ReviewAmerica’s attitude to race and racism examined in Ijeoma Olou’s new book

So You Want to Talk About Race
by Ijeoma Oluo (read by Bahni Turpin)
Blackstone Audio

3.5/5 stars

Racism is everywhere, every day, settling like a poison cloud on anyone who is not white. That seems to be the contention of Ijeoma Oluo, who grew up in Seattle among white friends and was conditioned to accept years of casual racism. Her hair was “too ‘ethnic’ for the office”; she earned less than white colleagues doing the same job; she laughed off racist jokes.

Oluo stretches her title’s confrontational tone into the book’s opening, calling herself “a black woman in a white supremacist country” whose bigotry, when her fury finally exploded, made her want to “start screaming and … never … stop”.

Here, she offers a sobering memoir-cum-handbook on what to avoid saying to persons of any shade. Example: “Why are you complaining? I thought Chinese people loved homework.” Charmaine Chan