Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Ijeoma Oluo

Quote by Ijeoma Oluo

“...it is always a bit of a gut punch to realize that someone you have been sitting next to for months or even years secretly harbors view that deny your basic humanity as a black woman. No matter how many times it happens, I have yet to get used to it. ...I really really wanted this to be just a matter of misunderstanding. I really wanted this to be a case where he just didn't know how harmful everyday racism is, and once he did, he would change his mind...It seemed far more important to him that the white people who were spreading and upholding racism be spared the effects of being called racist, than sparing his black friend the effects of that racism. ...That was when I learned that this was not a friend I could take to about this really important part of my life. I couldn't be my full self around him, and he would never truly have my back. He was not safe. I wasn't angry, I was heartbroken.”

Quote by Ijeoma Oluo

Book:So You Want to Talk About Race
Create image

Work

So You Want to Talk About Race

Browse quotes and source details for this work. more

Author

Ijeoma Oluo

Browse famous quotes and profile details for Ijeoma Oluo. more

You May Also Like

“There is no question that American police use their weapons more than police in any other developed democracy. Unfortunately, we don’t have fully accurate information about the number or nature of homicides at the hands of police. Despite a 2006 law requiring the reporting of this information (reauthorized in 2014), many police departments do not comply. Researchers have had to rely on independent information such as local news stories to cobble together numbers. One effort by the Guardian and Washington Post documented 1,100 deaths in 2014, 991 in 2015, and 1,080 in 2016— fewer than in the 1960s and 1970s, but still far too many.”

PoliticsPoliceSocialismCommunismUsaClass StruggleBlm
Book:The End of Policing
Create image

“A communal outrage inspires what the psychologist Roy Maumeister calls a victim narrative: a moralized allegory in which a harmful act is sanctified, the damage consecrated as irreparable and unforgivable. The goal of the narrative is not accuracy but solidarity. Picking nits about what actually happened is seen as not just irrelevant but sacrilegious or treasonous.”

ChaosBiasRationalityCognitionBiasesBlmAntifaMetooLgbtiqaFallacies
Book:Rationality
Create image

“When white feminism ignores history, ignores that the tears of white women have the power to get Black people killed while insisting that all women are on the same side, it doesn't solve anything. Look at Carolyn Bryant, who lied about Emmett Till whistling at her in 1955. Despite knowing who had killed him, and that he was innocent of even the casual disrespect she had claimed, she carried on with the lie for another fifty years after his lynching and death”

RaceFeminismBlack Lives MatterBlack HistoryBlmRasism
Book:Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot
Create image

“And, slowly, it was upon exactly that nothingness that my mind began to dwell, that constant sense of wanting without having, of being hated without reason. A dim notion of what life meant to a Negro in America was coming to consciousness in me, not in terms of external events, lynchings, Jim Crowism, and the endless brutalities, but in terms of crossed-up feeling, of psyche pain. I sensed that Negro life was a sprawling land of unconscious suffering, and there were but few Negroes who knew the meaning of their lives, who could tell their story.”

RaceBlack Lives MatterRace And Racism In AmericaBlmBeing Black
Book:Black Boy
Create image