so you want to talk about race by ijeoma oluo

It was in this context that I received a voicemail from her one evening in 2015. I could tell that this made my mom uncomfortable, to know that the babies that she had birthed from her own body had entire universes she couldn’t see, so the more that my world and my career became focused on race, the less my mom acknowledged it. But as we left home, and our mom began to see us interact as adults with the real world, she began to suspect that there was more to being black in this world than she had previously thought. And in the confines of our home, it was all that mattered. For our mom, we were black and beautiful and smart and talented and kind-and that’s all that mattered. It was almost impossible for her to see all of the everyday hurdles we had to jump, the tiny cuts of racism that we endured throughout our lives. But that optimism and starry-eyed love was, in fact, born from her whiteness.

Our mom never thought that our blackness would hold us back in life-she thought we could rule the world. My mother loved our blackness as much as was possible for any nonblack person to do, she loved our brown skin, our kinky hair, our full lips, our culture, and our history. Having a white mother, my siblings and I likely had even fewer conversations about race than black children raised by black parents, because there was a lot about our lives that our mother’s whiteness made it hard for her to see. But those conversations were one-offs that ceased to be necessary once we were old enough to see the reality of race for ourselves. While I was growing up, my mother had given the obligatory speeches that all parents of black children must give: don’t challenge cops, don’t be surprised if you are followed at stores, some people will be mean to you because of your beautiful brown skin, no you can’t have the same hairstyle as your friends because your hair doesn’t do that. But the truth is, like many families, our conversations growing up mostly revolved around homework, TV shows, and chores. I was well into my career in writing about culture and social justice and my opinions and identity around race were pretty well documented by then. But surprisingly, my mother and I had our first really substantive conversation about race late in my life, when I was 34 years old.

When my white mother gave birth to me, and later my brother, in Denton, Texas, she became the subject of a lot of racial commentary in her conservative southern community.

So you want to talk about race by ijeoma oluo