Ijeoma Oluo

After her book, So You Want to Talk About Race, becomes a bestseller, Black author Ijeoma Oluo offers to build her white mother a home with her earnings and learns how race can affect the ways adult children care for their aging parents.

An essay excerpted from So You Want to Talk About Race in which Ijeoma Oluo writes about a messy, uncomfortable, and important conversation she had with her white mother about race and racism.

Ijeoma Oluo traveled to Spokane, Washington to sit at a kitchen table with Rachel Dolezal, who is jobless and living in a month-to-month rental, hoping her new book will start something, anything, to get money coming in.

Writer Ijeoma Oluo schools well-meaning white people–who are late to the party–in the hard, thankless work of relinquishing their unearned privilege and fighting racism.

“The Martin Luther King Jr. that we celebrate every year is no longer a man or a movement. The annual holiday is no longer a remembrance.”