Today, the pussyfooting that politicians and publications have done around calling even blatantly racist statements and actions by President Donald Trump by their rightful name underscores how far white America still has to go when it comes to tackling the subject of race with clear eyes and minds, and open hearts.Īs author Ijeoma Oluo writes in her new book ' So You Want to Talk About Race' (Seal Press, published Tuesday), 'o many white people, it appears, there is absolutely nothing worse than being called a racist, or someone insinuating that you might be racist, or someone saying that something you did was racist, or somebody calling somebody you identify with racist.' In an act of nauseating irony, 'racist' has been re-interpreted by white people as a kind of nuclear option term of abuse rather than a useful descriptor, and as a result we will often go to great lengths to avoid using it. And she's far from alone in reacting with hostility instead of engagement when confronted with frank conversation about racism in America. But I came to understand that it was possible that nothing in that student's life up to that moment had prepared her to have a conversation about bell hooks' analysis of Madonna. Professors like you are the reason why racism still exists, because you keep bringing it up.'Īt the time, the outburst startled and bewildered me. We all talk about everything and nobody cares what color anyone is. One of my semester-end reading assignments in that course was bell hooks' essay ' Madonna: Soul Sister or Plantation Mistress?' And during one of those final discussion periods of that last semester I taught, one that if I recall correctly was an all-white class, one of my students exploded. Roughly 75 percent of the time I taught that class at this small liberal arts college, my student roster was 100 percent white. A few years into Obama's first term in office, I taught my final section of an interdisciplinary undergraduate seminar I had designed on popular music and American literature.

So you want to talk about race review