ONR: Author and educator Oluo's book about personal experiences with racism is more timely than ever
- Jul 17, 2020
- 2 min read
By ONME Newswire
Since the Memorial Day weekend live murder of Black man, George Flynn in 8 min and 46 seconds by the knee of a Minnesota peace officer, the topic of race has been more prevalent on the minds of everyone throughout the United States. Many non-Blacks are striving to learn more about the two Americas we seem to live in, where "privilege," was not a clear cut understanding until now.
However the voices speaking out about racism have never changed, from decade to decade; ask author and activist Ijeoma Oluo who chronicled her personal experience with racism, including descriptive, uncomfortable details in her book, So You Want to Talk About Race.
ONME News Review - News too Real 60 minutes segment highlighted Oluo's perspective on racism, which seemingly related to many other Black women living in America.
Oluo is a Nigerian-American writer born to a white mother from Wichita, KS, and a black Nigerian father. Her father was a political scientist who returned to his village in Nigeria, never returning to the United States; her mother raised her and her younger brother in a suburb outside Seattle, WA, working two jobs as a single mother.
Raised in a poor white neighborhood, Oluo attended Lynnwood High School in Bothell, Washington. She later graduated from Western Washington University with a degree in political science.
According to the Humanist Profile: Ijeoma Oluo article February 2018, Oluo entered a career in tech and digital marketing, married, had two boys, and later got divorced. It was after Trayvon Martin was fatally shot in 2012 that Oluo began her career as a professional writer. Her older son was the same age as Martin at the time he was killed, and Oluo was taken aback by how silent by some in her community were in the face of such injustice. She started publishing articles and personal essays at Jezebel, The Stranger, and the Guardian. Today she continues to write on feminism, racism, social justice, and gender and economic issues for those publications as well as TIME, New York magazine, Medium, and the Huffington Post. She also serves as editor-at-large for the online, female-run multimedia publication The Establishment.
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