There are many fantastic resources in the same line of thinking as So You Want to Talk About Race, but many of them forget that not everyone has been to college or can read academic texts. What also makes Ijeoma Oluo’s work necessary is how accessible it is. Because how are we going to change the system if we can’t even talk to each other about one of the fundamental issues facing us today? But we can start making a change at the most intimate level-person to person. It may seem sometimes that racist events happening at the national level (anti-immigrant abuses, police brutality, and so on) are out of our control.

So You Want to Talk About Raceis crucial, especially for our moment in time. This way, everyone is working toward a more productive discourse that results in change and new ideas. There are sections of the book for white people who are eager to understand race and work toward bettering the national conversation, and sections for people of color who might feel frustrated and misunderstood. But thankfully, Oluo addresses everyone in the equation. Sounds tricky to navigate, huh? You have no idea. So, conversations about race become a dynamic struggle between people of varying experiences, degrees of racial knowledge, opinions, and more. So, this leads to plenty of well-meaning people perpetuating harmful ideas and actions every day, often without realizing it. Systemic racism has its hands in education, government, policing, incarceration, housing, and so on and so forth. Instead, she underscores that our society is built on a systemic type of racism-one that leads to complicity in a racist system regardless of whether or not you want to be. While many people might have the idea that racism consists of one person being obviously prejudiced against another, Oluo turns that idea on its head. Oluo breaks down this idea succinctly for those new to this concept. The scope of racism goes much further these obvious offenses, though. A significant portion of recent mass shooters have committed their violent acts in part due to racist beliefs, for example, and a number of policies are created to affect people of certain races disproportionately (the recent Muslim ban, for example). It is no secret that racial tensions in the United States are high due to a variety of factors both historical and modern, and this goes far beyond discomfort at work.

So you wanna talk about race