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Chapter 5
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in So You Want to Talk About Race, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Racism, Privilege, and White Supremacy
Confronting Racial Pain
Intersectionality, Oppression, and Social Justice
Cultural Appropriation
Summary
Analysis
Oluo is driving with her brothers, and she gets stopped by a cop for speeding one mile per hour over the speed limit. They all stay calm but are terrified. Oluo tweets that she’s been stopped just in case something happens. Her brother Aham tells the cop that he’s reaching for the registration, waits for approval, and moves his hands slowly. Oluo remembers a time when a cop warned her not to reach for the glove compartment without saying what she’s doing first, otherwise she could get shot. When Oluo gets home, she receives many tweets from her community and people of color asking if she’s safe. She also receives many tweets from strangers asking why she brought race into the issue.
Oluo begins with a personal anecdote about being stopped by police for speeding and fearing for her life to stress that there is something deeply wrong with this picture. The solidarity she receives from other people of color—and the advice from a cop in the past—subtly imply that police brutality is a widespread (likely systemic) issue. Oluo’s feeling of terror emphasizes the profound emotional trauma of being targeted as a person of color in U.S. society. The tweets that deny or dismiss her experience indicate defensive reactions that tend to derail conversations about topics like this.
Themes
Truthfully, Oluo doesn’t know if she was racially profiled, but she also knows to never ask a police officer why she’s been stopped (she might end up like Sandra Bland). To Oluo, police brutality is about power, corruption, fear, guns, and accountability. The power that enables police brutality puts everyone at risk, but not equally. Studies show that black drivers are 23 percent more likely to be pulled over; five times more likely to be searched, ticketed, arrested, and killed by cops; and four times more likely to experience police force than white people (including hitting, choking, pepper spraying, tasing, and gun use). It’s clear to Oluo that black people are being targeted.
Sandra Bland was a black woman who died in police custody three days after being arrested for a traffic violation in 2015. Oluo raises this example and provides additional concrete statistics to further reinforce the idea that police brutality against people of color is a systemic issue in the U.S. If police brutality is systemic, it means that law enforcement in U.S. society is set up to target, oppress, and kill people of color. This is a bold claim, which is why Oluo uses hard evidence to back it up before delving deeper.
Themes
Oluo isn’t sure if the fear and stress of encountering police is worse, or the persistent denial that this happens to black people. People like to believe that systemic racism doesn’t exist and that there just a few “bad eggs.” Oluo knows it can be difficult for people who look to the police for safety and security to see them as harmful. But she needs people to believe her. She’s scared and hurting, and people are dying.
After offering facts to justify her claim, Oluo appeals to the reader’s emotions: her descriptions of the persistent terror faced by black people in the U.S. are intended to foster empathy with their plight and to highlight once more the pervasive emotional cost of being black in U.S. society. As before, she emphasizes that the problem isn’t a few random hateful people, or “bad eggs,” but an entire system of enforcement that systematically oppresses and kills black people.
Themes
Oluo suggests looking at historical relationships between police and people of color to help understand why minority communities lack trust in the police. She argues that the country’s first police forces grew out of “Night Patrols” and “Slave Patrols” whose task was to control and capture black and Native American people. In the Jim Crow era, many Southern police offers were also part of the Ku Klux Klan. Oluo argues that since the 18th century, people of color have always experienced higher rates of arrest, assault, and death by police. Police have also consistently been used to intimidate, silence, and punish ethnic minority activists.
Oluo appeals to history to justify her claim that law enforcement institutions in the U.S. were designed to oppress people of color. She argues that the police force evolved out of “Patrols” specifically created to control and catch black slaves and Native Americans. She moves through later periods of history to show that since its creation, the U.S. police force has persistently targeted people of color and continues to do so, meaning that Oluo thinks the police force is a tool of white supremacy through and through.
Themes
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Oluo argues that controlling people of color is entrenched American policing history. Among people of color, fear, mistrust, and trauma are also woven in. For Oluo, the damaged caused by police brutality and systemic oppression are multigenerational, and they haven’t healed—because police brutality is still going on. This doesn’t mean that most police officers are “racist, hateful monsters,” but it does mean that American culture has been shaped by media depicting black Americans as “violent criminals.” Today’s politicians use the same lingo when they talk about keeping cities safe from “thugs.” To Oluo, politicians and taxpayers essentially endorse and fund the perspective that black people need to be controlled by police.
Oluo reminds the reader that she’s not saying police officers are racist, hateful people. She’s saying that the people in power use the structures of U.S. society—like the media, education, and politics—to teach Americans that people of color are dangerous and need to be controlled, and they use the police force to exert that control. This system keeps people of color away from opportunity, which enables white supremacists at the top of the hierarchy to hoard power and wealth. All this comes at a tremendous emotional cost to people of color, which Oluo represents with the metaphor of wounds that haven’t healed (earlier, she used the symbol of scars to represent the same idea).
Themes
Oluo acknowledges that black men are more likely to commit violent offences than white men. But she thinks terms like “black-on-black” crime are fully racist, noting that most crime in white communities happens by white people, but it’s never called “white-on-white” crime. Oluo thinks that communities with more poverty and unemployment will simply have more crime. Oluo explains that on average, the net worth of a black or Hispanic American is less than a tenth of a white American. Native Americans are also three times as poor as white people. Even worse, Oluo asks, what should people of color do when they experience crime but can’t trust the police to protect them?
Oluo uses the example of “black on black crime” (a common phrase in the news cycle) to show how the media and politicians manipulate their language to subtly imply that black people are inherently violent. She debunks this as a manipulation tactic by showing that most crime simply happens within communities—and poor communities tend to be populated with people of color because of the preexisting systemic oppression they face.
Themes
Oluo argues that police are armed with guns and empowered by a justice system that protects them. If a civilian experiences harm as a result of unjustified force from a police officer, the officer will likely face few consequences. The situation is different for white people. Oluo notes that police were created “to protect and serve” white communities—there’s no history of violent oppression and abuse. Of course, white Americans have been abused by the police (especially those in the LGBTQ community), but on the whole, white Americans trust the criminal justice system.
Oluo explains that it can often be difficult for people who aren’t subject to such extensive oppression to grasp what it feels like. This is especially relevant in contexts where systemic racism is in force, precisely because the system ensures that most of the white community have different (and more positive) lived experiences with the police, as people whose job is to “protect and serve” their needs. This makes it much harder for them to understand the experience of being oppressed by an entire institution of society.
Themes
To get to a place where everyone can trust the criminal justice system, Oluo thinks that people need to acknowledge the very different history that people of color have with the police. When talking about police brutality, Oluo says that it’s important to remember that what happened to you is “valid and true” but that it’s not everyone’s experience. If you do trust and value the police force, you should expect them to earn the trust and respect of people of color. Oluo argues that people of color don’t want white people to fear the police as much as they do—they want white people support their demands for the right to be able to trust the police.
Oluo stresses the importance of trusting in the lived experiences of people of color as “valid and true” when it comes to systemic oppression, rather than denying or dismissing their claims—even if the experiences they describe seem foreign or unfamiliar. In fact, the goal for everybody in society should be to have institutions where such experiences are unfamiliar. Oluo reminds the reader that the point of addressing difficult issues like police brutality is to change the system so that it functions for everybody, not to shame the police or get rid of them.
Themes
