The Culture Shelf: Be a Revolution

How to Be a Revolution

After 17-year-old Trayvon Martin was murdered in Florida in 2012, Ijeoma Oluo turned to words to try to write away the pain and fear she was feeling.

"I was writing because I felt like I was going to go crazy if I didn't," she said. "I was working in a space that liked to pretend it was liberal and it cared, but would never have a really important conversation about race. And after Trayvon Martin was murdered, people would tell me, 'Oh, you're so lucky you don't live Florida.' As if I wasn't afraid in Seattle. As if I didn't fear for my children and my brothers. And I did. And I wanted to communicate that because I wanted to know that I could be seen and heard, that I wasn't living in an alternate reality."

In her first book, So You Want to Talk About Race, Oluo did just that. Two years later, she continued to lead difficult conversations through her book Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America. In her most recent book, the New York Times best-selling author is shifting the microscope from the problems in this country to the people working to make things better. Be A Revolution is a personal and societal journey, providing a glimpse into what activism can look like across locations, issues, and skillsets. 

This 2024 interview has been edited (lightly!) for clarity and flow.

Janelle Rucker: Talk to us a little bit about what made you want to write this book and tell these stories. What's kind of the origin story for this book?

Ijeoma Oluo: For me, it actually kind of started from this place of frustration and exhaustion. I had been writing about violent white supremacy for years, had written two books on it, and I was just feeling hurt and rung dry. I wanted to rest. I wanted to connect again with my love of writing. And so I had made it really clear I was actually going to take a break of a couple of years. But as I started thinking about it, I realized if I was going to be out of this scene, the work I wanted to leave people with, I wanted it to be more based in community. I wanted it to be more positive. I wanted that for myself and for my readers and my community. 

And then as 2020 hit and the pandemic hit and the uprising for Black lives, it really underscored for me - and I think many people - how important community is. And while we focus so often on struggle, the truth is that our survival is really rooted in communal love and these multiple generations of care, community care, that people have been providing. I wanted to show what is being done, not just one day someone will fix it, but we are alive because for generations, people have been doing this beautiful work, even if it's not making headlines.

JR: How has this book changed you, if at all? And did it fulfill that need that you were looking for at the onset?

Oluo: Oh, this book changed me and challenged me in ways that I wasn't really prepared for. I was like, it will be so nice to be with community. And I didn't realize that it would really challenge how I see myself and my work and really get me to face the ways in which I was shortchanging my own work, the ways in which I wasn't being proactive enough to stay meaningfully connected to members of my community.  Even if this book didn't sell a single copy, it would have been a success to me because of how changed I feel like I look at the world so differently after spending all of this time with dozens of amazing movement workers.

JR: That takes me back to the beginning of the book, where you talk a little bit about your role in the work and community building, and your role is as a writer. Can you talk a little bit about finding your role, what your role is in the work, and how you got to that understanding?

Oluo: Absolutely. I think that this is something that we're all kind of susceptible to. Right? When we think about the struggle for racial justice and the fights against depression, we're thinking of these kind of brutal, frontline actions. We're thinking of people being dragged off by police officers. And a lot of work that isn't, that gets discounted. One thing that everyone made so clear to me was if you go where your talents are, your interests are, and you invest your love and care and your knowledge about justice into that, and you do the work in that space, you're more likely to be doing the work that you're supposed to be doing.

Realizing as a writer that this drive that I had to document what was happening and try to get people to understand systemic oppression and how to fight systemic oppression was the work. 
That's my space right now.

JR: You also mentioned this idea of when you approach an issue as the issue, it's normally in a very abstract or academic way. How have you seen that hurt or help movements through your conversations? And do you think Be a Revolution helps make things a little less abstract and academic?

Oluo: Yeah, I love academia. Right. Don't get me wrong. I love learning. I love school. I am heavily critical of it, as you can read in my books. But I do feel like that is a space that could be heavily isolated. That is very white supremacist and is really a closed loop. Like, when you're in academia writing, you're writing for other academics, and they're telling you what they think about it. And if they like it, it's a success. It has nothing to do with education level, it has to do with connection.

I'm a huge proponent in the idea that if your work effectively communicates to the population you want to talk to, it is good writing. And that is something I think that we must push for, because there is a lot of classist, ablest, and white supremacist coding around what is good writing. And when that starts leaking into writing about social justice issues, it can be so highly problematic because it really will shape what we are saying, who has access to it, and whether or not it even is true. And so I really wanted to have the voices of the people I talked with. I'm trying to communicate story, I'm trying to communicate ideas, and I want that to be as widely accessible as I can make it. 

JR: The quote that I love from Emmett Schilling in your book, he said, "...the best advocacy is education and meeting people where they are." Is educating the community a key tactic, and how is it working?

Oluo: What I found was everyone who shared their kind of their origin stories of this work had these moments of awakening because they were suffering under this oppression and feeling the impacts of it every day, but didn't necessarily know how to name it or know how it worked systemically. And so education is incredibly important not only for the work that we do, but for even coming to that work. You have to gain that understanding of the systems at play and your place within it. And so that was always so fascinating to me, to have all these different moments, whether it was someone learning in college or just from attending a rally or a horrific event happening in the community. And people started digging in and saying, "What's behind this? What's causing this?" But there were those moments where people said, I have to learn more. Raising awareness is a huge part of this work, and it's not something we can count on our public schools to do.

Unfortunately, we're all products of these systems that really want to keep us ignorant about how our systems function so that we don't feel empowered to make change.

JR: Each of your sections address a different issue and how people are working on them. Each ends with suggested actions, which I love. Are these recommendations that came from folks that you interviewed or things that you have observed? 

Oluo: It was really a mix. So part of it were things I observed. Part of it were patterns I was noticing in conversations with people of what they were doing or where they got their starts, what their entry points were. And then I did directly ask the people I spoke to, if you were to give advice to people trying to come into this work or trying to support this work, what would you advise? 

JR: Why was it important for you to give us that action step and ways that we can get involved?

Oluo: There's a couple of reasons. One, I would say any Black person who has talked about race or just kind of existed in these last few years has heard a lot of people who would be allies say, "Oh, it's so awful. I wish there was something I could do. I just can't think of what I could do." And then there's also this feeling of helplessness that we can feel often, like, this is so big and so difficult. And what I really wanted to show is not only can you do it, but people are doing. And so I really wanted to take away kind of any excuse that we had for inaction.  

I really wanted to make it clear the next step after enlightenment, after some education, after feeling moved, is action.

JR: A lot of times, to be a revolution takes a toll on us, mentally and physically. What does self care look like for someone doing this work? From the conversations you had, how do they keep going in this climate of instant gratification to keep doing the work?

Oluo: It came out time and time again because I was talking with a lot of people in different stages of their movement work. So some people who had been doing their work for two to three years, and a lot of them were very burned out, very heart hurt, and wondering how much longer they could do this. And then people who have been doing this for 30 years and had been through that stage multiple times and come out the other side. And so one thing I think that's so important is to remember that you are part of the community you are caring for. And that's a thing that's easily lost. Reaching out to community time and time again, people said, you can't do this alone. You have to stay connected. That what makes your community laugh and smile and feel close is as important, if not more important, than the work that makes you cry, the work that makes you bleed. And so it's so vital that we do that, that we make time for it and don't feel guilty for it and know that that is a part of the work itself.