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In this special guest episode from the podcast In the Meanwhile, co-hosts Marcus Harrison Green and Nora Kenworthy sit down with author and activist Ijeoma Oluo (So You Want to Talk About Race; Mediocre: the Dangerous Legacy of White Male America; Be a Revolution) for a searching conversation about movement work, harm, belonging, and the radical choice to stay. Together, they explore the personal cost of speaking truth, the wounds movements can inflict on their own, and what it means to build the world we long for now—not after revolution, but through the way we live, love, and struggle every day. It’s a deeply honest conversation about survival, accountability, joy, and choosing community even when it hurts.
Featuring Ijeoma Oluo Music No Tears for a Wolf · Ahamefule J. Oluo · Okanomodé. In the Meanwhile Team
Making Contact Team
TRANSCRIPT
MC Button: Our system is in too many ways broken. The way we see the world shapes the way that we treat it. This is Making Contact.
Jessica Partnow: Welcome to Making Contact. I’m your guest host this week, Jessica Partnow. And this week we are bringing you a conversation with the brilliant author and internet yeller, Ijeoma Oluo.
She’s gonna be talking about her essay, If You Decide to Stay, You Need to Make a Choice.
Ijeoma Oluo: If it’s gonna cost me no matter what, you know, I might as well go down swinging, and that’s kind of the thing I have to remind myself. My work doesn’t make me unsafe. White supremacy makes me unsafe, and just like it made Trayvon Martin unsafe, just like it killed him for simply walking down the street.
And so remembering that, remembering that I didn’t get into this work because I was safe and I risked my safety. I got into this work because I wasn’t safe and, you know, I’m fighting for our lives. I don’t know what other choice I have. I don’t know how to not do this.
Jessica Partnow: Ijeoma Oluo is a New York Times bestselling author. She wrote So You Want to Talk About Race. She also wrote Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America, and her most recent book is called Be a Revolution: How Everyday People are Fighting Oppression and Changing the World, and How You Can Too. She has also written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, Esquire, Elle; she’s been on The Daily Show, NPR, the BBC. Basically, she is one of the most important thinkers writing about race and justice today. This conversation with Ijeoma Oluo comes to us from the podcast In the Meanwhile. It is a podcast that I work on when I’m not here at Making Contact, so I’m maybe a little bit biased towards it, but I think it’s a wonderful show.
It is funny and it’s inviting and it’s informative. They get incredible guests like Ijeoma Oluo. The hosts are Marcus Harrison Green, who is a journalist, founder of the South Seattle Emerald, as well as Hinton Publishing here in Seattle, and Nora Kenworthy, who is a public health scholar and professor.
She’s a professor here at University of Washington Bothell, and also wrote an incredible book about crowdfunding and healthcare. Both Marcus and Nora are published authors, and they’re also just great conversation partners. They’re super fun to work with as a producer, and I was really excited that they were open to sharing this conversation with you all. So with that, I will let Marcus, Nora, and Ijeoma take it from here.
Marcus Harrison Green: Ijeoma, thank you again, just for being here today with us to discuss your exquisite essay. I wanna say you open this essay by saying you didn’t choose this work and that it began with the murder of Trayvon Martin and the feeling that you would go crazy, quote-unquote, “if you didn’t speak.” Looking back more than a decade later, what did that moment unlock in you that hadn’t existed before?
Ijeoma Oluo: I think, you know, what it highlighted for me was first and foremost the limits of liberal empathy, and it kind of created that crisis point of, you know, people in Seattle have the right things to say often. And recognizing, oh, you literally never thought you were gonna have to deal with this in your life.
Like, like white Seattle in particular, non-Black Seattle in particular. Realizing in that moment in such a different reaction of how real this was to me, how much genuine justified fear and outrage and anger and hurt this brought to me for my family, for all the Black people I love, and then watching the stark difference in how it impacted other people and the refusal of people to talk about it in a real concrete way, it really helped me understand…
You know, at first it really confused me. And when I talk about, like, you know, I didn’t wanna go crazy, I’m not lying. I remember calling people and saying like, “Am I crazy?” Like, I mean, I’m surrounded by people who are just going about their day like this doesn’t matter, like it’s a, you know, sad television show they watched and not something real, you know?
And that was, when I first started writing, it was really about trying desperately to get people to understand why we needed to engage with this, and it was really local. Like, I remember writing and thinking, you know, I had people in mind. You know, I had names in mind of people in my life that I really wanted to understand this, and that’s kind of where that came from was, “What if I tried this?
What if I tried this? What if I tried this?” And it was just kind of this desperation. You know, I remember at the time as well, my brother, Ahamefule Oluo, was on tour and had already been in a physical altercation on tour, had already been handcuffed on tour, and I remember feeling deeply afraid for them, and just not understanding why people couldn’t get that, why it mattered.
There was such a dismissal of the real genuine fear and outrage that people felt for their own people. You know, it was acceptable to be sad for Trayvon. It was acceptable to be mad about what happened to this child, but it was viewed unacceptable to then say, “We need to talk about how this could be me, this could be my children, this could be my siblings,” you know?
That was deemed unacceptable because then that brought in the reality that there were people in our community who would do that sort of harm. And so that’s kind of where it all started for me.
Nora Kenworthy: Thank you. And of course, your writing has had such a tremendous impact on the conversations that so many of us have had about race and racism in the United States.
My understanding is that a lot of that work has also come with very distinct threats and harassment and violence. Doing this work as a Black woman in particular exposes you to a very particular kind of hate, I think. How have you come to measure the cost of speaking out and writing and continuing to write for survival oftentimes when the personal risk is so real?
Ijeoma Oluo: I think what I’ve had to learn over the years is that if you’re a Black woman in the United States and you take up any space, there’s a cost, and it doesn’t matter what you’re taking that space for, you know? You could absolutely be carrying water for white supremacy and there’s still going to be a real cost, not only to your soul, but you will be made to pay for taking any space in this country.
And part of how that shows in response to my work is it’s almost never about my actual work, you know? When we were swatted in 2019, it was really interesting to look at the website that was, you know, basically enticing people to swat us because they were pulling quotes and putting them on this website because it didn’t matter.
None of the people doing this had any idea what my work was, cared what my work was, you know? I’ve been harassed over the most seemingly innocuous things. I’ve been threatened over very innocuous things in my life, and it’s just about taking up space. So if that’s the risk, what you take up space for, you know, I think that matters, to me at least.
If it’s gonna cost me no matter what, I might as well go down swinging, and that’s kind of the thing I have to remind myself. And there are times where I am incredibly afraid. You know, my partner Gabriel reminds me regularly, it’s not my work that does this, it’s the response, right?
My work doesn’t make me unsafe. White supremacy makes me unsafe, and just like it made Trayvon Martin unsafe, just like it killed him for simply walking down the street. And so remembering that, remembering that I didn’t get into this work because I was safe and I risked my safety. I got into this work because I wasn’t safe and, you know, I’m fighting for our lives.
I don’t know what other choice I have. I don’t know how to not do this.
Marcus Harrison Green: One of the things you write about or touch on in the essay is that many activists… I- it’s something that many activists don’t, don’t say publicly, but certainly feel and that’s that sometimes the deepest wounds come not from opponents, but from people inside the movement.
When we bring our worst selves home to each other. So why do you think movements that are fighting injustice can still produce such a painful internal conflict at times?
Ijeoma Oluo: I would say that’s the case more often than not for people. When I talk to people who leave, it’s the number one reason why they leave the work, why they stop doing it, um, because it, there is a special kind of pain.
We know that we’re not safe out in the world, but feeling also then unsafe in community, in community who knows how to hurt you uniquely, is another layer onto it that can really become untenable. And I think there’s so many reasons around why. One is, I’ve said before, we’re traumatized people doing traumatizing work in traumatized community in a system that refuses to acknowledge our trauma, and we are collectively very under-resourced.
I had to search for well over a year to find a Black therapist. And the privilege of being able to afford that is another layer on top of that. And so, you know, we’re coming into these spaces that are activating us even further, and we are under-resourced. We do not have time to build a lot of tools, or we think we don’t have time to build a lot of tools around this.
And then we live in a carceral society, and the ways in which a carceral society impacts the way in which we deal with conflict, we often don’t investigate. It’s easy to be externally focused in activism work, even in abolitionist activism work, and to ignore all of the ways in which carceral training has really been inserted into our lives.
And when we think about the way in which even in our communities we define parenting, we define getting in an argument with your loved ones, uh, so much carceral messaging goes along with that. And so it’s no wonder that, you know, when we’re stressed and we’re running off instinct, that instinct is gonna go towards more carceral thinking.
And then there’s other layers, right? There, there are mental health challenges that can make it very hard. There is a lack of analysis that often makes it into our activist groups. We have people who are very activated by something, but perhaps don’t have the deep theory that can help them really apply these ideas and terms into how we operate.
And then we have, of course, like COINTELPRO, we have very active efforts to exacerbate these sort of conflicts, and it makes it very tough to go through these things. We don’t have strong histories, I would say especially in places like Seattle, where there have been the purposeful discouragement of multi-generational movement work.
We don’t have a long history of learning the real cost of not knowing how to work through conflict, not knowing, you know, how to make agreements on how we treat each other and care about each other. And so instead what ends up happening is generation after generation gets pushed out, and then we start from scratch over and over again.
And that is really tough. Not only does it take an immense personal toll on individual movement workers, but it is a devastating toll on the movement itself and what we’re able to accomplish.
Nora Kenworthy: Yeah. One of the things that you write about in the article is you, you quote Saul Williams saying that not everyone wants to be alive in a time of revolution.
And you write a bit about your acceptance and your journey to embracing what it means to live in one anyways. Can you talk to us a little bit about that?
Ijeoma Oluo: Yeah. This is my year of consent, honestly. Self-consent, which is a thing we don’t talk about a lot. I’m a caregiver. Part of it’s probably by nature.
A lot of it is conditioned, very gendered, eldest daughter conditioning. And for the longest time, my life was defined by what I had to do including my work, and by who needs me. And never was the thought that I get to choose a thing that I considered. And I think for many of us doing work like that, it’s not a thought we have.
And this is when I decided to stay and fight, that was a choice I had to make. And realizing I was making a choice, brought consent into this. But I’m also practicing it in everything I do, whether it’s saying yes to an engagement. I’m not saying yes because, oh, I think this would be good for my career and I have to.
I may take that into consideration, but at the end of the day, I have to say to myself, “Do you consent to this? Am I honestly with full knowledge coming in and saying I choose to do this?” And it could be because of pressure, but it’s still a choice I’m making. And the shift that makes in how you do things and, um, how you care for yourself around these things is really, really huge.
You have to choose this work. Waiting for it to choose you is probably one of the worst outcomes. Choosing it means you get to decide how you move through it. Choosing it means that you choose why you’re doing it instead of having to do it. You know, choosing it is a commitment and a relationship to the work that is equitable instead of, you know, an imbalanced power dynamic.
I’m in relationship with the work because I chose the work just like I choose my partner, just like all of these other things. I’m interacting with the work. I’m in conversation with the work. And I think it’s so important that we recognize that when you choose how you move through the world, when you choose the work that you do, you get to negotiate with it.
You get to ask more of it. You know, you get to decide how it’s defined, and that’s a huge difference in a world that tries to define so much about us and tries to tell us we have to do things in this particular way. And it makes it work that you can do for the rest of your life because as what you need changes, you have the ability to change how you do the work.
Lucy Kang: I’m jumping in to remind you that you are listening to Making Contact. If you like today’s show and want more information, or if you’d like to leave us a comment, visit us at our new website, makingcontactradio.org. There you can access today’s show and all of our prior episodes. Okay, now back to the show.
Jessica Partnow: This week we’re sharing an excerpt of an interview with Ijeoma Oluo from In The Meanwhile.
Marcus Harrison Green: You talk about choosing that work and choosing it again and again. When you talk about revolution in the essay, but also in your work, you talk about it, at least how I pick it up is that it’s a way of living, and not just in moments of crisis, but in the ordinary rhythms of life.
And so I want to ask you, how does it, what does that look like just as sort of a, a culture of revolution in, in your everyday life? You know, whether you’re at the dinner table, whether you’re conversing with somebody, you’re spending money. What does that look like practically to you?
Ijeoma Oluo: You know, I believe in so many different types of revolution. I believe in the big revolution too, right? I believe in like the everything toppling to the ground. I’m just honestly, I think the work I’m doing is I’m trying to come through revolution the easier way, where you’re doing the day-to-day work instead of coming to this point of crisis that can cost a lot.
But I believe in both. I’ll be there for both. I would rather be here now because even if it does come to the big revolution, the work we do now every day will serve that and it will serve to protect people. And so recognizing that when we’re talking about liberation, I think a lot of people don’t spend enough time with what’s on the other side because we’re afraid, because we don’t know, because it feels so deeply unknown what would be on the other side of revolution that we refuse to actually project ourselves into there.
But the way in which you get a better idea of what’s on the other side of revolution is by building it now. And we can’t build that on a national level right now. We build it in our families, in our work relationships, in our communities, in our movement spaces. And that means that every choice we make and how we relate to each other and care for each other and ourselves is either in service of revolution or works against it.
There is no neutrality, right? Neutrality works against it. And that’s a beautiful thing. Like it can seem tough, but honestly, to me, it’s amazing to know that every day I have countless opportunities to be in service of revolution. Um, and that everything I do in service of revolution helps protect my people and helps us get a better idea of what the other side looks like, you know?
So for me, where I have the most power, where I can get closer to it is often in my relationships. It’s not just in my writing and in my work, but it’s, it is how I parent, you know? It is how I deal with conflict with my partner. It’s how I, as a business owner, uh, deal with the people I work with. You know, it’s how I treat people when they’re upset with me or seeking to harm me.
All of these things are in service of revolution if you want it to be. And that just means really envisioning what you want this to be on the other side and building that now. And so for me as an abolitionist, that is a very clear, set of principles that helps me kind of experiment within my relationships to see what works and what doesn’t.
Nora Kenworthy: Yeah, I often say that our abolition principles are most tested in the family and parenting realm. I remember when my daughter was three and learned to tell me it was her body, her choice at nap time every day. I wish I’d had you around to give me advice then.
I wanna lean a little bit more into this place of faith, and talk about the end of the essay where you really write about the particular joy that can arise in choosing to stay and choosing to continue investing in these relationships even in painful times. We really like joy on this podcast, even though it’s hard to come by these days. And so can you articulate a little bit for us what kinds of joy you found in this work, and in kind of choosing to double down on it, that people outside of movements might not necessarily understand?
Ijeoma Oluo: Yeah. You know, when I decided to stay, I had to decide how to design my presence in movement spaces so that I could.
And I didn’t decide to be a martyr. You know, I didn’t decide I’m gonna suffer through it. That’s not the choice I made. I had to figure out how to be able to stay. Part of the fight is figuring out how to make it work for you. And so for me, a lot of that was deciding to be my whole self. Knowing that I could be as careful as I could think of and still be hurt, it was kind of freeing in a way because then it, you know, the alternative is you could also just be yourself and, you know, at least you didn’t hurt yourself in the process.
And that meant for me really insisting on getting to know some of the people I was in movement spaces with better and letting them know me better. Uh, one, it actually is a safety issue, right? Getting to really know people instead of just taking them at their word. Getting to learn through experiences with them, through understanding more of their lives.
And I’m not saying you have to do that with everyone in a space. That would be overwhelming. You can build coalition actually without, you know, friendly relationship, absolutely. But the people you’re doing the day-to-day work with, knowing them, whether you decide to become friends or not, is actually really important.
And letting them know you is really important. We’re fighting for our communities, and you do have to be in community. And so in doing that, it meant that for me, it was no longer acceptable to only see people at protests. It was no longer acceptable to only see people at actions, um, or in strategy meetings.
You know? If we’re gonna fight for our lives, we’re also gonna be able to celebrate our lives. And so I started showing up at people’s open mics, you know? I started showing up at birthdays and all these other things that normally I would’ve said, “You know, I don’t have time for,” or energy for.
Instead, I started viewing it as a huge part of the work. And what came through that is a built-in reminder of what we’re fighting for, not just what we’re fighting against. That’s a really dark, bleak place to live in. What you’re fighting for is the hope and the light and the joy and the love. And so building that, nurturing that, maintaining that has become a huge part of my work.
And so I’m lucky. Not lucky, blessed. I’m really blessed in that I have these relationships that do feel deeply safe, not because they will never have conflict, um, but because I can be really open in what I need, and I think the people that I’m in relationship with in this work feel the same about me, and that we have made some agreements, you know, in how we’re going to work through things and talk through things.
And we have a shared vision of the future we’re fighting for. We have a shared joy that we’re fighting to protect. And in that, it also means that as someone who is very neurodivergent and someone who does need a lot of alone time and downtime from social things, I’m also able to protect that in the work.
So I’m able to say things like, “I can’t do all of these things and I will be gone for a while.” Or you know, they know now to say, “Oh, you showed up tonight. I know not to expect you tomorrow. I know that you’re gonna need that break.” And it isn’t a thing, and it isn’t a big deal. And knowing, you know, that you’re cared for in that way and seen in that way, and that people understand that you taking that day where you don’t show up is part of what allows you to show up fully the next time you’re there is a huge, huge part of, like, feeling seen and cared for and in not overextending myself.
And community, the community I’ve built, because they understand me and I’ve let them know me, they are invested in that as well. And it also- You know, create space for other people to bring their needs in.
And so I have community and friendship. You know, I became a grandmother last year, my oldest had a baby.
And I would say at least three-quarters of the people that showed up for the baby shower were movement people, you know? And watching all these people come with gifts, you know, and my son was like, “Who are these people?” ‘Cause, you know, he’s an adult. He doesn’t live with me. You know, so he’s just like…
But they were so glad. They were like, “Oh my gosh,” you know, “We got all these lovely gifts.” Like, surrounded in love, all these people, you know, uh, calling themselves auntie and uncle, you know? And like, to this baby, you know, because that is part of the work and part of the community we’ve built.
It was so lovely to see my children surrounded in this love, um, because these people love me and I love them, and to see my grandchild surrounded in this love, you know? And it’s just kind of, you know, like my brother has a show. There’s gonna be a whole, you know, row of keffiyehs out there in the audience of people that, you know, I’ve been doing movement work with that, you know, want to support family.
I love going to things, you know, and watching what other people are doing, and I love, you know, going on walks with some of the people that I’ve been planning actions with and marching with. And it’s nice to sometimes just go on a casual walk where someone isn’t on a blowhorn yelling slogans at you.
And it feels really lovely, like, to have that kind of community, and to not feel like you’re gonna suddenly be shocked. You know, it’s a community built deeply on shared morals and ethics and a vision for the future, and that does make it safer. And because we are close, because we actually care about each other, no one is sacrificed to the work, you know?
We don’t make a decision that anyone’s disposable. We don’t make a decision that it’s okay for any of us to burn out. We all check on each other and care for each other. And it just feels nice to have that kind of feeling of family. It’s the first time I’ve honestly experienced it in my life.
Marcus Harrison Green: We just wanna say thank you for being so generous with your time today. Also, I know like me, you are an atheist, but I kept saying amen I don’t know how many times in this conversation. The Substack is Behind the Book. Ijeoma, thank you so much for joining us today.
Ijeoma Oluo: Thank you for having me. It was lovely to talk with y’all.
Nora Kenworthy: It was such a treasure. Thank you.
Jessica Partnow: That was an excerpt from the podcast In The Meanwhile. That show is produced by me, Jessica Partnow, and it’s hosted by Marcus Harrison Green and Nora Kenworthy, featuring music by Ahamefule J. Oluo. Thanks so much to Ijeoma Oluo for her work and her words. You can find out more information about her books, writing, and activism and the In The Meanwhile podcast on our website, makingcontactradio.org.
And that’s it for Making Contact this week. Making Contact is produced by Frequencies of Change Media. Our executive director is Jina Chung. Jeff Emtman does the engineering, and Lissa Deonarain does digital media marketing. I’m your guest host, Jessica Partnow. Thanks so much for listening.
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