She gained prominence for articles critiquing race and the invisibility of women's voices, like her April 2017 interview withRachel Dolezal, published inThe Stranger.[15][16][17][18]
Oluo began her career intechnology anddigital marketing.[19] She turned to writing in her mid-30s[20] after the 2012 death ofTrayvon Martin, who was the same age as her son, Malcolm, at the time.[19] Fearful for her son as well as her younger brother, a musician then traveling on tour, Oluo began sharing long-held concerns via a blog she had previously devoted to food writing.[20] She has described these initial forays as a significant influence on her writing style, as she hoped that sharing personal stories would be a way to connect to and activate her predominantly white community in Seattle.[20] Oluo has said she was disappointed by the response she initially received, and that many of her existing friends "fell away" instead of engaging in the issues she had begun raising; however, many black women she hadn't previously known reached out to express appreciation and Oluo's profile as a writer grew, with publishers asking to reprint work from her blog and eventually commissioning new writing.[20]
Recording theLovett or Leave It podcast on January 27, 2018, at theMoore Theatre in Seattle. Hosted byJon Lovett (left) and Akilah Hughes (second from left), with guestsLindy West (second from right) and Ijeoma Oluo (right).[21]
Oluo's columns and news articles appeared inThe Guardian andThe Stranger newspapers from 2015 through 2017,[22] and she has also written forJezebel,Medium andThe Establishment, a publication based atMedium that Oluo helped launch;[23] she was an editor-at-large.[24][15][19][25] Her writing covers topics likemisogynoir,intersectionality, online harassment, theBlack Lives Matter movement, race, economics, parenting,feminism andsocial justice.[10][14]
She is known for critiques of race and the erasure of black women's voices in the United States, as exemplified in Oluo's April 2017 interview ofRachel Dolezal, published inThe Stranger.[15][16][17][18]
Oluo stopped writing forThe Stranger in July 2017; her reasons included the paper's decision to publish an article ondetransitioning that Oluo said was "written by acis woman without the knowledge and language necessary to responsibly report on the subject in a way that would not feed into the narrative of anti-trans bigots. The piece quotes a doctor widely discredited forjunk science, with a well-known anti-trans bias."[26] Though Oluo has taken strong stands on many social issues, she has also said fans should be comfortable criticizing and speaking honestly about errors such as expressions of sexism, racism, or classism by their favorite celebrities, without having to condemn or reject anyone as irredeemable, and that critics generally share many of the same flaws they call out in others.[27] She wrote in 2015 that, "Beinganti-racist doesn't mean that you are never racist, it means that you recognize and battle racism in yourself as hard as you battle it in others." She expanded on this theme of honest dialogue about uncomfortable truths in her 2018 book, writing that "This does not mean that you have to flog yourself for all eternity."[27][28]
Oluo wrote on her blog in November 2017 thatUSA Today had asked her to write anop-ed, but only on the condition that Oluo's article argue against the need fordue process with regard to sexual misconduct allegations such as the high-profile cases associated with theMe Too movement. Specifically she said that the editors "want a piece that says that you don't believe in due process and that if a few innocent men lose their jobs it's worth it to protect women." Oluo was willing to rebut theUSA Todayeditorial that the accused are at great risk of their rights to due process being violated, but said she would not play the role of "theirstrawman", since she did in fact believe in everyone's right to due process.[29] After Oluo wrote about theUSA Today offer,The Washington Post responded with an editorial byChristine Emba that shared Oluo's position that the greatest violations of due process had been against the rights of harassment victims who had been denied justice for many years, and that such protestations over due process were, in Oluo's words, "attempt to re-center the concerns of men".[30] Oluo had said that such apparent concern for due process was intended to, "stop women from coming forward before too many men are held accountable for their actions".[29]
Oluo'sFacebook account was temporarily suspended in 2017. She had made a joke onTwitter that she felt uncomfortable around "white folk in cowboy hats" the first time she went in aCracker Barrel. In response, she received hundreds of threats and racist messages on Twitter and to her Facebook account.[31][32] Twitter took down tweets and banned users who were breaking itsterms of service, but Oluo said Facebook did nothing for three days.[32] Her account was suspended after Oluo posted screenshots of the messages, saying Facebook was not doing anything to help. Facebook later apologized and reactivated her account, saying the suspension had been a mistake. Oluo said the Facebook accounts of several other black activists have been suspended after publicly posting screenshots of threatening messages they had received, and each time Facebook said it was a mistake.[32][33]
In 2015, Oluoself-publishedThe Badass Feminist Coloring Book usingAmazon's CreateSpace.[34] The project began with Oluo sketching outlines of favorite feminists as a stress reliever; encouraged by friends, she launched aKickstarter campaign to create acoloring book of 45 sketches and accompanying quotes.[35] Well before the deadline, the project raised more than double its goal.[36]
Oluo's bookSo You Want to Talk about Race was published on January 16, 2018, by theSeal Press imprint ofPerseus Books Group'sDa Capo.[38][39][40][41][28][42] In its "New & Noteworthy" column,The New York Times described the book as "tak[ing] on the thorniest questions surrounding race, frompolice brutality to who can use the 'N' word."[43] Oluo began the project at the suggestion of her agent, who proposed Oluo write a guidebook to discussing the topics she was writing about regularly. Oluo was initially reluctant, feeling she already spent more time dealing with race than she wanted — speaking toBitch magazine, she said, "Think about how much time you want to spend, as a Black woman, talking about race, and then dedicating a whole book to talking about race. It's tough for me."[20] But as she considered the idea, she found many people reached out with topics, and ultimately she decided that a book might save her from having to answer the same questions over and over; in particular she hoped a book's tangible form might reach people in a different way than online work did.[20]
Bustle namedSo You Want to Talk about Race to a list of 14 recommended debut books by women, praising Oluo's "no holds barred writing style",[44] as well as to a list of the 16 bestnon-fiction books of January 2018.[45]Harper's Bazaar also named it to a list of 10 best new books of 2018, saying "Oluo crafts a straightforward guidebook to the nuances of conversations surrounding race in America."[46]
Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America
Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America, published December 1, 2020 by the Seal Press imprint ofBasic Books, is a historical and contemporary analysis of how white male supremacy affects politics, the workplace, sports and daily life. It was included in recommended reading lists fromTime,The Washington Post, andThe Seattle Times and has a starred review atPublishers Weekly.[47][48][49]
Seattle Met named Oluo one of the 50 most influential women in Seattle in 2018, andSeattle Magazine named her one of the most influential people in Seattle in 2015, for her "incisive wit, remarkable humor and an appropriate magnitude of rage", and said she is "one of Seattle's strongest voices for social justice."[13][12]Bustle included Oluo among "13 Authors to Watch in 2018".[55]
Oluo was born inDenton, Texas, in 1980. Her father, Samuel Lucky Onwuzip Oluo, is fromNigeria, and her mother, Susan Jane Hawley, is fromKansas and is white.[8] Oluo's younger sibling is jazz musicianAhamefule J. Oluo, who is married to Seattle writerLindy West.[9]
^abGallagher, Mary (2017),"Class Notes",Window: The Magazine of Western Washington University, vol. 9, no. 2, p. 44,archived from the original on 2018-02-03
^Ferguson, Jenny (January 19, 2018)."So You Want to Talk About Race".Washington Independent Review of Books.Archived from the original on February 3, 2018. RetrievedFebruary 3, 2018.
Bruner, Raisa; Chow, Andrew R.; Gutterman, Annabel; Lang, Cady; Wittmann, Lucas (September 3, 2020),"The 42 Most Anticipated Books of Fall 2020",Time,archived from the original on February 15, 2021, retrievedOctober 15, 2020
