The fight for justice keeps evolving

What happens when the youth roll their eyes at principles we've spent our lives fighting for, when they've decided that they are not only outdated, but oppressive?

And this is important to remember, for all of us. No matter what our intentions, everything we say and do in the pursuit of justice will one day be outdated, ineffective, and yes, probably wrong. That is the way progress works. What we do now is important and helpful so long as what we do now is what is needed now. But the arguments I was having in college are not the arguments the world needs now as I prepared to send my son to college. And if I refuse to acknowledge and adjust to that, all I'm doing is making things harder for a generation that would really lke to move things forward.

Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Want to Talk About Race (Seattle, WA: Seal Press, 2019) (orig. pub. 2018), p.  187

Microaggressions add up

Regular exposure to microaggressions causes a person of color to feel isolated and invalidated. The inability to predict where and when a microaggression may occur leads to hypervigilance, which can then lead to anxiety disorders and depression.

Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Want to Talk About Race (Seattle, WA: Seal Press, 2019) (orig. pub. 2018), p. 169

Hard to imagine readers of your writing

Even published academics may find it difficult to imagine real people—interested colleagues rather than pejorative judges—sitting at the other end of their sentences. 

Helen Sword, Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2017), p. 117

Many attributes neccessary for academics' success

To be a successful academic, it is not enough merely to have mastered the craft of writing intelligibly. You must also be creative enough to produce original research, persuasive enough to convey the significance of your findings to others, prolific enough to feed the tenure and promotion machine, confident enough to withstand the slings and arrows of peer review, strategic enough to pick your way safely through the treacherous terrain of academic politics, well organized enough to juggle multiple roles and commitments, and persistent enough to keep on writing and publishing no matter what.

Helen Sword, Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2017), p. 66

What's privilege?

The definition of privilege is in reality much simpler than a lot of social justice discussions would have you believe. Privilege, in the social justice context, is an advantage or a set of advantages that you have that others do not.

Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Want to Talk About Race (Seattle, WA: Seal Press, 2019) (orig. pub. 2018), p. 59

Race and class are both problems

Even without the invention of race, class would still exist and does exist even in racially homogenous countries. And our class system is oppressive and violent and harms a lot of people of all races. It should be addressed. It should be torn down. But the same hammer won't tear down all of the walls. What keeps a poor child in Appalachia poor is not what keeps a poor child in Chicago poor—even if from a distance the outcome looks the same. And what keeps an able-bodied black woman poor is not what keeps a disabled white man poor, even if the outcomes look the same.

Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Want to Talk About Race (Seattle, WA: Seal Press, 2019) (orig. pub. 2018), p. 13

Tinkering with sentences as they come out

Despite every attempt I have ever made to become a faster and less finicky writer—to forge relentlessly forward, laying down a thousand new words per hour as Rowena Murray suggests that any writer can learn to do—I seem to be constitutionally incapable of drafting even a single sentence without doubling back on it at least a few times to adjust various details.

Helen Sword, Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press, 2017), p. 60 (citing Rowena Murray, Writing for Academic Journals, 3rd ed. (Berkshire UK: Open University Press, 2013), chap. 3)