it’s for anyone who wants to be smarter and more empathetic about matters of race and engage in more productive anti-racist action.Freelance writer Oluo ( So You Want to Talk About Race) contends in this incisive treatise that American society revolves around “preserving white male power regardless of white male skill or talent.” This privileging of white male mediocrity has brought the U.S. “Generous and empathetic, yet usefully blunt. “Oluo gives us - both white people and people of color - that language to engage in clear, constructive, and confident dialogue with each other about how to deal with racial prejudices and biases.” - National Book Review In So You Want to Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo guides readers of all races through subjects ranging from intersectionality and affirmative action to “model minorities” in an attempt to make the seemingly impossible possible: honest conversations about race and racism, and how they infect almost every aspect of American life. How do you tell your roommate her jokes are racist? Why did your sister-in-law take umbrage when you asked to touch her hair - and how do you make it right? How do you explain white privilege to your white, privileged friend? Still, it is a difficult subject to talk about.

Widespread reporting on aspects of white supremacy - from police brutality to the mass incarceration of Black Americans - has put a media spotlight on racism in our society.

In this New York Times bestseller, Ijeoma Oluo offers a hard-hitting but user-friendly examination of race in America Mediocre investigates the real costs of this phenomenon in order to imagine a new white male identity, one free from racism and sexism.Īs provocative as it is essential, this book will upend everything you thought you knew about American identity and offers a bold new vision of American greatness.

Through the last 150 years of American history - from the post-reconstruction South and the mythic stories of cowboys in the West, to the present-day controversy over NFL protests and the backlash against the rise of women in politics - Ijeoma Oluo exposes the devastating consequences of white male supremacy on women, people of color, and white men themselves. What happens to a country that tells generation after generation of white men that they deserve power? What happens when success is defined by status over women and people of color, instead of by actual accomplishments? From the author of the New York Times bestseller So You Want to Talk About Race, a subversive history of white male American identity.

Mediocre dangerous legacy