1. Ijeoma Oluo is the author of So You Want to Talk About Race and has written for The Guardian, Jezebel, The Stranger, Medium, and The Establishment, where she was an editor-at-large.
20 Facts About Ijeoma Oluo
1. 2.
Ijeoma Oluo's writing covers racism, misogynoir, intersectionality, online harassment, the Black Lives Matter movement, economics, parenting, feminism, and social justice.
3.
Ijeoma Oluo gained prominence for articles critiquing race and the invisibility of women's voices, like her April 2017 interview with Rachel Dolezal, published in The Stranger.
4.
Ijeoma Oluo turned to writing in her mid-30s after the 2012 death of Trayvon Martin, who was the same age as her son, Malcolm, at the time.
5.
Ijeoma Oluo 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.
6.
Ijeoma 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 Ijeoma Oluo's profile as a writer grew, with publishers asking to reprint work from her blog and eventually commissioning new writing.
7.
Ijeoma Oluo's columns and news articles appeared in The Guardian and The Stranger newspapers from 2015 through 2017, and she has written for Jezebel, Medium and The Establishment, a publication based at Medium that Ijeoma Oluo helped launch; she was an editor-at-large.
8.
Ijeoma Oluo's writing covers topics like misogynoir, intersectionality, online harassment, the Black Lives Matter movement, race, economics, parenting, feminism and social justice.
9.
Ijeoma Oluo 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 of Rachel Dolezal, published in The Stranger.
10.
Ijeoma 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".
11.
Ijeoma Oluo had made a joke on Twitter that she felt uncomfortable around "white folk in cowboy hats" the first time she went in a Cracker Barrel.
12.
Twitter took down tweets and banned users who were breaking its terms of service, but Ijeoma Oluo said Facebook did nothing for three days.
13.
Ijeoma Oluo's account was suspended after Oluo posted screenshots of the messages, saying Facebook was not doing anything to help.
14.
Ijeoma 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.
15.
In 2015, Ijeoma Oluo self-published The Badass Feminist Coloring Book using Amazon's CreateSpace.
16.
The project began with Ijeoma Oluo sketching outlines of favorite feminists as a stress reliever; encouraged by friends, she launched a Kickstarter campaign to create a coloring book of 45 sketches and accompanying quotes.
17.
Bustle named So You Want to Talk about Race to a list of 14 recommended debut books by women, praising Ijeoma Oluo's "no holds barred writing style", as well as to a list of the 16 best non-fiction books of January 2018.
18.
Ijeoma Oluo has performed as a speaker, storyteller and standup comic.
19.
Ijeoma Oluo has a forthcoming book called Be a Revolution, to be published by HarperCollins.
20.
Ijeoma Oluo graduated from Lynnwood High School in 1999 and later graduated from Western Washington University with a BA in political science in 2007.