Ijeoma Oluo's New Book 'Be a Revolution' Calls On Readers to Take Action Against Systemic Oppression

"We have to understand that we get through this together or we don't get through this at all."

by Jas Keimig

This week, Seattle-based NYT bestselling author Ijeoma Oluo's third book, Be a Revolution: How Everyday People Are Fighting Oppression and Changing the World—And How You Can, Too, officially hit bookstores. Written in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, Oluo's book shares the stories of over 30 activists creating change in labor, health, education, prison systems, policing, and disability and reproductive rights. In documenting and uplifting their work, she also shares the tools they use to fight systemic oppression and how readers can learn from these activists to take action against systemic oppression in their own lives and communities.

Ahead of her Third Place Books talk on Feb. 8 and her Town Hall appearance on Feb. 9, the Emerald spoke with Oluo about what led her to write this new book, the difference between punishment and consequences, and how the COVID-19 pandemic shaped movement work.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

In the book's introduction, you said that after writing Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America you felt like you were done writing about racism for the moment. What made you want to take the leap back in and tackle movement work?

There were a couple of things. One was just realizing that if I was going on a break from writing about systemic racism and patriarchy, I wanted the last thing I write for a while that directly delves into it to be something more positive and more community focused. And then looking at 2020 and all of the hardship around it, but also realizing how much community was responsible for our survival and our ability to still feel connected, I really wanted to showcase that and I wanted people to see it. I wanted to take away this excuse that [fighting against racism and patriarchy] is too big, it's too hard, that nothing can be done, because things are being done every single day.

You interviewed dozens of movement workers for the book. What kinds of considerations did you take into account when telling their stories?

That was probably one of the hardest parts for me. It's where I had the most pause [because of] the overall responsibility of it all. The amount of trust that people have to speak openly with you about their work, their life, and, often, things that are quite sensitive or even traumatizing for them. And to recognize that they were likely going to be exposed to a whole new audience. So how to care for those [considerations] was really important, and how to figure out where to use my writing skills to maybe make things more clear for conciseness and readability while also keeping the spirit of their work. It was really, really important and maybe the most difficult part because I just took that so seriously.

At the end of every chapter, there's a section called "BE A REVOLUTION" with solidarity tactics for readers to use in their own lives. Why was it important to include those points of action?

It was really vital for me on multiple levels. If you do work like this, if you're writing and speaking on issues of systemic racism or systemic oppression, you hear people dismiss action all the time and think there's nothing to be done. So I wanted to take that away. I didn't want people to think they could pick a book, be voyeuristic, and be like, "I feel good, I'm glad I read that," and instead be like, "Oh, let me go do something." Also, I really do think that the care and time that these incredibly vital people to our communities took to speak with me in the hope that it would help is a debt that the reader owes and the debt that I owe to encourage action.

In your book, you emphasize that working to undo a lot of the systemic issues before us won't be particularly easy or quick or perfect. Why is it important that we take our time or we go slow with some of this work?

I think it's important first of all because there's always going to be an impact of our work. So we have to act now, but we have to act with care and intention. We are doing work that impacts communities, and if we don't have care and intention, we can actually create harm. We see that after every election, right? People rush in to volunteer and say, "I'm gonna change this, I have to fight this," and they're not taking the time to see who has been already doing this work or who's most impacted by this or what considerations we have to have to make sure that everyone is included and people aren't harmed. So it's really, really vital that we do take that time and care. There are activist communities, especially BIPOC disabled activist communities, who are already taking a lot of time and care because they are used to being excluded. They've been excluded so often that they understand the risk of it. Learning from that is really important if we're going to do work that doesn't cause further harm and is effective.

In the first chapter on abolition, you discuss the difference between punishment and consequences. Could you speak to that difference and why it matters?

Fundamentally, one of the biggest differences is it's usually related to the harm done. A consequence is usually what must happen to prevent further harm in order to address harm. Punishment almost always has nothing to do with the actual harm. If you rob somebody, putting someone in prison and in a confined space has nothing to do with that harm. It's not related to robbery, it doesn't get your stuff back. So looking at it and saying, okay, if our goal is healing, figuring out what was wrong, figuring out what caused this and what would prevent this, then the consequence would be the things that are necessary for that. Not because we want revenge, not because we want to inflict the pain. Not because we have decided that people shouldn't exist with us.

For example, if you are a supervisor at a company and you harm people at your company, a consequence would be you are not given the responsibility of supervising people anymore, and maybe you need to not be in this space because your presence is causing harm. It doesn't mean you will never work again. So looking at that and saying, are we trying to address an issue or are we trying to exact revenge? And really looking at what works and what doesn't. It's so amazing to me how from top to bottom, so many of the things that we think of as justice, even in parenting, have nothing to do with the harm done. If your kid cheats on a test and then you say they can't see their friends for a month, those two things aren't actually related. The kid doesn't come out with more skills or a better idea about alternatives, what they come out with is further [isolation].

Those are the types of things we have to really look at and say, what is our goal? Is our goal to just hurt somebody because we are upset or scared or harmed? Or is our goal to heal and make sure that this is less likely to happen again? We know time and time again that punishment for punishment's sake is not a deterrent. We incarcerate more people than any other country in the world. If it were a deterrent, we wouldn't have crime, and yet we still have to keep incarcerating all of these people. So that's not working because it's never addressing the root issue.

COVID-19 came up in nearly every single chapter. In doing this work, how have you seen the pandemic shape movement and community building across race, gender, disability, and education?

One thing I would say it's underscored, just like any other major issue, is that populations of color and Indigenous populations are the first hit, the hardest hit, the least paid attention to, and the least resourced. We saw this with the pandemic. We saw who was more likely to die, who was more likely to be seriously ill, and who was more likely to be exposed and exploited during this time. And now we're seeing with long COVID who's being cast aside. But the truth is that we are in one of the most disabling events — if not the most disabling event — in our history right now. If we're not listening to people who are the most impacted, to disabled BIPOC, and what they're saying we need to do, if we're not preparing, we are seeking to add another disaster to the myriad of disasters that we will continue to have to face as climate change gets worse, as we get further and further into end-stage capitalism. It is so important that we come together and honor the ways in which Communities of Color and especially disabled BIPOC have been able to create resources for each other to try to keep ourselves safe, to try to keep our community together. But also recognize that if we don't do more, the devastation that we thought we saw in 2020 and 2021 is just the beginning of some very, very long-standing multiple generations of devastation.

This book also comes at a moment when myself and my community are talking a lot about the genocide in Gaza being carried out by Israel right now. We're thinking a lot about what it means to be in solidarity and fight a system that's brutally massacring innocent civilians in Gaza. How do you see what you laid out in Be a Revolution to apply to what we can do to speak out against the injustice happening in Gaza?

If there's something that I hope applies and that's made really clear — in the book, because we do actually briefly discuss the Israeli army and the cooperation between Israeli forces and American police — is that systems of oppression work together and actually see their shared futures. And therefore, we have to see our shared liberation if we want to be free. These [oppressive] systems are flexible, they're cooperative, and we have to be flexible and cooperative. We have to understand that we get through this together or we don't get through this at all. The underlying intersectional nature of the book and seeing how connected even the people in the book are to each other, I think, underscores that. And that is not something that ends at the borders of the settler colonial space that is called the United States, right? This is worldwide because the oppression that harms us is also worldwide.

The world is watching an Indigenous population of color being wiped out in the most brutal and public way and learning they can get away with it. What does that mean for us? What does that mean for Black people, for Indigenous people in the United States? What does it mean for Brown people, for disabled people? We're already seeing the same tactics used to justify this genocide being used against us. We recognize the way in which it has been used against us in the past, so we all have a stake in this. It must be stopped. They must hear us, they must know that we see them and the way that they're cooperating and the way in which colonialism depends on this continued justification of its brutality, and that we will not give that justification anymore.

What are you hoping readers will take away after reading Be a Revolution?

At bare minimum, I want people to understand that change, real, meaningful change, is possible because it's been happening. The story of the survival of populations of color and Indigenous populations is rooted in this loving care, in this hard work that often doesn't make any headlines, and that it means we can because we have. At times when it feels like, oh, there's nothing I can do, recognize that we exist to say that because something has been done.

Ijeoma Oluo's Be a Revolution: How Everyday People Are Fighting Oppression and Changing the World—And How You Can, Too is available in bookstores everywhere. She'll be giving talks at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park on Feb. 8, Town Hall Seattle on Feb. 9, Langston Seattle and The Seattle Public Library on Feb. 27, and Elliott Bay Books on March 6.

Featured Image: "I wanted to take away this excuse that [fighting against racism and patriarchy] is too big, it's too hard, that nothing can be done, because things are being done every single day," said Oluo. (Photo: Jovelle Tomayo)