Ijeoma Oluo
So You Want To Talk About Race
Intro
In the wake of George Floyd’s death, the rise of anti-racism, and the Black Lives Matter movement, it has become more commonplace to have conversations about race and racism. However, this was not always the case, and still today, many people feel incredibly uncomfortable having difficult conversations about race.
The Nigerian-American writer Ijeoma Oluo knows that conversations surrounding racism, sexism, and discrimination are uneasy and imperfect; but that is exactly why she urges people to have them.1 Oluo is most well known for her book So You Want To Talk About Race, a guide full of tools and techniques for how to approach conversations surrounding intersectionality, race, gender, and discrimination.2
Since Oluo turned to writing in her mid-30s, she has accumulated an impressive repertoire of articles that tackle topics such as misogyny, feminism, harassment, white supremacy, and minority representation. She is also a speaker and a self-proclaimed “internet yeller,” dedicated to having the conversations people are too afraid to begin themselves.
Being privileged doesn’t mean that you are always wrong and people without privilege are always right. It means that there is a good chance you are missing a few very important pieces of the puzzle.
- Ijeoma Oluo in her book So You Want To Talk About Race3
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
