The revolution is written in the latest book from Ijeoma Oluo, bestselling author of 'So You Want to Talk About Race'

June 30, 2025 / 9:02 am

caption: The KUOW Book Club is reading "Be A Revolution" by Ijeoma Oluo in June 2025.

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This month, the KUOW Book Club read Ijeoma Oluo's "Be A Revolution: How Everyday People Are Fighting Oppression and Changing the World — and How You Can, Too." Oluo joined KUOW's Katie Campbell for a live conversation at the Seattle Central Library, the first in a three-part summer series in partnership with Seattle Public Library. The full audio and video from the event are available below.

here's a line in Oluo's chapter on art and creative revolutionary forces that I can't stop thinking about:

The revolution may not be televised, but it will be painted. It will be sung. BE A REVOLUTION, PAGE 305

Oluo left one thing out: that the revolution will be written, too. She did a lot of that writing in this expertly researched — and lived — guide to meaningful dialogue on oppressive systems and how everyday people can make real, lasting change. This book is itself art, literary art, in that it makes the reader reflect on what's in front of them and imagine something more.

"We have the right to define ourselves. We also move through the world where people are going to try to define us, and people are going to make judgments about us," Oluo told a live audience when we spoke at the Seattle Central Library Thursday night. "Be curious about yourself, first and foremost, because it will teach you how to be curious about others and allow people to define themselves and know that there is something really revolutionary in insisting on that definition."

Listen to our full conversation by hitting the play button above, or watch the video here:

Throughout "Be A Revolution," Oluo centers dozens of people who saw gaps in advocacy work and made movements themselves. It's wildly inspiring to say the least.

"It never occurred to them that they might not be able to [create something new]," she said. "If you, from before your birth, were underserved or harmed by the systems that exist, every ounce of your existence is owed to thinking outside of what already exists."

Take Britney R. Wilson, for example, who is featured in the chapter on disability. As a Black disabled woman, Wilson went to law school to become a civil rights attorney, fully expecting "that civil rights and social justice work would necessarily include disability." It didn't.

"I felt like there really was no country for me in these social justice spaces," Wilson explained in "Be A Revolution."

So, Wilson went her own way.

"It is not surprising to me that a disabled law student, a Black disabled law student, would say, 'Let me create a thing,'" Oluo told me when I asked about Wilson, "because you don't get to law school as a Black disabled woman without creating a lot of things along the way."

She added, "It could always be so much more if these institutions that have all these resources actually said, 'Let's support the people who are the real change makers in this space. What would it mean if our Black disabled law students came in here, and we asked them what they needed to see? What would happen if we already had Black disabled lawyers in here?' This could all be better. And instead of building it, instead of paying to teach your school how to teach, you could actually get that fullness of education."

In "Be A Revolution," Oluo shows the reader how systems, like educational institutions, have failed marginalized communities, contributing to that marginalization, and how they compound one another.

Consider this passage from the chapter on abolition:

When a system has its boot on your neck, it's quite easy to point to the boot and say, "Here — this boot needs to be removed." But it's even easier to say, "This boot should not exist at all." Two questions make this work difficult: "How?" and "What next?" What if, while you're focused on that boot, someone else is busy building a cage around you? What if this whole time you've been helping to build that cage, but you were unaware because this damn boot is taking up so much of your time and energy, or perhaps you've been told that building this cage is what would remove that boot? ... It's easy to target systems for abolition. It's much less easy to practice abolition in our day-to-day lives, in our communities and our families. Because even though large, oppressive, and exploitative systems are easier to spot, the same hierarchical patterns of punishment and reward, compliance or revenge, are ingrained in all of our interpersonal relationships. BE A REVOLUTION, PAGES 22-23

"People who've been truly radicalized — realizing that we need deep, systemic shift — often do so through a single issue," Oluo said. "It becomes their whole focus, and they become obsessed about it. They want to know why, and they want to know what it touches. And then, they're like, 'Oh my goodness, it touches everything!'"

Oluo's book shows how everything is connected. Race, labor, education, bodily autonomy, the whole lot. And more importantly, it shows how ignoring, say, racism in environmental movements serves white supremacy.

Environmental issues are racial justice issues. BIPOC communities are often the first affected, and almost always the worst affected, by environmental injustice – and that’s by design. If we all shared an equal burden for our ravages to the environment, people might be compelled to do something about them. Further, environmental injustice is often perpetrated by the same powers behind racial and economic injustice, and these injustices often serve to compound and defend one another. And yet this is not typically how our environmental crisis has been discussed in society. It’s a story dominated by white voices, focusing on the harm that will eventually come to white communities, not the harm that has already been wreaking havoc in communities of color for centuries. BE A REVOLUTION, PAGE 218

The KUOW Book Club also read "We Had No Rules" by Corinne Manning this month. In this collection of short stories, Manning explores contemporary queer life and the "rules" that aim to govern people, their bodies, and their love.

When I interview Manning, I asked why they thought it was important to identify the rules that try to govern us.

"All these systems of harm, all these systems of violence and oppression are the air we breathe and the water we drink, we just plug right into them," they said. "How do we actually unplug from them? How do we create anything new? I think we have to delve into and examine and see the messy, disgusting, brutal water that we're drinking."

I put the same question to Oluo, why it's important to name the rules and the oppressive systems in society, and perhaps unsurprisingly, she said something similar.

"We're being gaslit," she said. "We're being told that these things don't exist or we have a natural order of things, and not that every single rule — outside of that we need to eat, we need to breathe, we need shelter — is manufactured. You can live your whole life not understanding that you're living by rules that someone no better than you made up one day because it suited them. ... By naming things, either by naming them anew or returning to names we once knew, is a really powerful way of starting to recognize our own power of creation in this world."

Listen to our full conversation by hitting the play button at the top of this post, or watch the video embedded above.

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Spoiler alert: This interview with Ijeoma Oluo was just the first in a series of live KUOW Book Club events in partnership with Seattle Public Library.

We'll continue in July with Kim Fu's "Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century." The short story collection has won a ton of awards and accolades, including the 2023 Pacific Northwest Book Prize and 2022 Shirley Jackson Award for Short Fiction, so don't miss my conversation with Fu on July 30.

Look out for the reading schedule on July 2, and register for our live conversation here.

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Katie Campbell
Online Editor/Reporter

Katie joined KUOW's online team as an editor and reporter in 2024, after serving three years as senior producer of the local Morning Edition program. She has covered a variety of local topics, including the Seattle City Council, elections, and breaking news. She also brings readers some levity with a weekly news quiz.
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