Jason Koski/Cornell University
Author Ijeoma Oluo speaks during the annual Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Lecture, this year a conversation with history professor Ed Baptist, March 1 on Zoom. Oluo offers practical antiracism strategies in MLK Lecture
March 3, 2021
As far as author Ijeoma Oluo is concerned, William Frederick “Buffalo Bill” Cody is hardly the American hero he’s made out to be.
“The only thing that really made him exceptional,” said Oluo, author of ““Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America,” released in December 2020, “was his ability to wreak carnage on people and animals, and what a good liar he was.”
Jasmine J. Mahmoud Talks to the Author of
Mediocre
March 1, 2021
In 2015, Black Canadian writer Sarah Hagi tweeted: “Lord, give me the confidence of a mediocre white man.” The sentence “launched a thousand memes, T-shirts, and coffee mugs,” author Ijeoma Oluo writes in her newest book,
Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America. She continues, “[t]he sentence struck a chord with so many of us because while we seemed to have to be better than everyone else to just get by, white men seemed to be encouraged in and rewarded for their mediocrity.”
Five years after that tweet and within the debut year of
Date Time
Author, journalist Ijeoma Oluo to give annual MLK Lecture
Seattle-based writer Ijeoma Oluo will give the 2021 Martin Luther King, Jr. Commemorative Lecture at Cornell, in a virtual forum on March 1 at 7 p.m.
Instead of a lecture, this year’s event will be a conversation between Oluo and Edward Baptist, professor of history in the College of Arts and Sciences and author of “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism” (2014). A Q&A will follow.
Ijeoma Oluo
The conversation will be livestreamed and is free, open to the public and accessible; register here.
Lima Public Library Book Reviews
LIBRARY OPEN
• The Lima Public Library has reopened. Main library hours are 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Mondays through Thursdays and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays. Branch hours are noon to 6 p.m. Mondays to Thursdays, except Lafayette is closed Wednesdays.
• The main library has curbside pick up. Hours are 2 to 6 p.m. weekdays and 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturdays. Call 567-712-5239, contact the library through Facebook Messenger or put a hold on a book through the online catalog. Give workers 24 hours to gather. Park near the main entrance. Call when you arrive, and your items will be brought out.
FLOATING IN A MOST PECULIAR WAY By Louis Chude-Sokei
I was about 10 when I found out that my whole life I’d been saying my name wrong. A friend of my father’s an “uncle” had come to town, and my white mom had dressed us up for the occasion in traditional Nigerian dress. My top and wrap skirt were of a gorgeous orange- and red-printed fabric, hand-sewn by a woman from my father’s village in Rivers State. But when this uncle asked me my name, I embarrassed myself and my family by mispronouncing it “Joma.”
“That is not your name,” he replied. “Your name is Ijeoma. You have to know how to say your name. It is a very good Nigerian name.” Suddenly my clothing felt tight and uncomfortable, as if my uncle could see that none of this the clothing or the name fit me.