How to Be an Antiracist (One World Essentials)

by Ibram X. Kendi

Racism is a marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities.

We all have the power to discriminate. Only an exclusive few have the power to make policy.

Du Bois wished “to be both a Negro and an American.” Du Bois wished to inhabit opposing constructs. To be American is to be White. To be White is to not be a Negro.

Similar to the ideas posited by French writer Frantz Fanon, specifically in his 1952 work "Black Skin, White Mask". Fanon argues that this process of assimilation leads to violence perpetuated in two different ways: 1. By the colonizer, through annihilation of body, psyche, culture, along with the demarcation of space 2. By the colonized, as an attempt to retrieve dignity, sense of self, and history through anti-colonial struggle. WEB Du Bois' work pre-dates the above, but this colonizer/colonized duality made explicit by Fanon is present in many social problems in many countries.

WHITE PEOPLE HAVE their own dueling consciousness, between the segregationist and the assimilationist: the slave trader and the missionary, the proslavery exploiter and the antislavery civilizer, the eugenicist and the melting pot–ter, the mass incarcerator and the mass developer, the Blue Lives Matter and the All Lives Matter, the not-racist nationalist and the not-racist American.

This might be the weakest section of this chapter. There are predominantly white nations that explicitly call out in their Bill of Rights for their goal of a "mosaic" instead of a "melting pot". Canada is one such example. While the success of reaching that ideal is questionable, there isn't this strict duality as mentioned in this paragraph. For a more immediate example, how would you classify the band Rage Against the Machine? Most of the band is white, yet they don't seem to be on the side of "Blue Lives Matter" or "All Lives Matter". Edit: further reading shows I TOTALLY misread the point here. There is a duality in racist thought - not all thought. The example I gave above with RATM doesn't qualify as it is an antiracist thought.

He color-coded the races as White, Yellow, Red, and

In the first edition of Systema Naturae, Linnaeus subdivided the human species into four varieties based on continent and skin colour: "Europæus albus" (white European), "Americanus rubescens" (red American), "Asiaticus fuscus" (brown Asian) and "Africanus niger" (black African). In the tenth edition of Systema Naturae he further detailed phenotypical characteristics for each variety, and changed the description of Asians' skin tone to "luridus" (yellow). Additionally, Linnaeus created a wastebasket taxon "monstrosus" for "wild and monstrous humans, unknown groups, and more or less abnormal people". So I guess South Asians were "monstrosus", according to him.

The racializing serves the core mandate of race: to create hierarchies of value.

Dinesh D’Souza

This dude is a far-right conspiracy theorist. I'm surprised he's being name dropped here to make a point.

Culturally racist scholars have assumed that since African Americans exhibit outward physical manifestations of European culture, “North American negroes…in culture and language” are “essentially European,”

Franz Boas

Interestingly, Boas was also the first person to articulate the idea of Cultural Relativism - the essence of cultural antiracism

Melville Herskovits avowed in 1941.

Herskovits's book The Myth of the Negro Past is about African cultural influences on African Americans; it rejects the notion that African Americans lost all traces of their past when they were taken from Africa and enslaved in America. He traced numerous elements expressed in the contemporary African-American culture that could be traced to African cultures. Herskovits emphasized race as a sociological concept, not a biological one. He also helped forge the concept of cultural relativism, particularly in his book Man and His Works. This book examines in depth the effects of westernization on Africans of diverse cultures who were brought during slavery to the Americas, and who then developed a distinctly different African-American culture as a product of this displacement. As LeRoi Jones has commented on this text, some believe that the introduction of these Africans to Christianity is what propelled such westernization. Christian concepts shifted slave narratives from an emphasis on travelling home to their African countries of origin to traveling home to see their Lord, in Heaven. The development of African-American Christian churches, which served as one of the only places to provide these peoples with access to social mobility, further established a distinctly western culture among Africans in America. Along with these churches came Negro spirituals, which are cited as likely the first kind of music native to America made by Africans. Nonetheless, the development of such spirituals included direct influence from the African roots. This became apparent in a number of aspects of the spirituals, from the inclusion of call and response lines and alternate scales to the varied timbres and rhythms. All of this goes to show that Herskovits’s claims in this book carry much truth and accuracy in regards to the establishment of the African American identity as descendant of that of the African, and how music played into such shifts.

Antiracism means separating the idea of a culture from the idea of behavior.

Humans are intelligent and lazy, even as that intelligence and laziness might appear differently across the racialized cultural groups.

Schools lack basic supplies, basic textbooks, healthy food and water. The lack of resources leads directly to diminished opportunities for learning. In other words, the racial problem is the opportunity gap, as antiracist reformers call it, not the achievement gap.

Racist ideas often lead to this silly psychological inversion, where we blame the victimized race for their own victimization.

Whenever someone classifies people of European descent as biologically, culturally, or behaviorally inferior, whenever someone says there is something wrong with White people as a group, someone is articulating a racist idea.

This was specifically about Ibram's relationship with the Nation of Islam - an organization which believes that White people are the result of scientific experiments thousands of years ago. This "othering" is racist, despite the NoI's many attempts to enrich Black society.

“culture of poverty” in a 1959 ethnography of Mexican families.

Wow, what the fuck. Some more context here, Oscar Lewis was rewarded for these depictions of ethnic poverty, he won the 1967 U.S. National Book Award in Science, Philosophy and Religion for "La vida: a Puerto Rican family in the culture of poverty--San Juan and New York". This idea wasn't a fringe idea by some no-name who had no influence, this idea of "inherited behaviours which result in poverty" was accepted and celebrated.

“Being black and the daughter of a former welfare recipient, I know firsthand the unintended harm welfare has caused.”

An example of a Black person being racist. Kay Cole James served as G.W. Bush's director for the United States Office of Personnel Management. She's president of The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank geared towards public policy and on the board of advisors for NASA.

Racist Black elites, meanwhile, heightened their sense of self on the stepladder of racist ideas, on what we can call the wage of Black elitism. I may not be White, but at least I am not them niggers.

Prince Henry’s Portugal birthed conjoined twins—capitalism and racism—when it initiated the transatlantic slave trade of African people.

This is not true. While I don't want to derail the author's overall point that "an exploited group is good for Capitalism", capitalism as an ideology relies on the free market and imperial/feudal Europe was NOT a free market. "The Wealth of Nations" is the book many consider to be the founding capitalism manifesto, written by Adam Smith. This book was released in 1776, more than 300 years after the author's assertion. Hell, even authoritarian regimes in Leninist countries relied on exploitation of a group of people.

Poor Blacks are much more likely to live in neighborhoods where other families are poor, creating a poverty of resources and opportunities. Sociologists refer to this as the “double burden.”

Popular definitions of capitalism, like popular racist ideas, do not live in historical or material reality.

This is probably what I disagree with the most. If we are to say that Capitalism as an ideology must be defined by history, this also invalidates Karl Marx' teachings that he mentioned WEB Du Bois binged a few pages ago. There have been historical failures by countries which have claimed to be communist to the Marxist ideal, but many will be quick (and correct) to mention that these systems were not actually Marxist. Indeed, the USSR and Mao's China were closer to some fucked up kind of socialism than Marxist, but by this logic, we must permanently label these ideas as dangerous due to the millions of deaths these implementations have caused. Plato spoke about the divide between the realm of ideas and the realm of people (he called it the realm of men) before - and for both Capitalism and Marxism, the implementation of these ideas are in the realm of people. What we see in history are models, not true representation of what these Capitalist or Marxist ideals are. To read more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_forms

Separation is not always segregation. The antiracist desire to separate from racists is different from the segregationist desire to separate from “inferior” Blacks.

Moynihan called for national action to employ and empower Black men, who had been emasculated by discrimination and matriarchal Black women.

Wow. The only thing America hates more than Black men, is Black women.

Stonewall rebellion in Manhattan in 1969.

Closer to home - the Black queer community of SF in the 70s was extremely marginalized and oppressed. Gay bars were effectively white gay bars. The SFPD was brutal to Black queer community as well.

In 1991, UCLA critical race theorist Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw further explored this notion of “intersectionality.”

Yes! Pre-requisite to intersectionality is Critical race theory. Crenshaw was instrumental to making CRT a thing, intersectionality was first outlined in the seminal paper on CRT in 1991. However there are some others who are also important to call out - Derrick Bell and Mari Matsuda in addition to Crenshaw. The CRT and intersectionality was the result of a Harvard Law School strike in the 1980s after Bell left HLS. Bell had introduced courses to think about American law under a racial lens. When he left to become the dean of Law at Oregon, Harvard replaced him with two white civil rights activists. This resulted in strikes led by Crenshaw and Matsuda, both former students of Bell and classmates at HLS.

The average U.S. life expectancy of a transgender woman of color is thirty-five years.

“I’m not racist” and “race neutral” and “post-racial” and “color-blind” and “only one race, the human race” and “only racists speak about race” and “Black people can’t be racist” and “White people are evil” are bound to fail in identifying and eliminating racist power and policy.

The racism problem lay in the “astonishing ignorance” of White Americans, Myrdal advised in An American Dilemma in 1944. “There is no doubt, in the writer’s opinion, that a great majority of white people in America would be prepared to give the Negro a substantially better deal if they knew the facts.”

The problem of race has always been at its core the problem of power, not the problem of immorality or ignorance.

What if antiracists constantly self-critiqued our own ideas? What if we blamed our ideologies and methods, studied our ideologies and methods, refined our ideologies and methods again and again until they worked?

The most effective protests create an environment whereby changing the racist policy becomes in power’s self-interest,