How to Be an Antiracist (One World Essentials)

by Ibram X. Kendi

Racist ideas make people of color think less of themselves, which makes them more vulnerable to racist ideas. Racist ideas make White people think more of themselves, which further attracts them to racist ideas.

This is the consistent function of racist ideas—and of any kind of bigotry more broadly: to manipulate us into seeing people as the problem, instead of the policies that ensnare them.

It can become real if we focus on power instead of people, if we focus on changing policy instead of groups of people. It’s possible if we overcome our cynicism about the permanence of racism.

their percentage of the U.S. adult population. White people were still grossly underrepresented in the prison population at 30 percent, about half their percentage of the U.S. adult population.

the majority of Americans on welfare are not African American and the majority of African Americans eligible for welfare refuse it.

researchers have found a much stronger and clearer correlation between violent-crime levels and unemployment levels than between violent crime and race.

But individual stories are only proof of the behavior of individuals. Just as race doesn’t exist biologically, race doesn’t exist behaviorally.

What if different environments lead to different kinds of achievement rather than different levels of achievement? What

To be an antiracist is to build and live in a beauty culture that accentuates instead of erases our natural beauty.

ruin; the freedom to assassinate unions; the freedom to prey on unprotected consumers, workers, and environments; the freedom to value quarterly profits over climate change; the freedom to undermine small businesses and cushion corporations; the freedom from competition; the freedom not to pay taxes; the freedom to heave the tax burden onto the middle and lower classes; the freedom to commodify everything and everyone; the freedom to keep poor people poor and middle-income people struggling to stay middle income, and make rich people richer. The history of capitalism—of world warring, classing, slave trading, enslaving, colonizing, depressing wages, and dispossessing land and labor and resources and rights—bears out the conservative definition of capitalism.

Black and Latinx women still earn the least, while White and Asian men earn the most.

Queer racism produces a situation where 32 percent of children being raised by Black male same-sex couples live in poverty, compared to 14 percent of children being raised by White male same-sex couples, 13 percent of children raised by Black heterosexuals, and 7 percent of children raised by White heterosexuals.

While suburban White teenage boys partied and drank and drove and smoked and snorted and assaulted to a chorus of “boys will be boys,” urban Black boys faced zero tolerance in a policed state.