How to Be an Antiracist (One World Essentials)

by Ibram X. Kendi

It feels dangerous for me to be vulnerable, just as it can be dangerous to be antiracist and challenge the power and policy structure of racism.

It is even more dangerous for us not to strive to be antiracist. It is even more dangerous for us—for me—not to be vulnerable and self-critical, to find our flaws, and to grow.

on individual transformation for societal transformation—because powerful forces are still striving to conserve racism.

It was the sort of defiance that could have gotten him lynched by a mob in a different time and place—or lynched by men in badges today.

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.

that told me that the reason was rooted in my race…which made me more discouraged and less motivated as a student…which only further reinforced for me the racist idea that Black people just weren’t very studious…which made me feel even more despair or indifference…and on it went.

Malcolm primarily preached self-defense from racist terror and his anger at racism came from a deep well of love for Black people and a belief in human rights for all.

to say something is wrong about a racial group is to say something is inferior about that racial group.

“Racism” connotes power, policies, and ideas. “Racist” connotes a power, a policy, or an idea.

A group of people can engage in racism, while an individual can be racist.

When we think racism, what comes to mind should be structures. When we think racist, what comes to mind should be an individual, an idea, a policy—the elements making up the structure of racism.

When racist ideas resound, denials that those ideas are racist typically follow. When racist policies resound, denials that those policies are racist also follow.

the color-blind individual, by ostensibly failing to see how people are racialized, fails to see racism and falls into racist passivity. The

none of us are race representatives, nor is any individual responsible for someone else’s racist ideas.

A racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity or injustice. An antiracist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial equity or justice.

I do not think an organization should hire an incapable candidate solely because of that candidate’s race, which is how positive discrimination is sometimes defined.

positive antiracist discrimination is when a nation with limited supply of a life-saving vaccine provides it first to the racial groups dying at the highest rates from the viral disease.

negative age discrimination is when a nation with limited supply of a life-saving vaccine provides it first to the young people who are dying at the lowest rates from a viral

It is like a nutritionist telling clients to cut back on red meat without suggesting what they should eat instead. We need scholarship that helps us make the world healthy. An equitable and just world is a healthy world.

White lives matter to the tune of four additional years—and five additional years during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic

becoming harder for people of color to vote out of office the politicians crafting these policies designed to shorten their lives.

“We have all been programmed to respond to the human differences between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate. But we have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals.”

ASSIMILATIONIST IDEA: Any notion that suggests that a racial group is culturally or behaviorally inferior,

ideas. I have leaned into describing ideas and policies, and not identifying who individuals are in a permanent sense.

The stiffer sentencing policies for illegal drug activity—not a net increase in harm—caused the American prison population to quadruple between 1980 and 2000.

Many non-Black Americans looked down on Black Americans struggling with an addiction in revulsion—but too many Black folk looked down on the same people in shame.

They fed me the mantra that education and hard work would uplift me, just as it had uplifted them, and would, in the end, uplift all Black people.

pull your self up by the bootstraps mentality

We are particularly poor at seeing the policies lurking behind the struggles of people.

This program of Black people feeding Black people embodied the gospel of Black self-reliance that the adults in my life were feeding me.

White people have their own dueling consciousness, between the ideas of the segregationist and the assimilationist:

White assimilationist ideas challenge segregationist ideas that claim people of color are incapable of development, incapable of reaching the superior standard, incapable of becoming White and therefore fully human.

Assimilationist ideas reduce people of color to the level of children needing instruction on how to act.

Antiracist ideas are based on the notion of racial equality, assimilationist ideas are rooted in the notion that certain racial groups are culturally or behaviorally inferior, and segregationist ideas spring from a belief in genetic racial distinction and fixed hierarchy.

To be antiracist is to emancipate oneself from the dueling consciousness.

The White body no longer presents itself as the American body; the Black body no longer strives to be the American body, knowing there is no such thing as the American body, only American bodies, racialized by power.

first lesson kids receive about race is not to talk about it.

The gift of seeing myself as Black instead of being color-blind is that it allows me to clearly see myself historically and politically as being an antiracist, as a member of the interracial body striving to accept and equate and empower racial difference of all kinds.

Talk about this in a discussion post

did not enslave and trade humans for money, only to save souls.

a racist power creates racist policies out of raw self-interest; the racist policies necessitate racist ideas to justify them—lingers over the life of racism.

Black students were twice as likely as White students to be suspended from public schools. The suspension rate of Black students was more than double their share of student enrollment.

microaggressions as “brief, everyday exchanges that send denigrating messages to certain individuals because of their group membership.”

Blackness and therefore categorized it as misbehavior, not distress.

“that in genetic terms, all human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9 percent the same,”

assimilationist is to believe in the post-racial myth that talking about race constitutes racism, or that if we stop identifying by race, then racism will miraculously go away.

To be antiracist is to focus on ending the racism that shapes the mirages, not ignoring the mirages that shape people’s lives.

justify the relative disparities in poverty and wealth between the race-classes brought on by racial capitalism.

racist policies that enabled White flight and Black abandonment—instead, “ghetto” began to describe unrespectable Black

dark ghetto is institutionalized pathology; it is chronic, self-perpetuating pathology; and it is the futile attempt by those with power to confine that pathology so as to prevent the spread of its contagion to the ‘larger community,’

To be antiracist is to equalize the race-classes. To be antiracist is to root the economic disparities between the equal race-classes in policies, not people.

“The white poor and slum dweller have the advantage of…the belief that they can rise economically and escape from the slums,” he wrote. “The Negro believes himself to be closely confined to the pervasive low status of the ghetto.”