How to Be an Antiracist (One World Essentials)

by Ibram X. Kendi

As President Lyndon B. Johnson said in 1965, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”

Antiracist ideas argue that racist policies are the cause of racial inequities.

than Whites to be jailed for drug offenses. Nonviolent Black drug offenders remain in prisons for about the same length of time (58.7 months) as violent White criminals (61.7 months).

My parents—even from within their racial consciousness—were susceptible to the racist idea that it was laziness that kept Black people down, so they paid more attention to chastising Black people than to Reagan’s policies, which were chopping the ladder they climbed up and then punishing people for falling.

What people see in themselves and others has meaning and

manifests itself in ideas and actions and policies, even if what they are seeing is an illusion.

An antiracist treats and remembers individuals as individuals.