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January 25 - February 16, 2025
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.
Internalized racist ideas are the real Black on Black crime.
NOTE ON “RACISM” AND “RACIST” Here, I corrected one of my biggest errors in the hardcover edition: my use, at times, of the terms “racism” and “racist” interchangeably. Many people use “racism” and “racist” interchangeably. But we must stop. I am trying to stop. Because they mean different things. “Racism” connotes power, policies, and ideas. “Racist” connotes a power, a policy, or an idea. “Racism” connotes what is structural, systemic, institutional, connected, or plural: a powerful collection of unjust or inequitable policies justified by ideas of racial hierarchy. “Racist” connotes what is
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I was a dupe, a chump who saw the ongoing struggles of Black people on MLK Day 2000 and decided that Black people themselves were the problem. 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.
Denial is the heartbeat of being racist, beating across ideologies, races, and nations. It is beating within us.
What’s the problem with being “not racist”? It is a claim that signifies neutrality: “I am not a racist, but neither am I aggressively against racism.” But there is no neutrality in the racial struggle. The opposite of “racist” isn’t “not racist.” It is “antiracist.” What’s the difference? One endorses either the idea of a racial hierarchy as a racist, or racial equality as an antiracist. One either believes racial inequities are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of racial inequities in power and policies, as an antiracist. One either allows racial injustice to
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The good news is that racist and antiracist are not fixed identities. We can be a racist one minute and an antiracist the next. What we say about race, what we do about race, in each moment, determines what—not who—we are.
“Institutional racism” and “structural racism” and “systemic racism” are redundant. Racism itself is institutional, structural, and systemic.
We all have the power to discriminate. Only an exclusive few have the power to make policy. Focusing on “racial discrimination” puts our eyes on interpersonal actions and everyday people: one person discriminating against another. Focusing on “racial discrimination” takes our eyes off the central agents of racism: racist policy and racist policymakers, or what I call racist power.
The most threatening racist movement is not the alt right’s unlikely drive for a White ethnostate but the regular American’s drive for a “race-neutral” one. The construct of race neutrality actually feeds White nationalist victimhood by positing the notion that any policy protecting or advancing non-White Americans toward equity is “reverse discrimination.”
Racism is a powerful collection of policies that lead to racial inequity and injustice and that are substantiated by ideas of racial hierarchy. Antiracism is a powerful collection of policies that lead to racial equity and justice and that are substantiated by ideas of racial equality.
“Racist” and “antiracist” are like peelable name tags that are placed and replaced based on what someone is doing or not doing, supporting or expressing in each moment. These are not permanent tattoos. No one becomes a racist or antiracist. We can only strive to be one or the other in each moment.
Americans have long been trained to see the deficiencies of people rather than policy. It’s a pretty easy mistake to make: People are in our faces. Policies are distant. We are particularly poor at seeing the policies lurking behind the struggles of people.
I still identify as Black. Not because I believe Blackness, or race, is a meaningful scientific category but because our societies, our policies, our ideas and our histories and our cultures have rendered race and made it matter.
Latinx and Asian and African and European and Indigenous and Middle Eastern: These six races—at least in the U.S. context—are fundamentally power identities, because race is fundamentally a power construct of blended difference that lives socially. Race creates new forms of power: the power to categorize and judge, elevate and downgrade, include and exclude. Race makers use that power to process distinct individuals, ethnicities, and nationalities into monolithic races.
In the last decade, the term has become popular in social-justice spaces through the defining work of psychologist Derald Wing Sue. He defines microaggressions as “brief, everyday exchanges that send denigrating messages to certain individuals because of their group membership.”
People from the same ethnic groups that are native to certain geographic regions typically share the same genetic profile. Geneticists call them “populations.” When geneticists compare these ethnic populations, they find there is more genetic diversity between populations within Africa than between Africa and the rest of the world. Ethnic groups in Western Africa are more genetically similar to ethnic groups in Western Europe than to ethnic groups in Eastern Africa. Race is a genetic mirage.
Race is a mirage but one that humanity has organized itself around in very real ways. Imagining away the existence of races in a racist world is as conserving and harmful as imagining away classes in a capitalistic world—it allows the inequality to exist and persist undetected.
the facts that Black (31.3 percent), White (30.3 percent), and Latinx (29.8 percent) people receive welfare at similar rates, and states with larger Black populations tend to offer the lowest welfare benefits.
In recent years, the University of Chicago Crime Lab worked with the One Summer Chicago Plus jobs program and found a 43 percent reduction in violence-related arrests for Black youths who worked eight-week-long part-time summer jobs, compared with a control group of teens who did not. In other words, researchers have found a much stronger and clearer correlation between violence levels and unemployment levels than between violence and race.
Whoever creates the cultural standard usually puts themself at the top of the hierarchy.
To be antiracist is to see all cultures in all their differences as on the same level, as equals. When we see cultural difference, we are seeing cultural difference—nothing more, nothing less.
It makes racist sense to talk about personal irresponsibility as it applies to an entire racial group. Racial-group behavior is a figment of the racist’s imagination. Individual behaviors can shape the success of individuals. But policies determine the success of groups. And it is racist power that creates the policies that cause racial inequities and injustices.
To be antiracist is to separate the idea of a culture from the idea of behavior. Culture defines a group tradition that a particular racial group might share but that is not shared among all individuals in that racial group or among all racial groups. Behavior defines the inherent human traits and potential that everyone shares. Humans are intelligent and lazy, even as that intelligence and laziness might appear differently across cultural groups.
What if we realized the best way to ensure an effective educational system is not by standardizing our curricula and tests but by standardizing the opportunities available to all students?
Low-income White school districts annually receive $150 less per student than the national average, but approximately $1,500 more than low-income school districts where students of color make up at least three-quarters of the student body. 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.
Black individuals can be racist toward White people. But since White people remain on the higher end of nearly every racial disparity, we can conclude that Black people (and non-Black people) hardly wield racist policy when being racist toward White people.
I don’t think people realize that “racial prejudice” or racist ideas about any racial group do not cause racism, they conserve racism. They cause people to use their power to fight other people rather than power and policy. Whatever breeds common ignorance and mutual hate conserves racism. Whatever breeds notions of racial hierarchy conserves racism. That is the function of racist ideas: to conserve racist power and policy. Any idea that conserves racist power and policy is racist. An individual conserving racist power and policy is being racist. It is dangerously conserving of racist policy
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But racist ideas also suppress the resistance to policies that are detrimental to White people, by convincing everyday White people that injustice and inequity are rooted in “personal failure” and are unrelated to policies. Racist power manipulates everyday White people into resisting equitable and just policies by drilling them on what they are losing with equitable and just policies and how those policies are anti-White.
Racist White people do not want to define racial hierarchy or policies that yield racial injustices as racist. To do so would be to define their ideas and policies as racist. Instead, they define policies leading to justice as racist. Ideas not centering White lives are racist.
White supremacists are the ones supporting unjust policies that benefit racist power against the interests of the majority of White people. White supremacists claim to be pro-White but refuse to acknowledge that climate change is having a disastrous impact on the earth White people inhabit. They oppose affirmative-action programs, despite White women being their primary beneficiaries. White supremacists rage against Obamacare even as 43 percent of the people who gained lifesaving health insurance from 2010 to 2015 were White. They heil Adolf Hitler’s Nazis, even though it was the Nazis who
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I thought only White people could be racist and that Black people could not be racist, because Black people as a group did not have power. I thought Latinx, Asian, Middle Eastern, and Native people could not be racist, because their racial groups did not have power. I conflated the (structural) term “racism” with the (individual) term “racist.” I conflated Black people as a group with a Black individual.
To be antiracist is to say the political and economic conditions, not the people, in impoverished Black neighborhoods are pathological.
Whoever creates the norm creates the hierarchy and positions their own race-class at the top of the hierarchy.
Research shows, in fact, that impoverished Black people are more optimistic about their prospects than impoverished White people are.
She taught me that the power of the spoken word is in the power of the word spoken.
objectivity was really “collective subjectivity.” She concluded, “It is impossible to be objective.”
Estimated losses from white-collar harms are believed to be between $300 and $800 billion per year, according to experts. By comparison, near the height of violence in 1995, the FBI reported the combined costs of burglary and robbery to be $4 billion.
In a historically racist society, integration, whether assimilationist or antiracist, expects Black bodies harmed by racism to heal in proximity to racist White people who haven’t yet stopped harming them.
To be an antiracist is to champion resource equity by challenging the racist policies that produce resource inequity. Racial solidarity: openly identifying, supporting, and protecting integrated racial spaces. To be antiracist is to equate ethnic and cultural and color differences among racial groups.
My ideas of gender and sexual orientation reflected those of my parents. They did not actively and explicitly promote distrust of queer people (just as many parents do not actively and explicitly promote distrust of people of color). They rarely talked about queer people (just as many parents rarely talk explicitly about people of color). Ideas often dance a cappella. Their silence erased queer existence as thoroughly as assimilationist ideas erased the different cultures of peoples of color.
My parents did not strictly raise me to be a Black patriarch. I became a Black patriarch because my parents and the world around me did not strictly raise me to be a Black feminist.
White men’s obsession with accusing Black men of raping White women—and with lynching Black men—was as much about controlling the sexuality of White women as it was about controlling the sexuality of Black men.
Intersectional theory now gives all of humanity the ability to understand the intersectional oppression of their identities, from impoverished Latinx people to Black men to White women to Native lesbians to transgender Asian people. A theory from and for Black women is a theory for humanity.
Gay and lesbian people are a sexuality. Latinx people are a race. Latinx gay and lesbian people are a race-sexuality.
Our intentions, even if we mean well, hardly matter. What matters is what we do.
I did not know (and feminists like Kaila and Yaba were teaching me) about gender being an authentic performance; that the ways women and men traditionally act are not tied to their biology; that men can authentically perform femininity as effectively as women can authentically perform masculinity. Authentically, meaning they are not acting, as the homophobic and even transphobic idea assumes. They are being who they are, like trans men and women are being who they are.
To be a queer antiracist is to equate all the race-sexualities, to strive to eliminate the inequities between the race-sexualities. We cannot be antiracist if we are homophobic or transphobic.
To be queer antiracist is to serve as an ally to transgender people, to intersex people, to women, to gender-nonconforming people, to gay people and lesbian people, to bisexual people, to asexual people, to their intersections, meaning listening, learning, and being led by their equalizing ideas, by their equalizing policy campaigns, by their power struggle for equal opportunity and resources.
To be queer antiracist is to see homophobia, transphobia, racism, and queer racism—not the queer person, not the queer space—as the problem, as abnormal, as unnatural.
