How to Be an Antiracist (One World Essentials)

by Ibram X. Kendi

They stopped thinking about saving Black people and started thinking about liberating Black people.

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. By policy, I mean written and unwritten laws, rules, procedures, processes, regulations, and guidelines that govern people. There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy. Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity, racial injustice or justice.

“Institutional racism” and “structural racism” and “systemic racism” are redundant. Racism itself is institutional, structural, and systemic.

Reagan’s policies, which were chopping the ladder they climbed up and then punishing people for falling.

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.

After Spanish and Portuguese colonizers arrived in the Americas in the fifteenth century, they took to race making all the different Indigenous peoples, calling them one people, “Indians,” or negros da terra (Blacks from the land) in sixteenth-century Brazil.

This cause and effect—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.

With racist teachers, misbehaving Black kids do not receive inquiry and empathy and legitimacy. We receive orders and punishments and “no excuses,” as if we are adults. The Black child is ill-treated like an adult, and the Black adult is ill-treated like a child.

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.

Despite studies showing Black immigrants, on average, earn college degrees at rates comparable to the overall immigrant population in the United States, they earn lower wages than similarly trained non-Black immigrants and have the highest unemployment rate of any immigrant group. An ethnic racist asks, Why are Black immigrants doing better than African Americans? An ethnic antiracist asks, Why are Black immigrants not doing as well as other immigrant groups?

We were unarmed, but we knew that Blackness armed us even though we had no guns.

Or, as the Urban Institute stated in a more recent report on long-term unemployment, “Communities with a higher share of long-term unemployed workers also tend to have higher rates of crime and violence.”

A protest is organizing people for a prolonged campaign that forces racist power to change a policy. A demonstration is mobilizing people momentarily to publicize a problem.