How to Be an Antiracist (One World Essentials)

by Ibram X. Kendi

intelligence is as subjective as beauty.

I cannot disconnect my parents’ religious strivings to be Christian from my secular strivings to be an antiracist.

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.

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.”

No one becomes a racist or antiracist. We can only strive to be one or the other in each moment. We can unknowingly strive to be a racist. We can knowingly strive to be an antiracist. Like fighting an addiction, being an antiracist requires persistent self-awareness, constant self-criticism, and regular self-examination.

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.

Also Canadians and Europeans/Brits

the primitive accumulation of capital in the case of royal Portugal and subsequent human traders—has been behind racist policies.

At the 1988 American Heart Association conference, a Black hypertension researcher said African Americans had higher hypertension rates because only those able to retain high levels of salt survived consuming the salt water of the Atlantic Ocean during the Middle Passage. “I’ve bounced this off a number of colleagues and…it seems certainly plausible,” Clarence Grim told swooning reporters. Plausibility became proof, and the slavery/hypertension thesis received the red-carpet treatment in the cardiovascular community in the early 1990s. Grim did not arrive at the thesis in his research lab. It came to him as he read Roots by Alex Haley. Who needs scientific proof when a biological racial distinction can be imagined by reading fiction? By reading the Bible?

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.

Not all individuals migrate, but those who do, in what’s called “immigrant self-selection,” are typically individuals with an exceptional internal drive for material success and/or they possess exceptional external resources. Generally speaking, individual Black and Latinx and Asian and Middle Eastern and European immigrants are uniquely resilient and resourceful—not because they are Nigerian or Cuban or Japanese or Saudi Arabian or German but because they are immigrants. In fact, immigrants and migrants of all races tend to be more resilient and resourceful when compared with the natives of their own countries and the natives of their new countries. Sociologists call this the “migrant advantage.”

But crime bills have never correlated to harm any more than fear has correlated to actual violence. We are not meant to fear suits with policies that kill. We are not meant to fear good White males with AR-15s. No, we are to fear the weary, unarmed Latinx body from Latin America. The body kneeling to Allah is to be feared. The Black body from hell is to be feared. Adept politicians and police and prison entrepreneurs manufacture the fear and stand before voters to deliver them—messiahs who will liberate them from fear of these other bodies.

Black people are apparently responsible for calming the fears of violent cops in the way women are supposedly responsible for calming the sexual desires of male rapists. If we don’t, then we are blamed for our own assaults, our own deaths.

Making individuals responsible for the perceived behavior of racial groups and making whole racial groups responsible for the behavior of individuals are the two ways that behavioral racist ideas infect our perception of the world. In other words, when we believe that a racial group’s seeming positive or negative attributes redound to each of its individual members, we’ve accepted a racist idea. Likewise, when we believe that an individual’s positive or negative attributes redound to an entire group, we’ve accepted a racist idea.

I had antiracist intentions, unmindful that the car of racism can drive just as far with the right intentions. To be an antiracist is not to reverse the beauty standard. To be an antiracist is to eliminate any beauty standard based on skin and eye color, hair texture, facial and bodily features shared by groups. To be an antiracist is to diversify our standards of beauty like our standards of culture or intelligence, to see beauty equally in all skin colors, broad and thin noses, kinky and straight hair, light and dark eyes. To be an antiracist is to build and live in a beauty culture that accentuates instead of erases our natural beauty.

“Courage is not the absence of fear, but the strength to do what is right in the face of it,” as the anonymous philosopher tells us. Some of us are restrained by fear of what could happen to us if we resist. In our naïveté, we are less fearful of what could happen to us—or is already happening to us—if we don’t resist.

When on December 12, 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court stopped Florida’s recount, I no longer saw the United States as a democracy. When Gore conceded the next day, when White Democrats stood aside and let Bush steal the presidency on the strength of destroyed Black votes, I was shot back into the binary thinking of Sunday school, where I was taught about good and evil, God and the Devil.

This definition of “prejudice plus power” does not explain how people become prejudiced, and it falsely positions power as secondary. It maintains this notion that people of all races have prejudice, but only White people have the addition—power—which is why their “prejudice results in acts of discrimination and oppression against groups or individuals.” This suggests: Racism is the result of prejudice and then power. This formulation reinforces the myth of racial prejudice (or racist ideas) as the foundation of racism. In fact, powerful self-interest is the foundation of racism, a self-interest that leads to racist policies, and those policies lead to racial inequity and injustice, which are then justified and normalized by racist ideas (or racial prejudice). The consumption of racist ideas leads to ignorance and hate—all this ignorance about racist power and policy: the actual source of pain. And this ignorance opens the door for people to blame other racial groups for their pain, thus reinforcing hate for other racial groups. Whenever there is common ignorance and mutual hate, it prevents individuals and groups from organizing together to challenge racist policies especially harming people of color and harming most White people, too, at lesser levels. 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.

Of course, working-class White people benefit from racist policies, though not nearly as much as wealthy White people and not nearly as much as they could from a just society. In a just society, everyday White people (along with the rest of us), instead of superrich White men, would be deciding elections and shaping policies. Their kids’ first-class schools would resemble the private-jet prep schools of today’s superrich. High-quality universal healthcare could save millions of White lives. A national basic income program would pull millions of White people out of poverty. Building out of the ashes of our criminal punishment system a humane justice system that roots out the structural causes of harm and violence, and facilitates mediation, healing, and restoration when harm and violence occur, would save countless White people from harm, violence, surveillance, and incarceration. White people would no longer face the cronies of racism that attack them: sexism, ethnocentrism, homophobia, xenophobia, ableism, transphobia, and capitalism. Racist power, hoarding wealth and resources, has the most to lose in the building of a just society. As we’ve learned, racist power produces racist policies out of self-interest and then produces racist ideas to justify those policies. 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 unrelate...

Ordinary racist White people function as soldiers of racist power. With these ground troops shelling out racist abuse each day, it is hard for people of color not to hate ordinary White people. Anti-White racist ideas are usually a reflexive reaction to virulent White racism. Anti-White racism is indeed the hate that hate produced, attractive to the victims of White racism.

Yet previously he rejects the power adpect of white racism

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 launched a world war that destroyed the lives of more than forty million White people and ruined Europe. They wave Confederate flags and defend Confederate monuments, even though the Confederacy started a civil war that ended with more than five hundred thousand White American lives lost—more than every other American war combined until the Vietnam War. White supremacists “welcomed” the spread of COVID-19, even though it has killed approximately half a million White Americans to date. White supremacists love what America used to be, even though America used to be—and still is—teeming with 15.9 million White people living below the poverty line. White supremacists blame non-White people for the struggles of White people when any objective analysis of their plight primarily implicates the rich White Trumps they support. White supremacist is code for anti-White, and White supremacy is nothi...

This powerless defense, as I call it, emerged in the wake of racist power dismissing antiracist policies and ideas as racist in the late 1960s. In subsequent decades, Black voices critical of White racism defended themselves from these charges by saying, “Black people can’t be racist, because Black people don’t have power.” Quietly, though, this defense shields Black individuals and other individuals of color in positions of power from having to make antiracist policy, since even they are apparently powerless, since apparently White people have all the power. This means that individuals of color are powerless to roll back racist policies and eliminate racial injustice even in their own spheres of influence, the places where they actually do have some power to effect change. The powerless defense shields individuals of color from charges of racism even when these individuals are reproducing racist policies and justifying them with the same racist ideas as the White individuals they call racist. The powerless defense shields its believers from the history of racist White people empowering individuals of color to oppress people of color and of individuals of color using their limited power to oppress people of color for their own personal gain. Like every other racist idea, the powerless defense underestimates Black people and overestimates White people. It erases the small amount of power that Black individuals have and expands the already expansive reach of power that White...

The powerless defense says the more than two hundred Black judges on federal courts have had no power during the trials and sentencing processes that built our system of mass incarceration. It says the more than fifty thousand Black police officers do not have the power to brutalize and kill the Black body. It says the hundreds of Black police chiefs, assistant chiefs, and commanders have no power to shield the racist officers under their command.

Black individuals can be racist because Black individuals do have power, even if limited. Note that I say limited Black power rather than no power. White individuals control the United States. But not absolutely. Absolute power necessitates complete control over all levels of power. All policies. All policy managers. All minds. Ironically, the only way that White individuals can gain full control is by convincing us that White people already have all the power. If Black people accept the idea that we have no power, we are falling under the sort of mind control that will, in fact, rob us of any power to resist.

But it is impossible to know racism without understanding its intersection with capitalism.

The idea that capitalism is merely free markets, competition, free trade, supplying and demanding, and private ownership of the means of production operating for a profit is as whimsical and ahistorical and conserving as the idea that racism is “prejudice plus power.” Popular definitions of capitalism, like popular definitions of racism, do not live in historical or material reality. Capitalism, in producing racial injustices and inequities between race-classes, is essentially racist; racism, in also producing economic injustices and inequities between race-classes, is essentially capitalist. They were birthed together from the same unnatural causes, and they shall one day die together from unnatural causes.

I was like a plant devaluing the soil that made me.

The antiracist assumption underlying integration is that in a multiracial nation, all racial groups can live together in harmony and equity where biological and behavioral sameness is acknowledged, ethnic and cultural differences are respected, and the diversity of it all benefits all.

For too many Black men, the Black Power movement that emerged after the Moynihan report became a struggle against White men for Black power over Black women.

It is best to challenge ourselves by dragging ourselves before people who intimidate us with their brilliance and constructive criticism.

What if economic, political, or cultural self-interest drives racist policymakers, not hateful immorality, not ignorance?

Racist policymakers drum up fear of antiracist policies through racist ideas, knowing if the policies are implemented, the fears they circulate will not come to pass. Once the fears do not come to pass, people will let down their guards as they enjoy the benefits. Once they clearly benefit, most Americans will support and become the defenders of the antiracist policies they once feared.

The original problem of racism has not been solved by suasion. Knowledge is only power if knowledge is put to the struggle for power. Changing minds is not a movement. Critiquing racism is not activism. Changing minds is not activism. An activist produces power and policy change. If a person has no record of power or policy change, then that person is not an activist.

When I lashed out at well-meaning people who showed the normal impulse of fear, who used the incorrect terminology, who asked the incorrect question—oh, did I think I was so radical. When my scorched-earth words sent attendees fleeing at rallies and meetings, when my scorched-earth writings sent readers fleeing, oh, did I think I was so radical. When in fact, if all my words were doing was sounding radical, then those words were not radical at all. What if we measure the radicalism of speech by how radically it transforms open-minded people, by how the speech liberates the power within? What if we measure the conservatism of speech by how intensely it keeps people the same, keeps people enslaved by their ideas and fears, conserving their inequitable society?

When we fail to open the closed-minded consumers of racist ideas, we blame their closed-mindedness instead of our foolish decision to waste time reviving closed minds from the dead. When our vicious attacks on open-minded consumers of racist ideas fail to transform them, we blame their hate rather than our impatient and alienating hate of them. When people fail to consume our convoluted antiracist ideas, we blame their ignorance rather than our ignorant lack of clarity. When we transform people and do not show them an avenue of support, we blame their lack of commitment rather than our lack of guidance. When the politician we supported does not change racist policy, we blame the intractability of racism rather than our support of the wrong politician. When we fail to gain support for a protest, we blame the fearful rather than our alienating presentation. When the protest fails, we blame racist power rather than our flawed protest. When our policy does not produce racial equity, we blame the people for not taking advantage of the new opportunity, not our flawed policy solution. The failure doctrine avoids the mirror of self-blame. The failure doctrine begets failure. The failure doctrine begets racism.

What if antiracists constantly self-critiqued our own ideas? What if we blamed our ideologies and methods, studied our ideologies and methods, refined our ideologies and methods again and again until they worked? When will we finally stop making the mistake of doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result? Self-critique allows change. Changing shows flexibility. Antiracist power must be flexible to match the flexibility of racist power, propelled only by the craving for power to shape policy in their unjust interests. Racist power believes in by any means necessary. We, their challengers, typically do not, not even some of those inspired by Malcolm X. We care the most about the moral and ideological and financial purity of our ideologies and strategies and fundraising and leaders and organizations. We care less about bringing resources to people in dire straits, as we say we are purifying ourselves for the people in dire straits, as our purifying keeps the people in dire straits. As we critique the privilege and inaction of racist power, we show our privilege and inaction by critiquing every effective strategy, ultimately justifying our inaction on the comfortable seat of privilege. Anything but flexible, we are too often bound by ideologies that are bound by failed strategies of racial change. What if we assessed the methods and leaders and organizations by their results of policy change and equity? What if strategies and policy solutions stemmed not fr...

when we attend or organize demonstrations thinking they are protests, thinking they can change power and policy, and see no change happening, it is hard not to become cynical.

This framing of White people versus Black people does not take into account that all White people do not benefit equally from racism. It does not take into account how rich White people benefit more from racist policies than impoverished and middle-income White people. It does not take into account that Black people are not harmed equally by racism or that some Black individuals champion White supremacy to boost their own wealth and power.

Once we lose hope, we are guaranteed to lose. But if we ignore the odds and fight to create an antiracist world, then we give humanity a chance to one day survive, a chance to live in communion, a chance to be forever free.