How to Be an Antiracist (One World Essentials)

by Ibram X. Kendi

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...