How to Be an Antiracist (One World Essentials)

by Ibram X. Kendi

As important as finding the antiracist power within and financial support, demonstrations can provide emotional support for ongoing protests.

The most effective protests create an environment whereby changing the racist policy becomes in power’s self-interest, like desegregating businesses because the sit-ins are driving away customers, like increasing wages to restart production, like giving teachers raises to resume schooling, like passing a law to attract a well-organized force of donors or voters. But it is difficult to create that environment, since racist power makes laws that illegalize most protest threats. Organizing and protesting are much harder and more impactful than mobilizing and demonstrating. Seizing power is much harder than protesting power and demonstrating its excesses.

After all, 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.

Framing institutional racism as acts by the “total White community against the total Black community” accounts for the ways White people benefit from racist policies when compared to their racial peers.

Racism is not even six hundred years old. It’s a cancer that we’ve caught early.