How to Be an Antiracist (One World Essentials)

by Ibram X. Kendi

As always, thank you readers for engaging with me. But I must say: Writing How to Be an Antiracist was intensely hard. What made it so intense and hard? The range of multidisciplinary research I needed to collect and organize; the depth of vulnerability and empathy I needed to reach and conceptualize; the amassing of courage to challenge popular understandings of race—and complicate those understandings; the grueling intellectual process of clarifying those complexities so they can be conveyed clearly on the page; all while weaving together a chronological narrative of my racial life with a thematic narrative that builds like conceptual blocks over the course of the book; all the while being worried about how passages will likely be distorted or taken out of context; all the while battling stage IV cancer. When I was done, I was done! I planned to never write a book like that again. I planned to fall back into my comfortable seat of writing narrative history. But then I was back at it again, writing How to Raise an Antiracist, trying to answer those countless caretakers who during the racial reckoning of 2020 kept asking me how can they apply How to Be an Antiracist to their children and students, how can they can raise their young ones to be antiracist. And of course, this new book, which comes out in June 2022, was even harder to write! I had to dive head first into a conversation that became so politicized, controversial, and sensitive in 2021. I had to dive head first into the science and scholarship on a matter that’s so personal to me as a parent and educator. I had to dive head first into the vulnerability of writing about my daughter’s upbringing and my many mistakes and the mistakes I faced as a child. Why did I do this? Scholars and scientists commonly find that society is dangerously racist and raising our children to be antiracist actually protects our children. As a parent and teacher, I couldn’t walk away from caregivers looking to protect their children. Heck, I needed this book myself. It’s like what pushed me to write How to Be an Antiracist all over again but instead of helping adults protect themselves, I was driven to help adults protect their children. I didn’t care about how hard the researching and writing was. I only focused on how hard racism has been making the human experience—the experience of childhood—and how hard I’m willing to lean on the scholarly research to reveal how humans can be antiracist and deconstruct racism. But enough with my musing! Let’s get to annotating and discussing How to Be an Antiracist.

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.

In revealing the harmful effects on me, I wanted to reveal the harmful effects of racist ideas on people of all races. How racist ideas are addictive, like drugs. How the more we consume, the more we want. And the more we consume them, the more insecure or conceited we become about our race. That’s what happened to me. What about you? Was there ever a time when you thought more or less of your race and thereby yourself?

Internalized racism is the real Black on Black crime. 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.

This passage was emblematic of the depth of vulnerability I had to reach in the book. But I must admit, I was ashamed of writing this. I was ashamed to admit I had been duped by racist ideas; that I had blamed the Black victims of racism rather than anti-Black racism. I can still picture me viewing the tape of the MLK Day speech for the first time fifteen years later. I couldn’t watch it with anyone else. I was so ashamed of what I said. I carried so much shame—and guilt—as I carried along writing this book, even as I knew the shame and guilt are pacifying and counterproductive. But the more I wrote and unpacked how I had been systematically taught racist ideas by racist power, the more I realized I was the victim of racist ideas as much as I was victimizing Black people—including myself—with my ideas. And the more I realized this, the more my shame and guilt melted away. And as the shame and guilt melted away, the more empathy took over for myself, my people, and other people. I didn’t want to be duped anymore. I wanted to be antiracist. What about you? Did you struggle with guilt and shame as you read the book? Did it start to go away by the end? It sometimes resurfaces for me. What about you?

Denial is the heartbeat of racism, beating across ideologies, races, and nations.

If I remember correctly, I originally wrote after this line something like: admission is the heartbeat of antiracism. But I deleted that line. I didn’t want to tell this at this point. I wanted the book to show this, to sound this heartbeat by my constant admission of times when I was being racist, particularly towards Black people. But it was hard! So hard! It is so much easier to just deny, deny, deny? Is so much easier to say, “I’m not racist,” no matter what? Do you know what I’m saying?

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 racism 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 problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of problems in power and policies, as an antiracist.

This is perhaps the most important passage of the book. It is my thesis based on a wealth of research that I shared throughout the book. It is the very idea that generated a withering campaign of misinformation and disinformation about me to stop people from reading this book and taking this idea and the scholarship behind it seriously. Why? Because if prior to the 1950s, segregation was the main historical force sustaining racism and racial inequity, then by the 1970s, “racial neutrality” was the main historical force sustaining racism and racial inequity. The segregationists of old became the “not racists” of today. And so, I suspect that once I decisively demonstrated through scholarship that there’s no such thing as “not racist” and “race neutral,” that the powerful people who are banning books by writers of color, who are suppressing votes and gerrymandering districts, who are making into heroes police officers and vigilantes who kill people of color and White antiracists, who are inflaming White supremacist domestic terror to wage war on democracy—that they would slander me and this book so they can continue to project themselves as “not racist.” As a scholar of racist propaganda, I knew what was coming. And this is yet another thing that made writing this book hard. But it was worse and more outlandish than anything I ever imagined. My work on antiracism was framed as critical race theory. I was framed as the father of critical race theory, even as critical race theory was born in 1981, and I was born in 1982. I was framed as claiming White people are inherently racist, even as one of my central findings is that no one is inherently racist or antiracist. Antiracism was framed as anti-White and racist in the mainstream media, which means an old White supremacist talking point went mainstream. But through it all, I trusted my research. I trusted readers. And the downside of spreading disinformation about a book to delegitimize it is that when people actually read the book and realize for themselves that they have been purposefully misinformed, they lose respect for the people who misinformed them. And that’s what has happened. Our conversations about race don’t have to be so divisive and enraging but invariably they will be made that way by racist power. We can’t forget that racist power benefits from keeping the races divided, from people thinking they lose as others gain, from people thinking those other people are the source of their problems rather than the policies commonly harming us all.

THIS BOOK IS ultimately about the basic struggle we’re all in, the struggle to be fully human and to see that others are fully human.

I’ve never shared this before. But this passage is my favorite in this book, in perhaps my entire body of written work. It encapsulates this book, my scholarship, what it means to be antiracist. I think we are beginning to understand how being racist prevents us from seeing certain people as fully human. But I don’t think we understand how being racist prevents us from being fully human. What do I mean by fully human? I’m not talking in a biological sense. We are all fully human in a biological sense. I’m speaking in a social and political sense. To be fully human, socially, is to recognize a fundamental connection between you and every human being on earth. Which is to say you see every human being as a member of your extended family. Meaning we value the lives of all humans equally, no matter their skin color. To be fully human, politically, is to think fully about human rights, about what all humans need to live fulfilling lives, and what powerful forces are constraining humans—in this case the force of racism. To be fully human is to use your power to join with other humans to challenge the forces that are preventing the full flowering of humanity.

Racism is a marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities.

I really wanted to discuss how racial inequities are normalized; how so many people could live in societies where let’s say Black people are disproportionately incarcerated, impoverished, dying young, unemployed, and being diseased, killed by the police, expelled from schools, and fired from jobs—and see all this inequity as normal. No there there. When people have been led to believe that Black people are more violent (racist idea), then it makes sense Black people are being incarcerated and killed by the police at the highest rates. Racist ideas cause people to believe violent cops when they claim they feared for their life; when police officials say if funds are transferred from bloated police budgets to under-funded public schools, then there will be a rash of crime; since the violent crime is perceived to be the result of the Blackness of the people not the poor conditions racist policies have created. I don’t think people understand how much common sense is based in racist ideas; how racist common sense veils racist policies; how the racist policies are criminal and the racist ideas are like articulate mob lawyers covering up the crimes against humanity—a political marriage if there ever was one.

Racial inequity is when two or more racial groups are not standing on approximately equal footing.

Can I admit something? It annoys me to no end when racist propagandists falsely claim that antiracists are saying that racial inequity is when there is not the same exact outcomes; and that to be antiracist is to advocate for the exact same outcomes; that if the White employment rate is 5.251%, then to be antiracist is to demand that the Black unemployment rate to be exactly 5.251%. This is false. Call me cynical but I feel racist propagandists purposefully state this to make the drive to equity seem impossible and impractical. Approximately, is the key word here. If the White unemployment rate is 5.251% and the Latinx unemployment rate is 8.25%, then why can’t we recognize that as an inequity, as a problem? Why can’t we strive to lower the Latinx unemployment rate to close to 5%? And why can’t we simultaneously seek to lower the White unemployment rate while lowering the Latinx rate? I wanted to write a whole chapter on my use of the term “approximately” instead of “exactly” in this sentence. But I think that would have been too much? I think no matter how much I explain, propagandists will still distort what I was saying. I don’t know.

A racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups. An antiracist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial equity between racial groups. 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 between racial groups.

One of my highlights of 2021 was being awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as the “Genuis Grant.” I’ve since decided to use the funding to continue my years of research on a narrative history of racist power and policy from the origins to the present, which I’m tentatively titling, Bones of Inequity. I’ve been working on this book for five years now, and it may take another few years to complete. This book will historically and empirically demonstrate how racist policies came to be, how they produced and reproduced inequity, how these policies are connected like bones, how all these bones make up a structure: the structure of racism.

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.”

I don’t think I fully explained why the “race neutral” movement is more threatening. It’s simple. I suspect most Americans are conscious about how White supremacists drive for a White ethno-state is racist and threatening. But I don’t think people understand why America’s drive for race neutrality is dangerous; and more dangerously, many people have been misled into seeing this disease as a remedy to racism. And so, people are better equipped to recognize and thus battle against White supremacy, while they are supporting a mythical race neutrality. Said differently, they imagine the solution to racism is “race neutral” policies, even as those policies have historically yielded racial inequities. They imagine the solution as not identifying by race, when if we don’t identify by race, then we won’t be able to collect racial data. If we don’t collect racial data, then we can’t recognize racial disparities. If we can’t see racial disparities, then how we recognize the racist policies behind those disparities. We’ll live in a society of widespread racial disparities and not know it, and not even begin to know what policies are behind those disparities since they are apparently all “race neutral.” But I could be wrong, especially in this age when White supremacists are the greatest threat to national security and multiracial democracy. What do you think? What do you think is more threatening? White supremacist movements or “race neutral” movements? Or both in different ways?

An antiracist idea is any idea that suggests the racial groups are equals in all their apparent differences—that there is nothing right or wrong with any racial group. Antiracist ideas argue that racist policies are the cause of racial inequities.

I’m thinking about what’s not written in this passage. What drives me to produce scholarship about antiracism, about antiracist ideas, about being antiracist is learning from the research how and what I can be and do to dismantle racism—and knowing I’m not alone in this learning journey. It doesn’t help me—and I suspect you—for scholars to say what we should not be doing if scholars don’t also use their research expertise to say what we should be doing. It’s like a nutritionist telling clients to cut back on red meat without telling them what they should eat more of. What do you think about this?

Racism is a powerful collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity and are substantiated by racist ideas. Antiracism is a powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to racial equity and are substantiated by antiracist ideas.

I wrote an entire chapter defining racist/antiracist policies and racist/antiracist ideas in order to define racism/antiracism, in order for these two sentences to make sense! We can’t understand a racial structure, be it racism or antiracism, without understanding its component parts: power, ideas and policies. But some people have disparaged me for using the terms “racist” and “antiracist” in these definitions, claiming I’m using the same words to define words. I have to remind myself that people commonly use the terms racism and racist interchangeably when they are distinct terms with distinct definitions. But perhaps I should have written this differently. Perhaps I should have written: “Racism is a powerful collection of policies that lead to racial inequity and are substantiated by ideas of racial hierarchy. Antiracism is a powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to racial equity and are substantiated by antiracist ideas.” I don’t know. What do you think?

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I just want to thank you for engaging me on How to Be an Antiracist. I look forward to engaging you on How to Raise an Antiracist in June! https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59149034-how-to-raise-an-antiracist