How to Be an Antiracist (One World Essentials)

by Ibram X. Kendi

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?