How to Be an Antiracist (One World Essentials)

by Ibram X. Kendi

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.