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.