How to Be an Antiracist (One World Essentials)

by Ibram X. Kendi

To be a racist is to constantly redefine racist in a way that exonerates one’s changing policies, ideas, and personhood.

Antiracist ideas are based in the truth that racial groups are equals in all the ways they are different, assimilationist ideas are rooted in the notion that certain racial groups are culturally or behaviorally inferior, and segregationist ideas spring from a belief in genetic racial distinction and fixed hierarchy.

The Black child is ill-treated like an adult, and the Black adult is ill-treated like a child.

Race is a mirage but one that humanity has organized itself around in very real ways. Imagining away the existence of races in a racist world is as conserving and harmful as imagining away classes in a capitalistic world—it allows the ruling races and classes to keep on ruling.

Terminating racial categories is potentially the last, not the first, step in the antiracist struggle.

Black people are apparently responsible for calming the fears of violent cops in the way women are supposedly responsible for calming the sexual desires of male rapists. If we don’t, then we are blamed for our own assaults, our own deaths.

One of racism’s harms is the way it falls on the unexceptional Black person who is asked to be extraordinary just to survive—and,

Trump’s Department of Homeland Security, after the election. “Although black civil rights leaders like to point to a supposedly racist criminal justice system to explain why our prisons house so many black men, it’s been obvious for decades that the real culprit is black behavior,” argued Jason Riley in 2016.

This stereotype of the hopeless, defeated, unmotivated poor Black is without evidence. Recent research shows, in fact, that poor Blacks are more optimistic about their prospects than poor Whites are.

it is impossible to know racism without understanding its intersection with capitalism.

stigmatize Black neighborhoods as crime-ridden streets where you might have your wallet stolen. But they aspire to move into upscale White neighborhoods, home to white-collar criminals and “banksters,” as Thom Hartmann calls them, who might steal your life savings.

None of this is to say that White spaces or Black spaces are more or less violent—this isn’t about creating a hierarchy.

Indeed, when researchers compare HBCUs to HWCUs of similar means and makeup, HBCUs tend to have higher Black graduation rates. Not to mention, Black HBCU graduates are, on average, more likely than their Black peers from HWCUs to be thriving financially, socially, and physically.

How many times did I individualize the error in White spaces, blaming the individual and not the White space? How many times did I generalize the error in the Black space—in the Black church or at a Black gathering—and blame the Black space instead of the individual? How many times did I have a bad experience at a Black business and then walk away complaining about not the individuals involved but Black businesses as a whole?

Integrationists equate spaces for the survival of Black bodies with spaces for the survival of White supremacy.

In 1930, segregationist Alabama spent $37 for each White student, compared to $7 for each Black student; Georgia, $32 to $7; and South Carolina, $53 to $5.

“I favor integration on buses and in all areas of public accommodation and travel….I think integration in our public schools is different,” King told two Black teachers in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1959. “White people view black people as inferior….People with such a low view of the black race cannot be given free rein and put in charge of the intellectual care and development of our boys and girls.”

The integrationist transformation of King as color-blind and race-neutral erases the actual King. He did not live to integrate Black spaces and people into White oblivion.

Braving homophobia in Black spaces and racism in queer spaces, antiracist queer people formed their own spaces.

No wonder Black feminists have been saying from the beginning that when humanity becomes serious about the freedom of Black women, humanity becomes serious about the freedom of humanity.

that the ways women and men traditionally act are not tied to their biology; that men can authentically perform femininity as effectively as women can authentically perform masculinity. Authentically, meaning they are not acting, as the transphobic idea assumes. They are being who they are, defying society’s gender conventions.

We cannot be antiracist if we are homophobic or transphobic.

It is best to challenge ourselves by dragging ourselves before people who intimidate us with their brilliance and constructive criticism.

To be antiracist is to let me be me, be myself, be my imperfect self.

Racism has always been terminal and curable. Racism has always been recognizable and mortal.