How to Be an Antiracist (One World Essentials)

by Ibram X. Kendi

White supremacy is the greatest domestic threat to American lives and the life of democracy in the United States. Racism (and bigotry more broadly) is an existential threat to humans across the world, like nuclear war, climate change, and pandemics. The real danger lies in us not challenging racism. It is even more dangerous for us not to strive to be antiracist. It is even more dangerous for us—for me—not to be vulnerable and self-critical, to find our flaws, and to grow.

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 my applause-stoked flights of oratory, I didn’t realize that to say something is wrong about a racial group is to say something is inferior about that racial group. I did not realize that to say something is inferior about a racial group is to say a racist idea. I thought I was serving my people, when in fact I was serving up racist ideas about my people to my people. The Black judge seemed to be eating it up and clapping me on my back for more. I kept giving more.

I still have a nightmare—the memory of this speech whenever I muster the courage to recall it anew. It is hard for me to believe I finished high school in the year 2000 touting so many racist ideas. A racist society had handed me the ammunition to shoot Black people, to shoot myself, and I took and used it. Internalized racist ideas are the real Black on Black crime.

Many people use “racism” and “racist” interchangeably. But we must stop. I am trying to stop. Because they mean different things. “Racism” connotes power, policies, and ideas. “Racist” connotes a power, a policy, or an idea. “Racism” connotes what is structural, systemic, institutional, connected, or plural: a powerful collection of unjust or inequitable policies justified by ideas of racial hierarchy. “Racist” connotes what is individual or singular, such as a single (racist) policy or idea, or a single person who is being racist. I changed “internalized racism” to “internalized racist ideas” because an individual cannot have or internalize racism. A group of people can engage in racism, while an individual can be racist.

The common definition of racism can no longer hold. When we define racism as only a belief, philosophy, or ideology that can be internalized by an individual, it undermines two things: (1) the recognition of racism as structural, institutional, and systemic; and (2) the powerful role of policymakers, policies, and practices in the operation of racism. Power and policy are more foundational to racism than ideas (with ideas justifying the policies and practices). When we think racism, what comes to mind should be structures. When we think racist, what comes to mind should be an individual, an idea, a policy—the elements making up the structure of racism.

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.

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

“Our Constitution is color-blind,” U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Harlan proclaimed in his dissent to Plessy v. Ferguson, the case that legalized Jim Crow segregation in 1896. “The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country,” Justice Harlan asserted. “I doubt not, it will continue to be for all time, if it remains true to its great heritage.” A color-blind Constitution for a White-supremacist America.

The good news is that racist and antiracist are not fixed identities. We can be a racist one minute and an antiracist the next. What we say about race, what we do about race, in each moment, determines what—not who—we are.

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 or behavioral sense; we are all fully human in a biological and behavioral sense. I’m speaking in a social and political sense. To be fully human, socially, is for us to recognize a fundamental connection between ourself and every human being on earth. Which is to say we see every human being as a member of our extended family; we value the lives of all human groups equally, no matter their skin color. To be fully human, politically, is to think about human rights, about what all humans need to live fulfilling lives, and what powerful forces constrain humans—in this case the force of racism. To be fully human is to use our power to join with other humans to challenge the forces that prevent the full flowering of humanity.

After taking this grueling journey to the dirt road of the antiracist, humanity can come upon the clearing of a potential future: an antiracist world in all its imperfect beauty. It can become real if we focus on power instead of people, if we focus on changing policy instead of groups of people. It’s possible if we overcome our cynicism about the permanence of racism. We know how to be racist. We know how to pretend to be not racist. Now let’s know how to be antiracist.

James Cone’s working definition of a Christian described a Christianity of the enslaved, not the Christianity of the enslavers. Receiving this definition was a revelatory moment in Dad’s life. Ma had her own similar revelation in her Black student union—that Christianity was about struggle and liberation. My parents now had, separately, arrived at a creed with which to shape their lives, to be the type of Christians that Jesus the revolutionary inspired them to be. This new definition of a word that they’d already chosen as their core identity naturally transformed them.

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

If racial equity is the start, then racial justice is the end. If racial equity is all racial groups experiencing houselessness at somewhere close to 20 or 10 or 5 per 10,000 people, then racial justice is the abolition of houselessness and housing insecurity for all racial groups. Racial justice is building a society where everyone of every race has an affordable, safe, and comfortable roof over their head. Justice in a structural sense is when people experience nurturing and restorative love from policies and from their makers and defenders, who are being held accountable by the people. Injustice in a structural sense is when people experience destructive harm from policymakers and policies and from people who are usually immune to accountability.

A racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity or injustice. An antiracist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial equity or justice. 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, racial injustice or justice.

Racist policies have been described by other terms: “institutional racism,” “structural racism,” and “systemic racism,” for instance. But thos...

“Racist policy” says exactly what the problem is and where the problem is. “Institutional racism” and “structural racism” and “systemic racism” are redundant. Racism itself is institutional, structural, and systemic.

Since the 1960s, racist power has commandeered the term “racial discrimination,” transforming the act of discriminating on the basis of race into an inherently racist act. But if racial discrimination is defined as treating, considering, or making a distinction in favor of or against an individual based on that person’s race, then racial discrimination is not inherently racist. The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity. If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist.

The only remedy to negative racist discrimination that produces inequity is positive antiracist discrimination that produces equity. The only remedy to past negative racist discrimination that has produced inequity is present positive antiracist discrimination that produces equity. The only remedy to present negative racist discrimination toward inequity is future positive antiracist discrimination toward equity.

They reject my definition of “discrimination” and the delineation between racist and antiracist discrimination, even as these sentences are predicated on that definition and that delineation. All to substantiate their propaganda that my work is racist, and that antiracism is racist toward White people. I am talking about “propaganda” and not “criticism” for a reason. Critics explore what a writer actually means and challenge it. Propagandists distort what a writer means and then attack their own distortions. Consumers of the propaganda who haven’t read the book will never know that what is being fed to them is misinformation. These edits make it harder to distort the meaning of these sentences. But I am sure the conservators of racism will try. They want us thinking that antiracism, not racism, is the problem. They want us thinking that racism, not antiracism, is the solution.

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.”

So what is a racist idea? A racist idea is any notion that suggests one racial group is inferior or superior to another racial group in any way. Racist ideas argue that the inferiorities and superiorities of racial groups explain racial inequities in society. As Thomas Jefferson suspected a decade after declaring White American independence: “The blacks, whether originally a distinct race, or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.”

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 thereby convey that racist policies and practices are the cause of racial inequities.

Racist voting policy has evolved from disenfranchising by Jim Crow voting laws to disenfranchising by mass incarceration and voter-ID laws. Sometimes these efforts are so blatant that they are struck down: North Carolina enacted one of these targeted voter-ID laws, but in July 2016 the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit struck it down, ruling that its various provisions “target African Americans with almost surgical precision.” But others have remained and been successful.

“Racist” and “antiracist” are like peelable name tags that are placed and replaced based on what someone is doing or not doing, supporting or expressing in each moment. These are not permanent tattoos. No one becomes a racist or antiracist. We can only strive to be one or the other in each moment. We can unknowingly strive to be a racist. We can knowingly strive to be an antiracist. Like fighting an addiction, being an antiracist requires persistent self-awareness, constant self-criticism, and regular self-examination.

As Audre Lorde said in 1980, “We have all been programmed to respond to the human differences between us with fear and loathing and to handle that difference in one of three ways: ignore it, and if that is not possible, copy it if we think it is dominant, or destroy it if we think it is subordinate. But we have no patterns for relating across our human differences as equals.” To be an antiracist is a radical choice in the face of this history, requiring a radical reorientation of our consciousness.

My parents—even from within their racial consciousness—were susceptible to the racist idea that it was laziness that kept Black people down, so they paid more attention to chastising Black people than to Reagan’s policies, which were chopping the ladder they climbed up and then punishing people for falling.

The Reagan Revolution was just that: a radical revolution for the benefit of the already powerful. It further enriched high-income Americans by cutting their taxes and government regulations, installing a Christmas-tree military budget, and arresting the power of unions.

I always wonder what would have been if my parents had not let their reasonable fears stop them from pursuing their dreams. Traveling Ma helping to free the Black world. Dad accompanying her and finding inspiration for his freedom poetry. Instead, Ma settled for a corporate career in healthcare technology. Dad settled for an accounting career. They entered the American middle class—a space then as now defined by its disproportionate White majority—and began to look at themselves and their people not only through their own eyes but also “through the eyes of others.”

This conceptual duple reflected what W.E.B. Du Bois indelibly voiced in The Souls of Black Folk in 1903. “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others,” Du Bois wrote. He would neither “Africanize America” nor “bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism.” Du Bois wished “to be both a Negro and an American.” Du Bois wished to inhabit opposing constructs. To be American is to be White. To be White is to not be a Negro.

White people have their own dueling consciousness, between the ideas of the segregationist and the assimilationist: the human trader and the missionary, the proslavery exploiter and the antislavery civilizer, the eugenicist and the melting pot–ter, the mass incarcerator and the mass developer, the Blue Lives Matter and the All Lives Matter, the not-racist nationalist and the not-racist liberal.

White people have generally advocated for both assimilationist and segregationist policies. People of color have generally advocated for both antiracist and assimilationist policies. The “history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,” to quote Du Bois—the strife between assimilationist and antiracist ideas, between mass civilizing and mass equalizing.

But there is a way to get free. To be antiracist is to emancipate oneself from the dueling consciousness. To be antiracist is to conquer the assimilationist consciousness and the segregationist consciousness. The White body no longer presents itself as the American body; the Black body no longer strives to be the American body, knowing there is no such thing as the American body, only American bodies, racialized by power.

The root problem—from Henry to Trump—has always been the self-interest of racist power. Powerful economic, political, and cultural self-interest—the primitive accumulation of capital in the case of royal Portugal and subsequent human traders—has been behind racist policies. Powerful and brilliant intellectuals in the tradition of Gomes Eanes de Zurara then produced racist ideas and races to justify the racist policies of their era, to redirect the blame for their era’s racial inequities and injustices away from those policies and onto people.

I cannot recall her name. So very odd. I can recite the names of my Black fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade teachers. But the name of my White third-grade teacher is lost in my memory like the names of so many racist White people over the years who interrupted my peace with their sirens. Forgetting her may have been a coping mechanism.

My acceptance of biological racial distinction and rejection of biological racial hierarchy was like accepting water and rejecting its wetness. But that is precisely what I learned to do, what so many of us have learned to do in our dueling racial consciousness.

They fail to realize that if we stop using racial categories, then we will not be able to identify racial inequity. If we cannot identify racial inequity, then we will not be able to identify racist policies. If we cannot identify racist policies, then we cannot challenge racist policies. If we cannot challenge racist policies, then racist power’s final solution will be achieved: an unjust world of inequity none of us can see, let alone resist. Terminating racial categories is potentially the last, not the first, step in the antiracist struggle.

To be antiracist is to challenge those ideas essentializing race and racial identity. To be antiracist is to recognize one human race and the reality of biological equality, that skin color is as meaningless to our underlying humanity as the clothes we wear over that skin. To be antiracist is to recognize there is no such thing as White blood or Black diseases or natural Latinx athleticism. To be antiracist is to also recognize the living, breathing reality of the mirage of race, which makes our skin colors more meaningful than our individuality. To be antiracist is to focus on ending the racism that shapes the mirages, not ignoring the mirages that shape people’s lives.

Ethnic racist ideas, like all racist ideas, cover up the racist policies wielded against African Americans and Black immigrants. Whenever Black immigrants in the United States compare their economic standing to that of African Americans, whenever they agree that their success stories show that antiracist Americans are overstating racist policies against African Americans, they are tightening the handcuffs of racist policy around their own wrists. Black immigrants’ comparisons with African Americans conceal the racial inequities between Black immigrants and non-Black immigrants.

When I first picked up a basketball, at around eight years old, I also picked up on my parents’ fears for my Black body. My parents hated when I played ball at nearby parks, worried I’d get shot, and tried to discourage me by warning me of the dangers waiting for me out there. In their constant fearmongering about Black drug dealers, robbers, killers, they nurtured in me a fear of my own Black neighbors. When I proposed laying concrete in our grassy backyard and putting up a basketball hoop there, my father built a court faster than a house flipper, a nicer one than the courts at nearby parks. But the new basketball court could not keep me away from my own dangerous Black body. Or from Smurf on the bus.

More than the times I risked jail, I am still haunted by the times I did not help the victims of violence. My refusal to help them jailed me in fear. I was as scared of the Black body as the White body was scared of me. I could not muster the strength to do right.

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.

I did not connect the whole or even most of Southside Queens with violence, just as I did not connect all or even most of my Black neighbors with violence. Certain people like Smurf, certain blocks, and certain neighborhoods I knew to avoid. But not because they were Black—we were almost all Black. I knew in a vague way that Black neighborhoods with high-rise public housing like 40P (the South Jamaica Houses) or Baisley Park Houses were known to have more violence than neighborhoods like mine, Queens Village, with more single-family homes, but I never really thought about why. I knew it wasn’t Blackness—Blackness was a constant.

Assimilationist ideas substantiate calls to civilize these “super-predators” back to nonviolence through tough laws and tough love from mentors and fathers. Antiracist ideas substantiate the recognition that Black people, like all people, don’t need surveillance, policing, and prisons; they need more higher-paying jobs within their reach, especially Black youngsters, who have consistently had the highest rates of unemployment of any demographic group, topping 50 percent in the early to mid-1980s.

When we refer to a group as Black or White or another racial identity—Black Southerners as opposed to Southerners—we are racializing that group. When we racialize any group and then render that group’s culture inferior, we are articulating cultural racist ideas. When I defended Black culture in my mind, I was treating culture in a general sense, not a specific sense, just as I understood race in a general sense, not a specific (or intersectional) sense. I knew it was wrong to say Black people were culturally inferior. But I was quick to judge specific Black cultures practiced by specific Black racial groups.

Indeed, I was irresponsible in high school. It makes antiracist sense to talk about the personal irresponsibility of individuals like me of all races. I screwed up. I could have studied harder. But some of my White friends could have studied harder, too, and their failures and irresponsibility didn’t somehow tarnish their race.

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, even worse, when a Black person screws up, she faces the abyss after one error, while a White person who screws up in the same way is handed second chances and empathy. This shouldn’t be surprising: One of the fundamental values of racism to White people is that it makes success attainable for even unexceptional Whites, while success, even moderate success, is usually reserved for extraordinary Black individuals or unexceptional Black individuals willing to rise on the debasement of Black people.

Every time someone racializes behavior—describes something as “Black behavior”—they are expressing a racist idea. To be an antiracist is to recognize there is no such thing as racial behavior. To be an antiracist is to recognize there is no such thing as Black behavior, let alone irresponsible Black behavior. Black behavior is as fictitious as Black genes. There is no “Black gene.” No one has ever scientifically established a single “Black behavioral trait.” No evidence has ever been produced, for instance, to prove that Black people are louder, angrier, nicer, funnier, lazier, less punctual, more immoral, religious, or dependent; that Asian people are more subservient; that White people are greedier. All we have are stories of individual behavior. But individual stories are only proof of the behavior of individuals. Just as race doesn’t exist biologically, race doesn’t exist behaviorally.

To be antiracist is to separate the idea of a culture from the idea of behavior. Culture defines a group tradition that a particular racial group might share but that is not shared among all individuals in that racial group or among all racial groups. Behavior defines the inherent human traits and potential that everyone shares. Humans are intelligent and lazy, even as that intelligence and laziness might appear differently across cultural groups.