How to Be an Antiracist (One World Essentials)

by Ibram X. Kendi

NOTE ON ANTIRACIST WORK AND CRT In the summer of 2020, after the police murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd, approximately three in four White Americans recognized racism as a big problem. The growing recognition of racism among White Americans, their growing efforts to be antiracist, no doubt scared Trump operatives who relied on the racist ideas of White Americans to garner their support. To reinflame the racist ideas of White people, Trump operatives named all antiracist work “critical race theory,” and named me one of the fathers of CRT, even though CRT was born in 1981 and I was born in 1982. And then these operatives went about falsely defining CRT. Senator Ted Cruz said, “Critical race theory says every white person is a racist.” It doesn’t matter to this senator that the founders of CRT never made such a claim, or that I wrote: “To be antiracist is to never conflate racist people with White people, knowing there are antiracist Whites and racist non-Whites.” Alabama state legislator Chris Pringle misleadingly said that critical race theory “basically teaches that certain children are inherently bad people because of the color of their skin.” But to be antiracist is to condemn this idea. No racial group is inherently bad or good, racist or antiracist.