How to Be an Antiracist (One World Essentials)

by Ibram X. Kendi

These abolitionists—or, rather, progressive assimilationists—conjured what I call the oppression-inferiority thesis. In their well-meaning efforts to persuade people about the horrors of oppression, assimilationist ideas now as then maintain that oppression has degraded the behaviors of oppressed people.

W.E.B. Du Bois pictured “the first and greatest step toward the settlement of the present friction between the races…lies in the correction of the immorality, crime, and laziness among the Negroes themselves, which still remains as a heritage of slavery.” This framing of slavery as a demoralizing force was the mirror image of the Jim Crow historian’s framing of slavery as a civilizing force. Both positions led Americans toward behavioral racist ideas: Black behavior demoralized by freedom—or freed Black behavior demoralized by slavery.

Black “infighting,” materialism, poor parenting, colorism, defeatism, rage—these “dysfunctional” and “negative” behaviors “as well as many others are in large part related to trans-generational behavioral adaptations associated with the past traumas of slavery and on-going oppression,” maintains psychologist Joy DeGruy in her 2005 book, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome. (Some people believe, based on misleading studies, that these trans-generational adaptations are genetic.) DeGruy claimed “many, many” African Americans suffer from PTSS. She built this theory on anecdotal evidence and modeled it on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). But studies show that many, many people who endure traumatic environments don’t contract post-traumatic stress disorder. Researchers found that among soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, PTSD rates ranged from 13.5 to 30 percent.

there is a thin line between an antiracist idea that says individual Black people have suffered trauma and a racist idea that says Black people are a traumatized people. There is similarly a thin line between an antiracist idea saying slavery was debilitating and a racist idea saying Black people are a debilitated people.

As a struggling Black teenager in the nineties, I felt suffocated by a sense of being judged, primarily by the people I was closest to: other Black people, particularly older Black people who worried over my entire generation. The Black judge in my mind did not leave any room for the mistakes of Black individuals—I didn’t just have to deal with the consequences of my personal failings, I had the added burden of letting down the entire race. Our mistakes were generalized as the mistakes of the race. It seemed that White people were free to misbehave, make mistakes. But if we failed—or failed to be twice as good—then the Black judge handed down a hard sentence. No probation or parole. There was no middle ground—we were either King’s disciples or thugs killing King’s dream.

The use of standardized tests to measure aptitude and intelligence is one of the most effective racist policies ever devised to degrade Black minds and legally exclude Black bodies. We degrade Black minds every time we speak of an “academic-achievement gap” based on these numbers. The acceptance of an academic-achievement gap is just the latest method of reinforcing the oldest racist idea: Black intellectual inferiority. The idea of an achievement gap means there is a disparity in academic performance between groups of students; implicit in this idea is that academic “achievement” can only be measured by statistical instruments like test scores and dropout rates.

But what if, all along, these well-meaning efforts at closing the achievement gap have been opening the door to racist ideas? What if different environments lead to different kinds of achievement rather than different levels of achievement? What if the intellect of a low-testing Black child in an impoverished Black school is different from—and not inferior to—the intellect of a high-testing White child in a rich White school? What if we measured intelligence by how knowledgeable individuals are about their own environments? What if we measured intellect by an individual’s desire to know? What if we realized the best way to ensure an effective educational system is not by standardizing our curricula and tests but by standardizing the opportunities available to all students?

The prompt for the contest was “What would be Dr. King’s message for the millennium?” and what came to my pen were all the racist ideas about Black youth behavior circulating in the 1990s that, without realizing, I had deeply internalized. I started writing an anti-Black message that would have filled King with indignity—less like King himself and more like the shaming speeches about King that I heard so often from adults of my parents’ generation. If only I’d spent more time listening to King instead of all the adults who claimed to speak for him. “We must no longer be ashamed of being Black,” King would have told me, as he told a gathering of Black people in 1967. “As long as the mind is enslaved, the body can never be free.”

As long as the mind thinks there is something behaviorally wrong with a racial group, the mind can never be antiracist. As long as the mind oppresses the oppressed by thinking their oppressive environment has led to inferior behaviors, the mind can never be antiracist. As long as the mind is racist, the mind can never be free. To be antiracist is to think nothing is behaviorally wrong or right—inferior or superior—with any of the racial groups. Whenever the antiracist sees individuals behaving positively or negatively, the antiracist sees exactly that: individuals behaving positively or negatively, not representatives of whole races. To be antiracist is to deracialize behavior, to remove the tattooed stereotype from every racialized body. Behavior is something humans do, not races do.

Colorism is a collection of racist policies that cause injustices and inequities between Light people and Dark people, and these injustices and inequities are substantiated by racist ideas about Light and Dark people. Colorism, like all forms of racism, rationalizes injustices and inequities with racist ideas, claiming the inequities are not due to racist policy but are based in what is wrong or right with each group of people. Colorist ideas are also assimilationist ideas, encouraging assimilation into—or transformation into something close to—the White body.

“You’re never Black enough,” a Light woman once told Oprah about her feelings of rejection. Light people constantly report their struggle to integrate with Dark people, to prove their Blackness to Dark people, as if Dark people are the judge and standard of Blackness. The irony is that many Dark people—read me, circa 2000—do think of themselves as the judge and standard of Blackness, while at the same time meekly aspiring to the standard of Lightness or Whiteness.

To be an antiracist is not to reverse the beauty standard. To be an antiracist is to eliminate any beauty standard based on skin and eye color, hair texture, facial and bodily features shared by groups. To be an antiracist is to diversify our standards of beauty like our standards of culture or intelligence, to see beauty equally in all skin colors, broad and thin noses, kinky and straight hair, light and dark eyes. To be an antiracist is to build and live in a beauty culture that accentuates instead of erases our natural beauty.

NOTE ON COLORISM When people of color claim they can’t be racist, I do not think they realize that they are denying and erasing colorism today, as Du Bois did a century ago. Then again, the mass erasure makes sense. If there’s one form of racism that White people and people of color most commonly ignore and deny, it is colorism. Colorism is so old and widespread that it probably seems normal to most people. I had no idea I held colorist ideas. I had no idea about this history of colorism inside the Black community. I suspect many Light people cannot see their privileges, just as many White people cannot see their privileges. They are like fish in water. Surrounded by water their whole lives, how can fish possibly see it? It isn’t until they are removed from water that they realize what they were in. It isn’t until people develop antiracist empathy and strive to put themselves in waters inhabited by a person of another complexion that they can see the privileges or even deprivations of living in their own Dark or Light skin.

ANTI-WHITE RACIST IDEA: Any notion that classifies White people as inferior or that focuses hatred toward everyday White people, which distracts from and reinforces an inequitable and unjust power and policy structure that harms people of color and everyday White people. ANTIRACIST IDEA (ABOUT WHITE PEOPLE): Any notion that acknowledges racial equality, or that everyday White people are harmed by inequitable and unjust policies targeted at people of color (though not as severely as people of color) or that fosters interracial organizing toward an equitable and just society.

Racist ideas often lead to this silly psychological inversion, where we blame the victimized race for their own victimization.

The NOI’s history of White people was the racist history of Black people in Whiteface.

On September 22, 1964, Malcolm made no mistake about his conversion. “I totally reject Elijah Muhammad’s racist philosophy, which he has labeled ‘Islam’ only to fool and misuse gullible people, as he fooled and misused me,” he wrote. “But I blame only myself, and no one else for the fool that I was, and the harm that my evangelic foolishness in his behalf has done to others.”

Black individuals can be racist toward White people. But since White people remain on the higher end of nearly every racial disparity, we can conclude that Black people (and non-Black people) hardly wield racist policy when being racist toward White people. And the instances of Black people engaging in anti-White discrimination are as negligible as Black people engaging in voter fraud, even as propagandists keep fearmongering about both. Equitable actions—actions that do not reinforce White supremacy, and which White supremacists have historically framed as anti-White—are, in fact, antiracist. When I say Black individuals can be racist toward White people, I am specifically calling attention to anti-White racist ideas.

I don’t think people realize that “racial prejudice” or racist ideas about any racial group do not cause racism, they conserve racism. They cause people to use their power to fight other people rather than power and policy. Whatever breeds common ignorance and mutual hate conserves racism. Whatever breeds notions of racial hierarchy conserves racism. That is the function of racist ideas: to conserve racist power and policy. Any idea that conserves racist power and policy is racist. An individual conserving racist power and policy is being racist.

The only thing wrong with people, including White people, is when they embrace racist ideas and policies and then deny their ideas and policies are racist. This is not to ignore that White people have massacred and enslaved millions of Indigenous and African peoples, colonized and impoverished millions of people of color around the globe as their nations grew rich, all the while producing racist ideas that blame the victims. This is to say their history of pillaging is not the result of the evil genes or cultures of White people. There’s no such thing as White genes.

To be antiracist is to never mistake the global march of White racism for the global march of White people. To be antiracist is to never mistake the antiracist hate of White racism for the racist hate of White people. To be antiracist is to never conflate racist individuals with White people, knowing there are antiracist White individuals and racist individuals of color. To be antiracist is to see everyday White people as the frequent victimizers of people of color and the frequent victims of racist power.

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.

Racist White people do not want to define racial hierarchy or policies that yield racial injustices as racist. To do so would be to define their ideas and policies as racist. Instead, they define policies leading to justice as racist. Ideas not centering White lives are racist. Beleaguered racist White people who can’t imagine their lives not being the focus of any movement respond to “Black Lives Matter” with “All Lives Matter.” Embattled police officers who can’t imagine losing their right to profile and brutalize respond with “Blue Lives Matter.”

racist power thrives on anti-White racist ideas—more hatred only makes their power greater. When Black people recoil from White racism and concentrate their hatred on everyday White people, as I did freshman year in college, they are not fighting racist power. In losing focus on racist power, they fail to challenge anti-Black racist policies, which means those policies are more likely to flourish. Going after White people instead of racist power prolongs the policies harming Black life. In the end, anti-White racist ideas, in taking some or all of the focus off racist power, become anti-Black. In the end, hating White people becomes hating Black people.

White supremacist is code for anti-White, and White supremacy is nothing short of an ongoing program of genocide against the White race. In fact, it’s more than that: White supremacist is code for anti-human, a nuclear ideology that poses an existential threat to human existence.

How was our criticism of Black people any different from the anti-Black criticism of racist White people? I learned in that office that day that every time I say something is wrong with Black people, I am simultaneously separating myself from them, essentially saying “them niggers.” When I do this, I am being racist.

I thought only White people could be racist and that Black people could not be racist, because Black people as a group did not have power. I thought Latinx, Asian, Middle Eastern, and Native people could not be racist, because their racial groups did not have power. I conflated the (structural) term “racism” with the (individual) term “racist.” I conflated Black people as a group with a Black individual. Black people, as a group, have not had enough power (or desire) to institutionalize policies that put Black people on the higher end of inequities, while justifying their higher status by spreading ideas that Black people should be on the higher end because they are superior.

The heartbeat of being racist is denial. If the sound of that denial is “I’m not racist” for White individuals, then the sound of that denial for individuals of color is “I can’t be racist.” I have heard both sounds time and again from people reacting to this book.

Quietly, though, this defense shields Black individuals and other individuals of color in positions of power from having to make antiracist policy, since even they are apparently powerless, since apparently White people have all the power. This means that individuals of color are powerless to roll back racist policies and eliminate racial injustice even in their own spheres of influence, the places where they actually do have some power to effect change. The powerless defense shields individuals of color from charges of racism even when these individuals are reproducing racist policies and justifying them with the same racist ideas as the White individuals they call racist. The powerless defense shields its believers from the history of racist White people empowering individuals of color to oppress people of color and of individuals of color using their limited power to oppress people of color for their own personal gain.

Like every other racist idea, the powerless defense underestimates Black people and overestimates White people. It erases the small amount of power that Black individuals have and expands the already expansive reach of power that White individuals have.

When we stop denying the duality of racist and antiracist, we can take an accurate accounting of the racial ideas and policies we support. For the better part of my life I held both racist and antiracist ideas, supported both racist and antiracist policies; I’ve been antiracist one moment, racist in many more moments. To say individuals of color can’t be racist is to say people of color are being antiracist at all times. To say Black individuals can’t be racist is to say all Black individuals are being antiracist at all times. My own story tells me that is not true. History agrees.

Enslavers welcomed ministers preaching the gospel of eternal Black enslavement, derived from the fraught reading of the Bible where all Black people were the cursed descendants of Ham. A fifty-one-year-old free Black carpenter had to first teach away these racist ideas in 1818 as he began recruiting thousands of enslaved Black people around Charleston, South Carolina, to join his freedom revolt. Denmark Vesey set the date of the revolt for July 14, 1822, the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille during the French Revolution. The aim of the revolt was to take down slavery, as in the successful 1804 Haitian revolution that inspired Vesey.

Black people would be harmed by racist Black individuals again and again in the twentieth century. In the 1960s, the diversifying of America’s police forces was presented as a solution to the scourge of police brutality against Black victims. The fruit of decades of activism, a new crop of Black officers were expected to treat Black citizens better than their White counterparts did. But reports immediately surfaced in the 1960s that Black officers were as abusive as White officers.

NOTE ON “CRIMINAL” I have moved away from using the term “criminal.” This term implies that there are inherently bad people who commit crimes. This implication substantiates our criminal punishment system: that bad people must be locked away. But what about people who occasionally do bad things? And what if they do bad things largely as a result of bad conditions? Like poverty. Like the easy availability of guns. Like toxic masculinity. Should we be locking people away? Or should we be locking away the bad conditions?

When we say impoverished people are lazy, we are expressing a classist idea. When we say Black people are lazy, we are expressing a racist idea. When we say impoverished Black people are lazier than impoverished White people, White elites, and Black elites, we are speaking at the intersection of classist and racist ideas—an ideological intersection that forms class racist ideas. When Dinesh D’Souza writes, “the behavior of the African American underclass…flagrantly violates and scandalizes basic codes of responsibility, decency, and civility,” he is expressing class racist ideas.

When a policy exploits impoverished people, it is a classist policy. When a policy exploits Black people, it is a racist policy. When a policy exploits Black impoverished people, the policy exploits at the intersection of classist and racist policies—a policy intersection of class racist policies. When we racialize classes, support racist policies against those race-classes, and justify them by racist ideas, we are engaging in class racism. To be antiracist is to equalize the race-classes. To be antiracist is to root the economic disparities between the equal race-classes in policies, not people.

I saw impoverished Black people as the product of racism and not capitalism, largely because I thought I knew racism but knew I did not know capitalism. But it is impossible to know racism without understanding its intersection with capitalism. As Martin Luther King Jr. said in his critique of capitalism in 1967, “It means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated.”

The injustices and inequities wrought by anti-Black racism and capitalism are not restricted to the United States. Africa’s unprecedented capitalist growth over the past two decades has enriched foreign investors and a handful of Africans, while the number of people living in extreme poverty is growing in Sub-Saharan Africa. With extreme poverty falling rapidly elsewhere, forecasters project that nearly nine in ten extremely impoverished people will live in Sub-Saharan Africa by 2030.

White poverty is not as distressing as Black poverty. Impoverished Black people are much more likely to live in neighborhoods where other families are impoverished, creating a poverty of resources and opportunities. Sociologists refer to this as the “double burden.” Impoverished Black people in metropolitan Chicago are ten times more likely than impoverished White people to live in high-poverty areas. With Black poverty dense and White poverty scattered, Black poverty is visible and surrounds its victims; White poverty blends in. Attributing these injustices and inequities solely to capitalism is as faulty as attributing them solely to racism. Believing these injustices and inequities will be eliminated through eliminating capitalism is as faulty as believing they will be eliminated through eliminating racism.

Du Bois described the development of a “petty bourgeoisie” within the working class in the United States as a “post-Marxian phenomenon.” As such, Marxism could not fully explain U.S. political economy. He started to think beyond Marx and Russian communists at the time, as antiracist and anticapitalist Black scholars have ever since. “Instead of a horizontal division of classes, there was a vertical fissure, a complete separation of classes by race, cutting square across the economic layers,” Du Bois wrote. The vertical cutting knife? Racism, sharpened through the centuries. “This flat and incontrovertible fact, imported Russian Communism ignored, would not discuss.”

Du Bois helped breed a new crop of antiracist anticapitalists before they were driven underground or into prison by the red scares of the 1950s, before resurfacing in the 1960s. They are resurfacing again in the twenty-first century in the wake of the Great Recession, the Occupy movement, the movement for Black Lives, and the campaigns of democratic socialists, recognizing “there is an inextricable link between racism and capitalism,” to quote Northwestern scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor. They are winning elections, rushing into anticapitalist organizations, and struggles against racial capitalism.

I use “anticapitalist” because the conservative defenders of capitalism, particularly Republicans, regularly say their opponents fighting for economic justice for all people are against capitalism. They say efforts to provide a safety net for all people are “anticapitalist.” They say attempts to prevent monopolies are “anticapitalist.” They say efforts that strengthen weak unions and weaken exploitative owners are “anticapitalist.” They say plans to normalize worker ownership and regulations protecting consumers, workers, and environments from big business are “anticapitalist.” They say laws taxing the richest more than the middle class, redistributing pilfered wealth, and guaranteeing basic incomes are “anticapitalist.” They say wars to end poverty are “anticapitalist.” They say campaigns to remove the profit motive from essential life sectors like education, healthcare, utilities, mass media, and public safety are “anticapitalist.”

Warren should be applauded for her efforts to establish and enforce rules that end the theft and level the playing field for, hopefully, all race-classes, not just the White middle class. But if Warren succeeds, then the new economic system will operate in a fundamentally different way than it has ever operated before in American history. Either the new economic system will not be capitalist or the old system it replaces was not capitalist. They cannot both be capitalist.

What capitalism introduced to the world was global theft in the guise of capital accumulation, racially uneven playing fields, unidirectional wealth that rushes upward in unprecedented amounts, wealth that allows capital to free people from work or force people to work. Since the dawn of racial capitalism, when were markets level playing fields? When could working people compete equally with capitalists? When could Black people compete equally with White people? When could African nations compete equally with European nations? When did the rules not generally benefit the wealthy and White nations? Humanity needs honest definitions of capitalism and racism based in the actual living history of the conjoined twins.

The idea that capitalism is merely free markets, competition, free trade, supplying and demanding, and private ownership of the means of production operating for a profit is as whimsical and ahistorical and conserving as the idea that racism is “prejudice plus power.”

I thought I was so real, so Black, in choosing this apartment in this neighborhood. In truth, I was being racist, playing impoverished Black people cheap as human beings. While others had fled from impoverished Black people in racist fear of their dangerous inferiority, I was fleeing to impoverished Black people in racist assurance of the superiority conferred by their danger, their superior authenticity. I was the Black gentrifier, a distinct creature from the White gentrifier. If the White gentrifier moves to the impoverished Black neighborhood to be a developer, the Black gentrifier is moving back to the impoverished Black neighborhood to be developed.

SPACE RACIST IDEA: Any notion that suggests that a racialized space is superior or inferior to another racialized space in any way, or justifies policies that lead to injustice or resource inequity between racialized spaces or the elimination of certain racialized spaces. SPACE ANTIRACIST IDEA: Any notion that suggests that racialized spaces are equals or substantiates policies that lead to racial justice and equity between integrated and protected racialized spaces.

In my first course with Mazama, she lectured on Asante’s contention that objectivity was really “collective subjectivity.” She concluded, “It is impossible to be objective.” It was an idea that shifted my view of the world immediately. It made so much sense to me as I recalled the subjective choices I’d made as an aspiring journalist and then scholar. If objectivity was dead, though, I needed a replacement. I flung up my hand like an eighth-grader. “Yes?” “If we can’t be objective, then what should we strive to do?” She stared at me as she gathered her words. Not a woman of many words, it did not take long. “Just tell the truth. That’s what we should strive to do. Tell the truth.”

Racist Americans stigmatize entire Black neighborhoods as places of homicide and mortal violence but don’t similarly connect White neighborhoods to the disproportionate number of White males who engage in mass shootings. And they don’t even see the daily violence that unfolds on the highways that deliver mostly White suburbanites to their homes. In 1986, during the violent crack crisis 3,380 more Americans died from alcohol-related traffic deaths than from homicides. None of this is to say that White spaces or Black spaces are more or less violent—this isn’t about creating a hierarchy. The point is that when we unchain ourselves from the space racist ideas that deracialize and normalize and elevate elite White spaces, while doing the opposite to Black spaces, we will find good and bad, violence and nonviolence, in all spaces, no matter how impoverished or rich, Black or non-Black. No matter the effect of the conjoined twins.

Just as racist power racializes people, racist power racializes space. The ghetto. The inner city. The developing world. A space is racialized when a racial group is known to either govern the space or make up the clear majority in the space.