How to Be an Antiracist (One World Essentials)

by Ibram X. Kendi

“Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

Antiracism seemed like an indulgence in the face of the self-destructive behavior they were witnessing all around them.

Americans have long been trained to see the deficiencies of people rather than policy. It’s a pretty easy mistake to make: People are in our faces. Policies are distant.

seeing the policies lurking behind the struggles of people. And so my parents turned away from the problems of policy to look at the problems of people—and reverted to striving to save and civilize Black people rather than liberate them.

what would have been if my parents had not let their reasonable fears stop them from pursuing their dreams.

began to look at themselves and their people not only through their own eyes but also “through the eyes of others.”

It’s hard or difficult or even naïve to be colorblind other people are judging you and those around you by color

They were not wearing a mask as much as splitting into two minds.

Another thing about color blindness when you’re wearing multiple faces, or even if you’re not, other people view you as if you are. So even if you don’t consider yourself bike race you consider raise the majority of other people think that way

this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others,”

Another comment on color blindness

“escape into the mass of Americans in the same way that the Irish and Scandinavians”

Color blindness might be an easy way of saying assimilation. Pretending to be color blind, while In reality preferring everyone just act ““white”

he wanted to liberate Black people from racism but he also wanted to change them, to save them from their “relic of barbarism.”

the superior standard that another racial group should be measuring themselves against, the benchmark they should be trying to reach.

Color blindness sets the absence of color as, in reality, the race which is considered the most superior form of culture and standard to be held up to. “measuring themselves against, the benchmark they should be trying to reach.”

race is a mirage, which doesn’t lessen its force. We are what we see ourselves as, whether what we see exists or not. We are what people see us as, whether what they see exists or not.

Race is a mirage but one that we do well to see, while never forgetting it is a mirage, never forgetting that it’s the powerful light of racist power that makes the mirage.

Race is a mirage but one that we do well to see, while never forgetting it is a mirage, never forgetting that it’s the powerful light of racist power that makes the mirage.

Color blind

Not because I believe Blackness, or race, is a meaningful scientific category but because our societies, our policies, our ideas, our histories, and our cultures have rendered race and made it matter.

The gift of seeing myself as Black instead of being color-blind is that it allows me to clearly see myself historically and politically as being an antiracist, as a member of the interracial body striving to accept and equate and empower racial difference of all kinds.

This is why He is not colorblind

It is one of the ironies of antiracism that we must identify racially in order to identify the racial privileges and dangers of being in our bodies.

raw self-interest;

That the root problem of racism is ignorance and hate.

The heart of racism is power not ignorance and hate because ignorance and hate from the powerless with lead to nothing but using race as a tool to impose and dominate...

Self interest of power itself, racist or not. Race is a construct used to rule, divide, and “other”

Powerful economic, political, and cultural self-interest—the

I did not mind until I noticed.

This is racist categorizing, this stuffing of our experiences with individuals into color-marked racial closets.

The word “racism” went out of fashion in the liberal haze of racial progress—Obama’s

some well-meaning Americans started consciously and perhaps unconsciously looking for other terms to identify racism.

Micro aggression as a term that reduces the focus in racism, defangs it

Oh boy. “You’re with me here or you’re a racist” The author is making this binary. So ultimately you can call someone a racist for calling out an offense as an offense — but not racist. This conjugationing of race and language...

Meanginless differences = bio anti racism Superficial differences = bio racism

Biological racism rests on two ideas: that the races are meaningfully different in their biology and that these differences create a hierarchy of value.

My acceptance of biological racial distinction and rejection of biological racial hierarchy was like accepting water and rejecting its wetness.

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

To be antiracist is to focus on ending the racism that shapes the mirages, not to ignore the mirages that shape peoples’ lives.

all of his local elementary schooling in the late 1950s without

We, the young Black super-predators, were apparently being raised with an unprecedented inclination toward violence—in a nation that presumably did not raise White slaveholders, lynchers, mass incarcerators, police officers, corporate officials, venture capitalists, financiers, drunk drivers, and war hawks to be violent.

We are not meant to fear suits with policies that kill.

The idea that Black languages outside Africa are broken is as culturally racist

Myrdal’s scripture standardized the general (White) American culture, then judged African American culture as distorted or pathological from that standard. Whoever makes the cultural standard makes the cultural hierarchy.

The wider culture was avidly imitating and appropriating from us; our music and fashion and language were transforming the so-called mainstream.

“Civilization” is often a polite euphemism for cultural racism.

The cultural African survived in the Americans, created a strong and complex culture with Western “outward” forms “while retaining inner [African] values,”

“By reinforcing the stereotypes that long hindered blacks, and by teaching young blacks that a thuggish adversarial stance is the properly ‘authentic’ response to a presumptively racist society, rap retards black success,”

“This statue was made by one of you men. If we lions knew how to erect statues, you would see the man placed under the paw of the lion.” Whoever creates the cultural standard usually puts themself at the top of the hierarchy.

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.

the Black screwup who faces the abyss after one error, while the White screwup is handed second chances and empathy.

when we believe that a racial group’s seeming success or failure redounds to each of its individual members, we’ve accepted a racist idea. Likewise, when we believe that an individual’s seeming success or failure redounds to an entire group, we’ve accepted a racist idea.

Black behavior is as fictitious as Black genes. There is no “Black gene.” No one

Just as race doesn’t exist biologically, race doesn’t exist behaviorally.

Antiracism means separating the idea of a culture from the idea of behavior.

Behavior defines the inherent human traits and potential that everyone shares.

behavioral racism: Black behavior demoralized by freedom—or freed Black behavior demoralized by slavery.

thin line between an antiracist saying slavery was debilitating and a racist saying Blacks are a debilitated people.