How to Be an Antiracist (One World Essentials)

by Ibram X. Kendi

The Black judge in my mind did not leave any room for the mistakes of Black individuals—I

Rarely opening my lips or raising my hand, I shaped myself according to what I thought they believed about me.

I saw myself through their eyes: an impostor, deserving of invisibility.

Intellect is the linchpin of behavior, and the racist idea of the achievement gap is the linchpin of behavioral racism.

education reformers banged the drum of the “achievement gap” to get attention and funding for their equalizing efforts.

What if different environments lead to different kinds of achievement rather than different levels of achievement?

the racial problem is the opportunity gap, as antiracist reformers call it, not the achievement gap.

To be antiracist is to think nothing is behaviorally wrong or right—inferior or superior—with any of the racial groups.

Behavior is something humans do, not races do.

When I first saw his lighter eyes, I assumed they were fake. It turned out, his genes provided him what I had to buy.

I hardly realized my own racist hypocrisy: I was turning the color hierarchy upside down, but the color hierarchy remained.

White people and Dark people reject and envy Light people.

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. We must separate the warlike, greedy, bigoted, and individualist cultures of modern empire and racial capitalism (more on that later) from the cultures of White people.

White economic inequality, for instance, soared

Racist power, hoarding wealth and resources, has the most to lose in the building of an equitable society.

Going after White people instead of racist power prolongs the policies harming Black life.

We created a group identity, niggers, that in turn created a hierarchy, as all race making does. We added the hypocritical audacity of raging when White people called all of us niggers (Chris Rock stopped performing this routine when he saw White people laughing too hard).

We racialized the negative behavior and attached negligent parenting to niggers, like White racists, as Black racists. We did not place Black criminals into an interracial group of criminals—as antiracists.

the antiracist position that racism is the main reason Blacks can’t get ahead

How the hell is that a racist position

the racist position that struggling Blacks are mostly responsible for their own condition,

Again how the hell is this a racist position

this defense shields people of color in positions of power from doing the work of antiracism,

The truth is: Black people can be racist because Black people do have power, even if limited.

Aside from Justice Clarence Thomas’s murderous gang of anti-Black judgments

post-racial idea that “our country has made

So another words he’s saying no matter what if you don’t believe him or agree with him you’re racist

The rise of mass incarceration was partially fueled by Black people

“Pathology,” meaning a deviation from the norm.

When a policy exploits poor people, it is an elitist policy. When a policy exploits Black people, it is a racist policy.

To be antiracist is to root the economic disparities between the equal race-classes in policies, not people.

Oh and here we go down the rabbit hole of wealth inequality and socialism. Are yes racism explains and only explains why people are poor, and any argument that there are other factors it’s racist itself. This is bullshit that is used to justify this professorial hatred of capitalism How about we attack the obvious factors: that systemic racism in criminal justice, education, as well as housing, not to mention banking and economic opportunities, or at the rate of wealth disparities. If we are locking up predominantly black man, and therefore children are often in single-parent homes, that’s an immediate hit right there. The racism is not in “evil capitalism exploiting the black body” but rather in criminal justice and a failing educational system that refuses to reform

Whoever creates the norm creates the hierarchy and positions their own race-class at the top of the hierarchy.

Unlike other economists, who explored the role of policy in the “cycle of poverty”—predatory

elitist idea that poor behaviors keep poor people poor.

Something was making poor people poor, according to this idea. And it was welfare.

The pathology of welfare

Goldwater and his ideological descendants said little to nothing about rich White people who depended on the welfare of inheritances, tax cuts, government contracts, hookups, and bailouts.

Here’s a thing this isn’t capitalism — it’s cronyism and it’s bad. It’s sustains those people that support and enrich the powerful

welfare for the Black poor became the true oppressor in the conservative version

Kenneth Clark was an unrelenting chronicler of the racist policies that made “the dark ghetto,” but at the same time he reinforced the racial-class hierarchy.

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.

W.E.B. Du Bois famously called the “wage” of Whiteness. I may not be rich, but at least I am not a nigger.

Black elitism. I may not be White, but at least I am not them niggers. Racist Black elites thought

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

These newborns looked up with tender eyes to their ancient siblings of sexism, imperialism, ethnocentrism, and homophobia.

This is juvenile — his critique has nothing to do about capitalism whatsoever and is simply using it as a pejorative to denounce the power structures Interesting that he offers no definition of capitalism; it’s just a pejorative that he defines as a racist oppressor (one which enables him to make quite a lot of money from a rather free and yes competitive market). Rights of contract, commerce, and property have lifted far more lives out of poverty — wait, am I being assimilationist in suggesting that is a good thing? — than any religion, social movement, or government. And yet I throw the word capitalist out there, tying it to slavery, to imperialism, to genocide. That’s brilliant.

Some of these socialists and communists may not be familiar with their ideological guide’s writings on race.

Wow — to think that some adherents and apologists for a following that murdered tens of millions in the 20th century... What a shock! In interviews with Salon and The Guardian he criticizes the naive Americans for having a soft, friendly, false definition of Capitalism— and yet all he does is call it racist. No definition. Does he define commerce? The rise of the bourgeois tinkerer, shop owner, artisan, trader? No. Capitalism is an ugly, deformed conjoined twin that defouls and corrupts. So apparently I not only have to believe in everything he writes — or else I’m a racist — I have to be a jacobin socialist who believes property rights are a racist construct.

But Du Bois discussed it.

Yes, and he also praised Stalin on his death — https://www.digitalcommonwealth.org/search/commonwealth-oai:0r969j21w

In doing so, these conservative defenders are defining capitalism.

What is the author’s actual, articulated definition of capitalism? Or is he exploiting antiracism to score points for his Marxist beliefs? He spends a chapter criticizing conservatives (which I am not) for providing a (false, corrupted) definition of capitalism that just so conveniently allows him to say, “See? It’s this generic embodiment of racist, classist evil”. And it conveniently allows him to not define capitalism. According to the author, the world can only be saved by being both anti racist and crushing the “predatory” racist system of — wait for this devious system — human beings freely and without coercion building, creating, exchanging, cooperating, producing, consuming, investing and otherwise interacting cooperatively? If Americans are ignorant about the readily apparent evils of capitalism, I’d suggest he is ignorant about the the piles of bodies laying at the feet of Jacobite socialism and communism. In fact, he might have mentioned that at the same time W.E.B. duBois was bravely fighting for the proletariat, duBois was also apologizing for and memorializing Stalin. Given the author’s strident focus on examining one’s priors, I trust that future editions of this book will correct his oversight, or at least excuse mass murders, the Holodomir in Ukraine, class and ethnic purges, mass arrests and incarceration of “undesirables”, and more, all executed perfectly.

the freedom to undermine small businesses and cushion corporations;

Again, the author has no idea of capitalism— small businesses are women’s by who? The collective? At what point does a nice small business become a racist corporation?

The history of capitalism—of world warring, classing, slave trading, enslaving, colonizing, depressing wages, and dispossessing land and labor and resources and rights—bears out the conservative definition of capitalism.

See prior note. Where is his history of communism?

But if Warren succeeds, then

Back to the same thing — If you don’t agree with me you’re racist

they are disentangling capitalism from theft and racism and sexism and imperialism.

However, history does not affirm this definition of capitalism.

And what does history affirm for communism? Genocide, piles of skulls in the desert, starved peasants, prison camps, vast wastelands of pollution?

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 as the

So again where is his whimsical and ahistorical definition of communism? I love how he makes Clarence Thomas and others out to be the evil sellouts, while failing to mention anything about the dozens if not hundreds of vile, genocidal maniacs and their enablers

Capitalism is essentially racist; racism is essentially capitalist. They

I love my definition of capitalism, I am a capitalist, and I’m not gonna let him define me or what I believe