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KENDI’S RACIST INTRODUCTION
When Kendi was in High School, he participated in a Martin Luther King Jr. oratorical contest, representing Stonewall Jackson High School. As he prepared for the contest, he observed how tourists trek to Manassas National Battlefield Park to relive the glory of the Confederate victories at the Battles of Bull Run during the Civil War. It was there that General Thomas J. Jackson acquired his nickname, “Stonewall,” for his stubborn defense of the Confederacy. And, interestingly, northern Virginians kept the stonewall intact after all these years. Kendi couldn’t help but wonder, “Did anyone notice the irony that at this, my free Black life represented Stonewall Jackson High School?”
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. Kendi explained that he thought he was a subpar student and was bombarded by messages—from Black people, White people, the media—that told him that the reason was rooted in his race…which made him more discouraged and less motivated as a student…which only further reinforced for him the racist idea that Black people just weren’t very studious…which made him feel even more despair or indifference…and on it went.
Internalized racism is the real Black on Black crime. Kendi observed, “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.
When racist ideas resound, denials that those ideas are racist typically follow. When racist policies resound, denials that those policies are racist also follow. Denial is the heartbeat of racism, beating across ideologies, races, and nations.
How many of us would agree with this statement: “ ‘Racist’ isn’t a descriptive word. It’s a pejorative word. It is the equivalent of saying, ‘I don’t like you.’ ” These are actually the words of White supremacist Richard Spencer, who identifies as “not racist.”
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 racism 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 problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of problems in power and policies, as an antiracist. One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist. There is no in-between safe space of “not racist.”
The common idea of claiming “color blindness” is akin to the notion of being “not racist”—as with the “not racist,” the color-blind individual, by ostensibly failing to see race, fails to see racism and falls into racist passivity. The language of color blindness—like the language of “not racist”—is a mask to hide racism.
This is the basic struggle we’re all in—the struggle to be fully human and to see that others are fully human. After taking this grueling journey to the dirt road of antiracism, 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.
DEFINITIONS
RACIST: One who is supporting a racist policy through their actions or inaction or expressing a racist idea.
ANTIRACIST: One who is supporting an antiracist policy through their actions or expressing an antiracist idea.
Christianity is about struggle and liberation. Kendi’s parents 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.
Kendi notes, “I cannot disconnect my parents’ religious strivings to be Christian from my secular strivings to be an antiracist.” To be an antiracist is to set lucid definitions of racism/antiracism, racist/antiracist policies, racist/antiracist ideas, racist/antiracist people. To be a racist is to constantly redefine racist in a way that exonerates one’s changing policies, ideas, and personhood.
Racism is a marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities. Racial inequity is when two or more racial groups are not standing on approximately equal footing. A racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups. An antiracist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial equity between racial groups. Policy refers to 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 between racial groups.
“Racist policy” also cuts to the core of racism better than “racial discrimination,” another common phrase. “Racial discrimination” is an immediate and visible manifestation of an underlying racial policy.
As President Lyndon B. Johnson said in 1965, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”
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.”
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 argue that racist policies are the cause of racial inequities.
Racism is a powerful collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity and are substantiated by racist ideas. Antiracism is a powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to racial equity and are substantiated by antiracist ideas.
There may be no more consequential White privilege than life itself. White lives matter to the tune of 3.5 additional years over Black lives in the United States, which is just the most glaring of a host of health disparities, starting from infancy, where Black infants die at twice the rate of White infants. In the United States, African Americans are 25 percent more likely to die of cancer than Whites.
A racist is someone who is supporting a racist policy by their actions or inaction or expressing a racist idea. An antiracist is someone who is supporting an antiracist policy by their actions or expressing an antiracist idea.
DUELING CONSCIOUSNESS
On June 24, 1982, President Reagan declared war on drugs. “We must put drug abuse on the run through stronger law enforcement,” Reagan said in the Rose Garden. The stiffer sentencing policies for drug crimes—not a net increase in crime—caused the American prison population to quadruple between 1980 and 2000.
Nonviolent Black drug offenders remain in prisons for about the same length of time (58.7 months) as violent White criminals (61.7 months). In 2016, Black and Latinx people were still grossly overrepresented in the prison population at 56 percent, double their percentage of the U.S. adult population. White people were still grossly underrepresented in the prison population at 30 percent, about half their percentage of the U.S. adult population.
President Reagan’s “stronger law enforcement” sent more Black people into the clutches of violent cops, who killed twenty-two Black people for every White person in the early 1980s. Black youth were four times more likely to be unemployed in 1985 than in 1954. But few connected the increase in unemployment to the increase in violent crime. Americans have long been trained to see the deficiencies of people rather than policy.
Assimilationist ideas are racist ideas. Assimilationists can position any racial group as the superior standard that another racial group should be measuring themselves against, the benchmark they should be trying to reach. Assimilationists typically position White people as the superior standard. White people have their own dueling consciousness, between the segregationist and the assimilationist: the slave trader and the missionary, the proslavery exploiter and the antislavery civilizer, the eugenicist and the melting potter, the mass incarcerator and the mass developer, the Blue Lives Matter and the All Lives Matter, the not-racist nationalist and the not-racist American. Assimilationist ideas reduce people of color to the level of children needing instruction on how to act.
Despite the cold truth that America was founded “by white men for white men,” as segregationist Jefferson Davis said on the floor of the U.S. Senate in 1860, Black people have often expressed a desire to be American and have been encouraged in this by America’s undeniable history of antiracist progress, away from chattel slavery and Jim Crow.
History duels: the undeniable history of antiracist progress, the undeniable history of racist progress.
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.
POWER
RACE: A power construct of collected or merged difference that lives socially.
For all of its life-shaping power, 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. What people see in themselves and others has meaning and manifests itself in ideas and actions and policies, even if what they are seeing is an illusion. 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.
Some White people do not identify as White for the same reason they identify as not-racist: to avoid reckoning with the ways that Whiteness—even as a construction and mirage—has informed their notions of America and identity and offered them privilege, the primary one being the privilege of being inherently normal, standard, and legal.
Race creates new forms of power: the power to categorize and judge, elevate and downgrade, include and exclude. Race makers use that power to process distinct individuals, ethnicities, and nationalities into monolithic races. This cause and effect—a racist power creates racist policies out of raw self-interest; the racist policies necessitate racist ideas to justify them—lingers over the life of racism.
Kendi was taught that racist ideas cause racist policies. That ignorance and hate cause racist ideas. That the root problem of racism is ignorance and hate. But that gets the chain of events exactly wrong. The root problem 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 slave traders—has been behind racist policies.
BIOLOGY
BIOLOGICAL RACIST: One who is expressing the idea that the races are meaningfully different in their biology and that these differences create a hierarchy of value.
BIOLOGICAL ANTIRACIST: One who is expressing the idea that the races are meaningfully the same in their biology and there are no genetic racial differences.
Generalizing the behavior of racist White individuals to all White people is as perilous as generalizing the individual faults of people of color to entire races.
We often see and remember the race and not the individual. This is racist categorizing, this stuffing of our experiences with individuals into color-marked racial closets.
“Microaggression,” a term coined by eminent Harvard psychiatrist Chester Pierce in 1970, described the constant verbal and nonverbal abuse racist White people unleash on Black people wherever we go, day after day. A White woman grabs her purse when a Black person sits next to her. The seat next to a Black person stays empty on a crowded bus. A White woman calls the cops at the sight of Black people barbecuing in the park. In the last decade, the term has become popular in social-justice spaces through the defining work of psychologist Derald Wing Sue. He defines microaggressions as “brief, everyday exchanges that send denigrating messages to certain individuals because of their group membership.”
The term “microaggression” emerged in popularity during the so-called post-racial era that some people assumed we’d entered with the election of the first Black president. A persistent daily low hum of racist abuse is not minor. Kendi uses the term “abuse” because aggression is not as exacting a term. Abuse accurately describes the action and its effects on people: distress, anger, worry, depression, anxiety, pain, fatigue, and suicide. What other people call racial microaggressions Kendi calls racist abuse.
With racist teachers, misbehaving kids of color do not receive inquiry and empathy and legitimacy. Instead, they receive orders and punishments and “no excuses,” as if they are adults. The Black child is ill-treated like an adult, and the Black adult is ill-treated like a child.
Biological racists are segregationists. Biological racism rests on two ideas: that the races are meaningfully different in their biology and that these differences create a hierarchy of value.
When Noah awoke, he learned that Ham, the father of Canaan, had viewed him in all his nakedness. “May a curse be put on Canaan,” Noah raged. “May Canaan be the slave of Shem.” In 1578, English travel writer George Best provided an answer that, not coincidentally, justified expanding European enslavement of African people. God willed that Ham’s son and “all his posteritie after him should be so blacke and loathsome,” Best writes, “that it might remain a spectacle of disobedience to all the worlde.”
Race is a mirage but one that humanity has organized itself around in very real ways.
ETHNICITY
ETHNIC RACISM: A powerful collection of racist policies that lead to inequity between racialized ethnic groups and are substantiated by racist ideas about racialized ethnic groups.
ETHNIC ANTIRACISM: A powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to equity between racialized ethnic groups and are substantiated by antiracist ideas about racialized ethnic groups.
President Calvin Coolidge signed the Immigration Act of 1924. Of course, by then “American” included millions of Negro, Asian, Native, Middle Eastern, and Latinx peoples (who would, at least in the case of Mexican Americans, be forcibly repatriated to Mexico by the hundreds of thousands). But Coolidge and congressional supporters determined that only immigrants from northeastern Europe—Scandinavia, the British Isles, Germany—could keep America American, meaning White. The United States “was a mighty land settled by northern Europeans from the United Kingdom, the Norsemen, and the Saxon,” proclaimed Maine representative Ira Hersey, to applause, during debate over the Immigration Act of 1924. Nearly a century later, U.S. senator Jeff Sessions lamented the growth of the non-native-born population. “When the numbers reached about this high in 1924, the president and Congress changed the policy. And it slowed down significantly,” he told Breitbart’s Steve Bannon in 2015. “We then assimilated through to 1965 and created really the solid middle class of America with assimilated immigrants. And it was good for America.”
Across history, racist power has produced racist ideas about the racialized ethnic groups in its colonial sphere and ranked them—across the globe and within their own nations. We practice ethnic racism when we express a racist idea about an ethnic group or support a racist policy toward an ethnic group. Ethnic racism, like racism itself, points to group behavior, instead of policies, as the cause of disparities between groups. The face of ethnic racism bares itself in the form of a persistent question: “Where are you from?”
To be antiracist is to view national and transnational ethnic groups as equal in all their differences. To be antiracist is to challenge the racist policies that plague racialized ethnic groups across the world. To be antiracist is to view the inequities between all racialized ethnic groups as a problem of policy.
BODY
BODILY RACIST: One who is perceiving certain racialized bodies as more animal-like and violent than others.
BODILY ANTIRACIST: One who is humanizing, deracializing, and individualizing nonviolent and violent behavior.
“Blacks must understand and acknowledge the roots of White fear in America,” President Bill Clinton said in a speech on October 16, 1995, the same day as the Million Man March. He’d escaped the march and the Black men assembling practically on the White House lawn for the campus of the University of Texas. “There is a legitimate fear of the violence that is too prevalent in our urban areas,” he added. “By experience or at least what people see on the news at night, violence for those White people too often has a Black face.”
In 1631, Captain John Smith warned the first English colonizers of New England that the Black body was as devilish as any people in the world. Boston pastor Cotton Mather preached compliance to slavery in 1696: Do not “make yourself infinitely Blacker than you are already.”
Seceding Texas legislators in 1861 complained of not receiving more federal “appropriations for protecting…against ruthless savages.” U.S. senator Benjamin Tillman told his colleagues in 1903, “The poor African has become a fiend, a wild beast, seeking whom he may devour.” Two leading criminologists posited in 1967 that the “large…criminal display of the violence among minority groups such as Negroes” stems from their “subculture-of-violence.” Manhattan Institute fellow Heather MacDonald wrote, “The core criminal-justice population is the black underclass” in The War on Cops in 2016.
Americans today see the Black body as larger, more threatening, more potentially harmful, and more likely to require force to control than a similarly sized White body, according to researchers.
Black people comprise 13 percent of the U.S. population. And yet, in 2015, Black bodies accounted for at least 26 percent of those killed by police, declining slightly to 24 percent in 2016, 22 percent in 2017, and 21 percent in 2018, according to The Washington Post. Unarmed Black bodies—which apparently look armed to fearful officers—are about twice as likely to be killed as unarmed White bodies.
Around Thanksgiving in 1995, Princeton political scientist John J. DiIulio Jr. warned of the “coming of the super-predators,” especially young bodies like Kendi’s in “Black inner-city neighborhoods.”
“Most inner-city children grow up surrounded by teenagers and adults who are themselves deviant, delinquent or criminal,” DiIulio wrote. Watch out. “A new generation of street criminals is upon us—the youngest, biggest and baddest generation any society has ever known,” he warned.
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.
Kendi explains, “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.”
Black writers who grew up in “inner city” Black neighborhoods too often recall the violence experienced more than the nonviolence; and they become exactly like the nightly local-news shows—if it bleeds, it leads—and stories center on violent Black bodies instead of the overwhelming majority of nonviolent Black bodies.
A study that used National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data from 1976 to 1989 found that young Black males engaged in more violent crime than young White males. Researchers have found a much stronger and clearer correlation between violent-crime levels and unemployment levels than between violent crime and race.
Black upper-income and middle-income neighborhoods tend to have less violent crime than Black low-income neighborhoods—as is the case in non-Black communities. But that does not mean low-income Black people are more violent than high-income Black people. That means low-income neighborhoods struggle with unemployment and poverty—and their typical byproduct, violent crime.
For decades, there have been three main strategies in reducing violent crime in Black neighborhoods. Segregationists who consider Black neighborhoods to be war zones have called for tough policing and the mass incarceration of super-predators. Assimilationists say these super-predators need tough laws and tough love from mentors and fathers to civilize them back to nonviolence. Antiracists say Black people, like all people, 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 mid-1990s.
CULTURE
CULTURAL RACIST: One who is creating a cultural standard and imposing a cultural hierarchy among racial groups.
CULTURAL ANTIRACIST: One who is rejecting cultural standards and equalizing cultural differences among racial groups.
When the reaction to the Nazi Holocaust marginalized biological racism, cultural racism stepped into its place. “In practically all its divergences,” African American culture “is a distorted development, or a pathological condition, of the general American culture,” Gunnar Myrdal wrote in An American Dilemma, his 1944 landmark treatise on race relations, which has been called the “bible” of the civil-rights movement. 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.
To be antiracist is to reject cultural standards and level cultural difference. As President Theodore Roosevelt said in 1905, the goal should be to assimilate “the backward race…so it may enter into the possession of true freedom, while the forward race is enabled to preserve unharmed the high civilization wrought out by its forefathers.”
Jason Riley, a Wall Street Journal columnist, wrote, “Black culture today not only condones delinquency and thuggery but celebrates it to the point where black youths have adopted jail fashion in the form of baggy, low-slung pants and oversize T-shirts.”
Culturally racist scholars have assumed that since African Americans exhibit outward physical manifestations of European culture, “North American negroes…in culture and language” are “essentially European,” to quote anthropologist Franz Boas in 1911.
In the final analysis, “we are not Africans,” Bill Cosby told the NAACP in 2004.
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 racism.
BEHAVIOR
BEHAVIORAL RACIST: One who is making individuals responsible for the perceived behavior of racial groups and making racial groups responsible for the behavior of individuals.
BEHAVIORAL ANTIRACIST: One who is making racial group behavior fictional and individual behavior real.
Black people needed to stop playing “race cards,” the phrase Peter Collier and David Horowitz used to brand “talk of race and racism” in 1997. The issue was personal irresponsibility.
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 people.
Progressive Americans—the ones who self-identified as “not racist”—had abandoned biological racism by the mid-1990s. They had gone further: Mostly they’d abandoned ethnic racism, bodily racism, and cultural racism. But they were still sold on behavioral racism. And they carried its torch unwaveringly, right up to the present.
“America’s Black community…has turned America’s major cities into slums because of laziness, drug use, and sexual promiscuity,” fancied Reverend Jamie Johnson, director of a faith-based center in Trump’s Department of Homeland Security, after the election. “Although black civil rights leaders like to point to a supposedly racist criminal justice system to explain why our prisons house so many black men, it’s been obvious for decades that the real culprit is black behavior,” argued Jason Riley in 2016.
Just as race doesn’t exist biologically, race doesn’t exist behaviorally.
In the states that “retained the ancient relation” between White mastery and Black slavery, Blacks “had improved greatly in every respect—in numbers, comfort, intelligence, and morals,” Secretary of State John C. Calhoun explained to a British critic in 1844.
In contrast, abolitionists, including Benjamin Rush in 1773, argued, “All the vices which are charged upon the Negroes in the southern colonies and the West-Indies, such as Idleness, Treachery, Theft, and the like, are the genuine offspring of slavery.”
In his address to the founding meeting of Alexander Crummell’s American Negro Academy in 1897, W.E.B. DuBois 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.”
Both positions led Americans toward behavioral racism: Black behavior demoralized by freedom—or freed Black behavior demoralized by slavery.
Psychologist Joy DeGruy in her 2005 book, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome claimed “many, many” African Americans suffer from PTSS. She built this theory on anecdotal evidence and modeled it on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Black individuals have, of course, suffered trauma from slavery and ongoing oppression.
The so-called Nation’s Report Card told Americans the same story. It first reported the math scores of eighth- and fourth-graders in 1990. The racial “achievement gap” in reading between White and Black fourth-graders also narrowed between 1990 and 2017 but widened between White and Black twelfth-graders. In 2015, Blacks had the lowest mean SAT scores of any racial group.
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.
To believe in a racial hierarchy is to believe in a racist idea. The idea of an achievement gap between the races—with Whites and Asians at the top and Blacks and Latinx at the bottom—creates a racial hierarchy, with its implication that the racial gap in test scores means something is wrong with the Black and Latinx test takers and not the tests. From the beginning, the tests, not the people, have always been the racial problem.
Harvard psychologist Richard Herrnstein and political scientist Charles Murray in The Bell Curve. The racist idea of an achievement gap lived on into the new millennium through George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act and Obama’s Race to the Top and Common Core—initiatives that further enlarged the role of standardized testing in determining the success and failure of students and the schools they attended.
To be antiracist is to think nothing is behaviorally wrong or right—inferior or superior—with any of the racial groups.
COLOR
COLORISM: A powerful collection of racist policies that lead to inequities between Light people and Dark people, supported by racist ideas about Light and Dark people.
COLOR ANTIRACISM: A powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to equity between Light people and Dark people, supported by antiracist ideas about Light and Dark people.
This post-racial beauty ideal is Lightness: the race of lighter skin and eyes, straighter hair, thinner noses, and semi-thick lips and buttocks, perceived as biracial or racially ambiguous.
Colorism is a collection of racist policies that cause inequities between Light people and Dark people, and these inequities are substantiated by racist ideas about Light and Dark people.
To be an antiracist is to focus on color lines as much as racial lines, knowing that color lines are especially harmful for Dark people. When the gains of a multicolored race disproportionately flow to Light people and the losses disproportionately flow to Dark people, inequities between the races mirror inequities within the races.
As skin tone lightens, levels of self-esteem among Black women rise, especially among low- and middle-income Black women. Dark African Americans receive the harshest prison sentences and more time behind bars. Dark female students are nearly twice as likely to be suspended as White female students, while researchers found no disparity between Light and White female students.
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.
Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the so-called “father” of Western art history, demanded in History of the Art of Antiquity in 1764. “A beautiful body will be all the more beautiful the whiter it is.”
The U.S. father of colorism is Samuel Stanhope Smith, a longtime theologian who taught at and then presided over Princeton University in early America. In early 1787, the young Princeton professor gave the annual oration to the new nation’s most distinguished scholarly group, the American Philosophical Society.
When emancipation in 1865 thrust all Black people into the land of freedom, White communities built higher walls of segregation to keep Black people out. To maintain Light privilege, the segregated Light people further segregated their Dark brothers and sisters, preserving prewar racial disparities between Light and Dark people.
By the end of the nineteenth century, dozens of cities had “Blue Vein” societies, which barred Dark people “not white enough to show blue veins,” as Charles Chesnutt put it in an 1898 short story.
“American Negroes recognize no color line in or out of the race, and they will in the end punish the man who attempts to establish it,” W.E.B. DuBois declared in The Crisis.
Today, skin lighteners are used by 70 percent of women in Nigeria; 35 percent in South Africa; 59 percent in Togo; and 40 percent in China, Malaysia, the Philippines, and South Korea.
WHITE
ANTI-WHITE RACIST: One who is classifying people of European descent as biologically, culturally, or behaviorally inferior or conflating the entire race of White people with racist power.
“Courage is not the absence of fear, but the strength to do what is right in the face of it,” as the anonymous philosopher tells us.
Months before being assassinated, Malcolm X faced a fact many admirers of Malcolm X still refuse to face: Black people can be racist toward White people.
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. We must discern the difference between racist power (racist policymakers) and White people.
When Congress passed the (first) Civil Rights Act of 1866, it made Black people citizens of the United States, stipulated their civil rights, and stated that state law could not “deprive a person of any of these rights on the basis of race.” President Andrew Johnson reframed this antiracist bill as a “bill made to operate in favor of the colored against the white race.” Racist Americans a century later framed supporters of affirmative action as “hard-core racists of reverse discrimination,” to quote former U.S. solicitor general Robert Bork in The Wall Street Journal in 1978.
When Alicia Garza typed “Black Lives Matter” on Facebook in 2013 and when that love letter crested into a movement in 2015, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani called the movement “inherently racist.”
BLACK
POWERLESS DEFENSE: The illusory, concealing, disempowering, and racist idea that Black people can’t be racist because Black people don’t have power.
In 2003, as Kendi sat in a Black editor’s office, 53 percent of Black people were surveyed as saying that something other than racism mostly explained why Black people had worse jobs, income, and housing than Whites, up from 48 percent a decade earlier. Only 40 percent of Black respondents described racism as the source of these inequities in 2003. By 2013, in the middle of Obama’s presidency, only 37 percent of Black people were pointing to “mostly racism” as the cause of racial inequities. A whopping 60 percent of Black people had joined with the 83 percent of White people that year who found explanations other than racism to explain persisting racial inequities. The internalizing of racist ideas was likely the reason.
Following the 1960s, Black voices critical of White racism defended themselves from these charges by saying, “Black people can’t be racist, because Black people don’t have power.”
Every single person actually has the power to protest racist and antiracist policies, to advance them, or, in some small way, to stall them.
If we accept the idea that we have no power, we are falling under the sort of mind control that will, in fact, rob us of any power to resist. As Black History Month father Carter G. Woodson once wrote: “When you control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his ‘proper place’ and will stay in it.”
Slaveowners welcomed ministers preaching the gospel of eternal Black enslavement, derived from the reading of the Bible where all Black people were the cursed descendants of Ham.
“Black on Black crime has reached a critical level that threatens our existence as a people,” wrote Ebony publisher John H. Johnson, in a 1979 special issue on the topic. The Black on Black crime of internalized racism had indeed reached a critical level—this new Black-abetted focus on the crisis of “Black crime” helped feed the growth of the movement toward mass incarceration that would wreck a generation.
Under Clarence Thomas’s directorship from 1980 to 1986, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission doubled the number of discrimination cases it dismissed as “no cause.”
CLASS
CLASS RACIST: One who is racializing the classes, supporting policies of racial capitalism against those race-classes, and justifying them by racist ideas about those race-classes.
ANTIRACIST ANTICAPITALIST: One who is opposing racial capitalism.
“The dark ghetto is institutionalized pathology; it is chronic, self-perpetuating pathology; and it is the futile attempt by those with power to confine that pathology so as to prevent the spread of its contagion to the ‘larger community,’ ” wrote psychologist Kenneth Clark in his 1965 book, Dark Ghetto.
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 deploying class racism.
When a policy exploits poor people, it is an elitist policy. When a policy exploits Black people, it is a racist policy. Class racism is as ripe among White Americans—who castigate poor Whites as “White trash”—as it is in Black America, where racist Blacks degrade poor Blacks as “them niggers” who live in the ghetto.
White racists still drag out the culture of poverty. “We have got this tailspin of culture in our inner cities in particular of men not working, and just generations of men not even thinking about working, and not learning the value and the culture of work,” Wisconsin representative Paul Ryan said in 2015. “So there’s a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.”
Obama made a similar case during his campaign speech on race in 2008. “For all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it—those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations—those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future.” 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.
In 1450 with Portugal (and Spain) sailing into the unknown Atlantic, Prince Henry’s Portugal birthed conjoined twins—capitalism and racism—when it initiated the transatlantic slave trade of African people.
In the twenty-first century, persisting racial inequities in poverty, unemployment, and wealth show the lifework of the conjoined twins. The Black poverty rate in 2017 stood at 20 percent, nearly triple the White poverty rate.
By 2053, the median wealth of Black households is expected to redline at $0, and Latinx households will redline two decades later.
The global gap between the richest (and Whitest) regions of the world and the poorest (and Blackest) regions of the world has tripled in size since the 1960s—at the same time as the global non-White middle class has grown. Upward mobility is greater for White people, and downward mobility is greater for Black people.
Liberals who are “capitalist to the bone,” as U.S. senator Elizabeth Warren identifies herself, present a different definition of capitalism. “I believe in markets and the benefits they can produce when they work,” Warren said when asked what that identity meant to her. “I love the competition that comes with a market that has decent rules….The problem is when the rules are not enforced, when the markets are not level playing fields, all that wealth is scraped in one direction,” leading to deception and theft.
To love capitalism is to end up loving racism. To love racism is to end up loving capitalism. The conjoined twins are two sides of the same destructive body.
In the bestselling Beyond the Melting Pot, written with Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1963, sociologist Nathan Glazer argued that, unlike the other middle classes, “the Negro middle class contributes very little…to the solution of Negro social programs.” Without any supporting data, Glazer positioned the Black bourgeoisie as inferior, in the scale of social responsibility, to other bourgeoisies.
SPACE
SPACE RACISM: A powerful collection of racist policies that lead to resource inequity between racialized spaces or the elimination of certain racialized spaces, which are substantiated by racist ideas about racialized spaces.
SPACE ANTIRACISM: A powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to racial equity between integrated and protected racialized spaces, which are substantiated by antiracist ideas about racialized spaces.
In 1986, during the violent crack epidemic, 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 racism that deracializes and normalizes and elevates 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 poor 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 third 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.
“Even the best black colleges and universities do not approach the standards of quality of respectable institutions,” as economist Thomas Sowell wrote in 1974. Sowell’s “description remains accurate,” Jason Riley wrote in The Wall Street Journal on September 28, 2010. Selective HBCUs lag behind “decent state schools like the University of Texas at Austin, never mind a Stanford or Yale.” The endowment of the richest HBCU, Howard, was five times less than UT Austin’s endowment in 2016, never mind being thirty-six times less than the endowment of a Stanford or Yale. The racial wealth gap produces a giving gap.
Resources define a space, resources the conjoined twins divvy up.
The history of space racism is long. It is an American history that begins with Thomas Jefferson’s solution to the “Negro problem.” Civilize and emancipate the Negro. Send the Negro to Africa to “carry back to the country of their origin the seeds of civilization,” as Jefferson proposed in a letter in 1811.
Martin Luther King Jr. also privately disagreed. “I favor integration on buses and in all areas of public accommodation and travel… I think integration in our public schools is different,” King told two Black teachers in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1959. “White people view black people as inferior… People with such a low view of the black race cannot be given free rein and put in charge of the intellectual care and development of our boys and girls.” King had a nightmare that came to pass. Non-White students fill most of the seats in today’s public school classrooms but are taught by an 80 percent White teaching force, which often has, however unconsciously, lower expectations for non-White students. When Black and White teachers look at the same Black student, White teachers are about 40 percent less likely to believe the student will finish high school. Low-income Black students who have at least one Black teacher in elementary school are 29 percent less likely to drop out of school, 39 percent less likely among very low-income Black boys.
Integration turned into “a one-way street,” a young Chicago lawyer observed in 1995. “The minority assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around,” Barack Obama wrote. “Only white culture could be neutral and objective. Only white culture could be nonracial.” Integration (into Whiteness) became racial progress.
Americans have seen the logical conclusion of segregationist strategy, from slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration and border walls. The logical conclusion of antiracist strategy is open and equal access to all public accommodations, open access to all integrated White spaces. To be an antiracist is to champion resource equity by challenging the racist policies that produce resource inequity.
GENDER
GENDER RACISM: A powerful collection of racist policies that lead to inequity between race-genders and are substantiated by racist ideas about race-genders.
GENDER ANTIRACISM: A powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to equity between race-genders and are substantiated by antiracist ideas about race-genders.
Racism had “clearly” and “largely focused” on the Black male, sociologist Charles Herbert Stember argued in his 1976 book, Sexual Racism: The Emotional Barrier to an Integrated Society. An America of integrated (White) spaces had not been achieved because at racism’s core was the “sexual rejection of the racial minority, the conscious attempt on the part of the majority to prevent interracial cohabitation,” he wrote. The White man’s sexual jealousy of the Black man was the key.
In time for the midterm elections in 1994, political scientist Charles Murray made sure Americans knew the percentage of Black children born into single-parent households “has now reached 68 percent.” Murray blamed the “welfare system.”
Afro-Dutch scholar Philomena Essed published her reflections on in-depth interviews she’d conducted with Black women in the United States and the Netherlands in Understanding Everyday Racism. “In discussing the experiences of Black women, is it sexism or is it racism?” Essed asked. “These two concepts narrowly intertwine and combine under certain conditions into one, hybrid phenomenon. Therefore, it is useful to speak of gendered racism.”
Gender racism was behind the growing number of involuntary sterilizations of Black women by eugenicist physicians—two hundred thousand cases in 1970, rising to seven hundred thousand in 1980.
After the imprisonment of Black men dropped 24 percent between 2000 and 2015, Black men were still nearly six times more likely than White men, twenty-five times more likely than Black women, and fifty times more likely than White women to be incarcerated. Black men raised in the top 1 percent by millionaires are as likely to be incarcerated as White men raised in households earning $36,000.
“Contemporary feminist and antiracist discourses have failed to consider intersectional identities such as women of color,” Kimberlé Crenshaw wrote in 1991.
FAILURE
ACTIVIST: One who has a record of power or policy change.
Incorrect conceptions of race as a social construct (as opposed to a power construct), of racial history as a singular march of racial progress (as opposed to a duel of antiracist and racist progress), of the race problem as rooted in ignorance and hate (as opposed to powerful self-interest)—all come together to produce solutions bound to fail. Terms and sayings like “I’m not racist” and “race neutral” and “post-racial” and “color-blind” and “only one race, the human race” and “only racists speak about race” and “Black people can’t be racist” and “White people are evil” are bound to fail in identifying and eliminating racist power and policy.
Challenging the conjoined twins separately is bound to fail to address economic-racial inequity.
“The further decrease of prejudice, and the amelioration of the condition of thousands of our brethren who are yet in bondage, greatly depend on our conduct,” Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm wrote on March 16, 1827, in one of the opening editorials of Freedom’s Journal, the first African American newspaper. Kendi reflected, “I grew up on this same failed strategy more than one hundred fifty years later.”
The judges strap the entire Black race on the Black body’s back, shove the burdened Black body into White spaces, order the burdened Black body to always act in an upstanding manner to persuade away White racism, and punish poor Black conduct with sentences of shame for reinforcing racism, for bringing the race down.
“If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do that,” President Abraham Lincoln wrote on August 20, 1862. “What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union.” On January 1, 1863, Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation as a “necessary war measure.”
The racism problem lay in the “astonishing ignorance” of White Americans, Myrdal advised in An American Dilemma in 1944. “There is no doubt, in the writer’s opinion, that a great majority of white people in America would be prepared to give the Negro a substantially better deal if they knew the facts.”
Popular history tells us that a great majority of White Americans did give the Negro a better deal—the desegregation rulings, Civil Rights Act (1964), and Voting Rights Act (1965)—when they learned the facts.
In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. admitted, “We’ve had it wrong and mixed up in our country, and this has led Negro Americans in the past to seek their goals through love and moral suasion devoid of power.”
The original problem of racism has not been solved by suasion. Knowledge is only power if knowledge is put to the struggle for power. Changing minds is not a movement. Critiquing racism is not activism. Changing minds is not activism. An activist produces power and policy change, not mental change. If a person has no record of power or policy change, then that person is not an activist.
Fear is kind of like race—a mirage. “Fear is not real. It is a product of our imagination,” as a Will Smith character tells his son in one of my favorite movies, After Earth. “Do not misunderstand me, danger is very real, but fear is a choice.”
As we critique the privilege and inaction of racist power, we show our privilege and inaction by critiquing every effective strategy, ultimately justifying our inaction on the comfortable seat of privilege. What if we assessed the methods and leaders and organizations by their results of policy change and equity?
SUCCESS
The story of our generation will be based on what we are willing to do. Are we willing to endure the grueling fight against racist power and policy? Are we willing to transform the antiracist power we gather within us to antiracist power in our society?
When both Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders spoke of “institutional racism” on the presidential campaign trail in 2016, when the activists who demonstrated at their events spoke of “institutional racism,” they were using, whether they realized it or not, a formulation coined in 1967 by Black Power activist Kwame Toure and political scientist Charles Hamilton in Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. “Racism is both overt and covert,” Toure and Hamilton explained. “It takes two, closely related forms: individual whites acting against individual blacks, and acts by the total white community against the black community. We call these individual racism and institutional racism. The system’s acts are covert, just as the racist ideas of the people are implicit.
A similar bond exists between implicit bias and post-racialism. They bond on the idea that racist ideas are buried in the mind. Because they are implicit and unconscious, implicit bias says. Because they are dead, post-racialism says.
The term “institutionally racist policies” is more concrete than “institutional racism.” The term “racist policies” is more concrete than “institutionally racist policies,” since “institutional” and “policies” are redundant: Policies are institutional.
SURVIVAL
The history of racist ideas is the history of powerful policymakers erecting racist policies out of self-interest, then producing racist ideas to defend and rationalize the inequitable effects of their policies, while everyday people consume those racist ideas, which in turn sparks ignorance and hate. Treating ignorance and hate and expecting racism to shrink suddenly seemed like treating a cancer patient’s symptoms and expecting the tumors to shrink.
Kendi’s book Stamped from the Beginning came out in 2016, and he took this message on the road from the University of Florida. He talked about racist policies leading to racist ideas, not the other way around, as we have commonly thought. He talked about eliminating racist policies if we ever hope to eliminate racist ideas.
In the summer of 2017, Kendi moved to American University in the nation’s capital to found and direct the Antiracist Research and Policy Center.
Our world is suffering from metastatic cancer. Stage 4. Racism has spread to nearly every part of the body politic, intersecting with bigotry of all kinds, justifying all kinds of inequities by victim blaming; heightening exploitation and misplaced hate; spurring mass shootings, arms races, and demagogues who polarize nations; shutting down essential organs of democracy; and threatening the life of human society with nuclear war and climate change. In the United States, the metastatic cancer has been spreading, contracting, and threatening to kill the American body as it nearly did before its birth, as it nearly did during its Civil War.
Kendi faced cancer himself. As he explains, “I sat in the waiting rooms, between medical meetings, tests, and procedures, writing an essay arguing that the heartbeat of racism is denial, the heartbeat of antiracism is confession. It appeared in The New York Times on Sunday, January 14, 2018, three days after my diagnosis. But my writing on the denial of racism did not stop me from denying the severity of my cancer. I could not confess I was likely to die. I have cancer. The most serious stage. Cancer is likely to kill me. I can survive cancer against all odds. My society has racism. The most serious stage. Racism is likely to kill my society. My society can survive racism against all odds.”
Pain is usually essential to healing. When it comes to healing America of racism, we want to heal America without pain, but without pain, there is no progress.
Kendi writes, “We can survive metastatic racism. Forgive me. I cannot separate the two, and no longer try. What if humanity connected the two? What if we treated racism in the way we treat cancer?”
But before we can treat, we must believe. Believe all is not lost for you and me and our society. Believe in the possibility that we can strive to be antiracist from this day forward.
Race and racism are power constructs of the modern world. For roughly two hundred thousand years, before race and racism were constructed in the fifteenth century, humans saw color but did not group the colors into continental races, did not commonly attach negative and positive characteristics to those colors and rank the races to justify racial inequity, to reinforce racist power and policy. Racism is not even six hundred years old. It’s a cancer that we’ve caught early. But racism is one of the fastest-spreading and most fatal cancers humanity has ever known.
Once we lose hope, we are guaranteed to lose. But if we ignore the odds and fight to create an antiracist world, then we give humanity a chance to one day survive, a chance to live in communion, a chance to be forever free.