Ibram X. Kendi

As he recounts in How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi was born and raised in Queens, New York. After feeling ostracized in Christian private schools for many years, he attended John Bowne High School in Queens before moving to Virginia with his family, where he graduated from Stonewall Jackson High School (now Unity Reed High School). Although he was an average student and mostly cared about basketball during high school, Kendi went on to study African American Studies and Magazine Production at Florida A&M University, then earn his PhD in African American Studies from Temple University in 2010. He taught in the State University of New York system for seven years before taking appointments at Brown University and the University of Florida. In 2016, at age 34, Kendi became the youngest winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction for his second book, Stamped from the Beginning. However, as he explains in How to Be an Antiracist, while writing Stamped from the Beginning Kendi realized that his fundamental assumptions about the nature of racist ideas were wrong: racist ideas do not cause people to support racist policies; rather, people adopt racist ideas in order to defend racist policies that they choose for self-interested reasons. This realization led him to begin working on policy issues, including by founding the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University, where he taught from 2017–2020. But in early 2018, he was diagnosed with late-stage colon cancer and given only a 12% chance of survival. Miraculously, he beat the cancer, and in How to Be an Antiracist he uses this experience—as well as his wife’s, mother’s, and father’s respective battles with cancer—as a metaphor for the American battle against racism. Kendi became a household name in the United States with the publication of How to Be an Antiracist in 2019; the book became a #1 New York Times Bestseller in 2020, during the nationwide wave of antiracist protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police. As of mid-2020, Kendi is moving to Boston University, where he is establishing the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research and planning to spend 2020–2021 as a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University.