Ibram X. Kendi’s goal is not merely to educate people or help them measure how antiracist they are: rather, it’s to build a racially equitable society. Although education and personal change are important steps along the way to political change, the latter is rooted in governmental and institutional policies, not merely ideas. In fact, Kendi argues that anyone who elevates ideas above policy change is not really an activist at all. While education and reflection can help people unlearn racism, Kendi explicitly criticizes people who focus primarily on righteously debating others, judging people by their beliefs, or maintaining a sense of moral purity. He thinks that true antiracists must focus on bringing people into an inclusive, diverse activist movement. So while Kendi believes that antiracist ideas can be a means to personal transformation, he also concludes that such changes can only lead to societal transformation when combined with policy change.
Kendi uses his own experiences as a model for how readers can become antiracists. This requires learning about history, reflecting on their existing beliefs, and challenging their assumptions about race. Kendi opens the book with what he calls a “Racist Introduction.” He remembers giving a speech full of racist tropes and stereotypes about young Black people—like himself—at an oratorical contest named after Martin Luther King Jr. He explains that many of these racist ideas were simply part of the common sense he learned growing up. By emphasizing that even he himself, an expert on antiracism, used to be a racist, Kendi makes it clear that anyone can overcome their racism and join the movement for an antiracist society. For him, this process required gradually peeling back the layers of racism that affected his thinking. For instance, he had to abandon the fiction that it’s possible to be “not racist” before he could recognize that many of his own ideas and political beliefs were racist, even though he didn’t intend them to be. Through understanding the broader history of such racist ideas and policies, he realized that his upbringing conditioned him to uncritically accept them. This shows that, while it’s a long and gradual process, people have to recognize and unlearn their racist ideas if they want to help build a more racially just and equitable world.
Over his years of reflection, however, Kendi actually realized that personal transformation isn’t enough to create widespread social change. Rather, because racial inequity is the result of racist policy, antiracists have to build political power and implement antiracist policies to truly create equity. Kendi realized this while writing his previous book Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. By studying racist ideas, he realized that they do not actually create racial inequities. When antiracist educators disprove existing racist ideas, racist policies do not fall: rather, they stay around while people in power rush to justify them with new racist ideas. Accordingly, Kendi’s life plan—to become a professor and educate away people’s ignorance about racism—suddenly looked impossible. He realized that he needed to research and change policy if he wanted to do anything about racism.
Kendi concludes that antiracists can only effectively achieve their goals by focusing on policy, not ideas. He does so by examining his own failures as a college activist. He remembers convening a Black Student Union meeting in graduate school in order to try to help the Jena 6, a group of young Black men unfairly sentenced to long criminal sentences for retaliating against a racist threat. Kendi was fiery and dogmatic, but the other students were wary of his plan to build a national movement and send a convoy of cars to Washington. He responded by attacking their intentions, which ended up undermining his entire strategy. This showed him that activists need to be patient and open-minded—they should focus on building an inclusive movement and persuading others, rather than showing off their own intelligence and loyalty to the cause. After this meeting, Kendi learned about the difference between a demonstration and a protest. The Black Student Union put on a demonstration in which the students marched around campus and raised awareness but did not translate this into any political demand. In contrast, a protest is a long-term campaign designed to build power and create policy change. Those in power do not change policies unless doing so benefits them, so protest requires people to make inaction costlier than social change. This often requires protesters to put themselves on the line and risk ostracism, injury, or imprisonment. Protestors have to sacrifice themselves to save others—or, alternatively, sacrifice their short-term self-interest in order to invest in the long-term goal of building an antiracist society. This means that engaging in protest rather than demonstration requires examining one’s own political self-interest and recognizing that one may have to make deep sacrifices for the sake of justice.
So while personal and social transformation are both important processes that parallel each other, Kendi argues that personal change is only valuable insofar as it leads to broader societal change. Of course, every individual makes the world a slightly better place when they become an antiracist, but nobody becomes an activist simply by talking the talk. Accordingly, Kendi asks his readers to walk the walk, if they’re genuinely committed to antiracism: to join protest movements, hold their peers accountable, and leverage whatever power they do have to fight for racial equity in their schools, workplaces, and communities.
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Activism and Social Transformation Quotes in How to Be an Antiracist
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.
Definitions anchor us in principles. This is not a light point: If we don't do the basic work of defining the kind of people we want to be in language that is stable and consistent, we can't work toward stable, consistent goals. Some of my most consequential steps toward being an antiracist have been the moments when I arrived at basic definitions. 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.
“Racist” and “antiracist” are like peelable name tags that are placed and replaced based on what someone is doing or not doing, supporting or expressing in each moment. These are not permanent tattoos. No one becomes a racist or antiracist. We can only strive to be one or the other. We can unknowingly strive to be a racist. We can knowingly strive to be an antiracist. Like fighting an addiction, being an antiracist requires persistent self-awareness, constant self-criticism, and regular self-examination.
History duels: the undeniable history of antiracist progress, the undeniable history of racist progress. Before and after the Civil War, before and after civil rights, before and after the first Black presidency, the White consciousness duels. The White body defines the American body. The White body segregates the Black body from the American body. The White body instructs the Black body to assimilate into the American body. The White body rejects the Black body assimilating into the American body—and history and consciousness duel anew.
I do not pity my seven-year-old self for identifying racially as Black. I still identify as Black. 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. I am among those who have been degraded by racist ideas, suffered under racist policies, and who have nevertheless endured and built movements and cultures to resist or at least persist through this madness.
Terminating racial categories is potentially the last, not the first, step in the antiracist struggle. […] To be antiracist is to also recognize the living, breathing reality of this racial mirage, which makes our skin colors more meaningful than our individuality. To be antiracist is to focus on ending the racism that shapes the mirages, not to ignore the mirages that shape people’s lives.
How can I get upset at immigrants from Africa and South America for looking down on African Americans when African Americans have historically looked down on immigrants from Africa and South America? How can I critique their ethnic racism and ignore my ethnic racism? That is the central double standard in ethnic racism: loving one’s position on the ladder above other ethnic groups and hating one's position below that of other ethnic groups. It is angrily trashing the racist ideas about one's own group but happily consuming the racist ideas about other ethnic groups. It is failing to recognize that racist ideas we consume about others came from the same restaurant and the same cook who used the same ingredients to make different degrading dishes for us all.
To be antiracist is to see all cultures in all their differences as on the same level, as equals. When we see cultural difference, we are seeing cultural difference—nothing more, nothing less.
To be an antiracist is to recognize there is no such thing as racial behavior. To be an antiracist is to recognize there is no such thing as Black behavior, let alone irresponsible Black behavior. Black behavior is as fictitious as Black genes. There is no “Black gene.” No one has ever scientifically established a single “Black behavioral trait.” No evidence has ever been produced, for instance, to prove that Black people are louder, angrier, nicer, funnier, lazier, less punctual, more immoral, religious, or dependent; that Asians are more subservient; that Whites are greedier. All we have are stories of individual behavior. But individual stories are only proof of the behavior of individuals. Just as race doesn’t exist biologically, race doesn’t exist behaviorally.
Whenever someone classifies people of European descent as biologically, culturally, or behaviorally inferior, whenever someone says there is something wrong with White people as a group, someone is articulating a racist idea.
The only thing wrong with 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. 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.
Racist ideas are constantly produced to cage the power of people to resist. Racist ideas make Black people believe White people have all the power, elevating them to gods. And so Black segregationists lash out at these all-powerful gods as fallen devils, as I did in college, while Black assimilationists worship their all-powerful White angels, strive to become them, to curry their favor, reproducing their racist ideas and defending their racist policies.
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. 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 White-supremacist idea that calling something racist is the primary form of racism. Popular definitions of capitalism, like popular racist ideas, do not live in historical or material reality. Capitalism is essentially racist; racism is essentially capitalist. They were birthed together from the same unnatural causes, and they shall one day die together from unnatural causes. Or racial capitalism will live into another epoch of theft and rapacious inequity, especially if activists naïvely fight the conjoined twins independently, as if they are not the same.
The logical conclusion of antiracist strategy is open and equal access to all public accommodations, open access to all integrated White spaces, integrated Middle Eastern spaces, integrated Black spaces, integrated Latinx spaces, integrated Native spaces, and integrated Asian spaces that are as equally resourced as they are culturally different. All these spaces adjoin civic spaces of political and economic and cultural power, from a House of Representatives to a school board to a newspaper editorial board where no race predominates, where shared antiracist power predominates. This is diversity, something integrationists value only in name.
I gobbled up Audre Lorde, E. Patrick Johnson, bell hooks, Joan Morgan, Dwight McBride, Patricia Hill Collins, and Kimberlé Crenshaw like my life depended on it. My life did depend on it. I wanted to overcome my gender racism, my queer racism. But I had to be willing to do for Black women and queer Blacks what I had been doing for Black men and Black heterosexuals, which meant first of all learning more—and then defending them like my heroes had.
To understand why racism lives is to understand the history of antiracist failure—why people have failed to create antiracist societies. To understand the racial history of failure is to understand failed solutions and strategies. To understand failed solutions and strategies is to understand their cradles: failed racial ideologies.
The problem of race has always been at its core the problem of power, not the problem of immorality or ignorance.
Over time, the source of racist ideas became obvious, but I had trouble acknowledging it. The source did not fit my conception of racism, my racial ideology, my racial identity. I became a college professor to educate away racist ideas, seeing ignorance as the source of racist ideas, seeing racist ideas as the source of racist policies, seeing mental change as the principal solution, seeing myself, an educator, as the primary solver.
Racism is one of the fastest-spreading and most fatal cancers humanity has ever known. It is hard to find a place where its cancer cells are not dividing and multiplying. There is nothing I see in our world today, in our history giving me hope that one day antiracists will win the fight, that one day the flag of antiracism will fly over a world of equity. What gives me hope is a simple truism. 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.
