When we talk about racial issues and racial problems, we still feel the need to create programs and projects and theories that are going to somehow improve Black behavior, as if that is a problem. Racist ideas have prevented us from truly seeing that the main issue is discrimination and exploitation, and a series of other oppressive calamities, and not the actual behavior of the people.

Historian Ibram X. Kendi examines the history (and present) of racist ideas in America - from the anti-Black premise that liberalism and progressivism share with segregationism, to the ways capitalism, science and religion adopted and adapted racist ideology to maintain White supremacy - and explains why the only route to ending racism lies in dismantling the policies of discrimination, not attempting to alter or police the behavior of its victims.

Ibram is author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America from PublicAffairs.

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