Another is “How to Be an Antiracist,” published by One World, an imprint of Random House. Part memoir, part social analysis, part polemic, it’s a book that, like its predecessor, seems to be arriving at exactly the right moment, as President Trump’s verbal attacks on lawmakers of color and on the city of Baltimore have spurred both intense outrage and debate on how to respond.

But it’s also a book that directs some of its most unstinting criticism at the author himself, and what he sees as his own racist ideas.

Dr. Kendi defines racist ideas expansively: any idea that there is something inherently better or worse about any racial group. There is no such thing as “not racist” ideas, policies or people, he argues, only racist and antiracist ones.

Among the most painful personal episodes he revisited, he said, is the one that opens the book: a speech he gave in a high school oratory contest named for Martin Luther King Jr., in which he assailed African-American youth for its supposed failures.

The thunderous applause from the mostly black audience gave him the confidence, he writes, that he could succeed in college, despite mediocre grades and test scores. The speech, which he listened to over and over, was also, in his view, deeply racist.