HOW TO BE AN ANTIRACIST

By Ibram X. Kendi



What do you do after you have written “Stamped From the Beginning,” an award-winning history of racist ideas that examined some of America’s most seemingly progressive intellectuals — Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, W. E. B. Du Bois — to expose what one reviewer called the “unwitting racism of the well-meaning.” If you’re Ibram X. Kendi, you craft another stunner of a book that is in some ways your previous work’s natural counterpart: “How to Be an Antiracist,” a 21st-century manual of racial ethics.

Kendi is on a mission to push those of us who believe we are not racists to become something else: antiracists, who support ideas and policies affirming that “the racial groups are equals in all their apparent differences — that there is nothing right or wrong with any racial group.” For Kendi, the founding director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University, there are no nonracists; there are only racists — people who allow racist ideas to proliferate without opposition — and antiracists, those who expose and eradicate such ideas wherever they encounter them.

Instead of focusing on our racist ideas, Kendi offers up a wrenching examination of the evolution of his, beginning with a day in 2000 when he gave a prizewinning speech as a young student. “I remember the M.L.K. competition so fondly,” he writes. “But when I recall the racist speech I gave, I flush with shame.” What was racist about it? In his speech, Kendi asserted that black youth were the “most feared in our society” and that “they think it’s O.K. not to think!” Rather than attacking institutional and individual racism as some black intellectuals had done decades earlier, during the years of Bill Clinton’s presidency, for example, more recent black thinkers have often blamed black youth as the main source of the problems of the black community. “I didn’t realize that to say something is wrong about a racial group is to say something is inferior about that racial group,” Kendi writes. “I did not realize that to say something is inferior about a racial group is to say a racist idea. I thought I was serving my people, when in fact I was serving up racist ideas about my people to my people.”