In his new book, “Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America,” Professor Ibram X. Kendi argues that “almost everyone is some kind of racist.” This includes people who thought that African Americans should get an education.

Kendi, a Professor of History at the University of Florida, argues that people can be both overtly and covertly racist. His definition of racist is “any concept that regards one racial group as inferior or superior to another racial group in any way.”

However, this includes people like William Lloyd Garrison, who advocated for social justice for black people and an end to slavery in the 1800s.



Garrison wrote that the enslavement of African Americans had caused them socioeconomic damage, but their intelligence and morality stayed uncorrupted. “Nothing has been left undone to cripple their intellects, darken their minds, debase their moral nature, obliterate all traces of their relationship to mankind,” Garrison wrote.

To alleviate the damage done to them by slavery, however, Garrison believed that black people should have “educational development,” in order to learn things that they were barred from while slaves. “Racist,” Kendi says of Garrison.

According to Kendi, Garrison’s assertion is racist because “he still accepted even temporary racial inferiority, to be remedied with education or other kindly forms of social uplift.”

Kendi also argues in his book that asking black people to help end racism is racist in itself, as it is white people who need end racism. The Cosby Show, for example, was racist because it attempted to “redeem the Black family in the eyes of White America.”

Even Barack Obama is a racist, according to Professor Kendi, because President Obama blamed racism equally on black and white people. “Obama ended up following in the racist footsteps of every president since Richard Nixon,” he explains, “legitimizing racist resentments, saying those resentments were not racist, and redirecting those resentments toward political opponents.”

The court case that ended segregation was “marred by racism” as well. Kendi writes that Chief Justice Earl Warren “essentially offered a racist opinion in this landmark case: separate Black educational facilities were inherently unequal and inferior because Black students were not being exposed to White students.”