Print List Price:	$18.99
Kindle Price:	$8.99 Save $10.00 (53%)
Sold by:	Random House LLC Price set by seller.

Promotions apply when you purchase

Add an

audiobook with Audible narration for $6.00

Audiobook Price: $17.33

Save: $11.33 (65%)

Read with our free app

You've subscribed to ! We will preorder your items within 24 hours of when they become available. When new books are released, we'll charge your default payment method for the lowest price available during the pre-order period.

Update your device or payment method, cancel individual pre-orders or your subscription at
Your Memberships & Subscriptions

There was an error. We were unable to process your subscription due to an error. Please refresh and try again.

Follow the author

Ibram X. Kendi

+ Follow

More books from this author

21 Books I Read This Month

Image Unavailable

Image not available for
Color:

To view this video download Flash Player

VIDEO

How to Be an Antiracist Kindle Edition

by Ibram X. Kendi (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.7 28,659 ratings

See all formats and editions

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the National Book Award–winning author of Stamped from the Beginning comes a “groundbreaking” (Time) approach to understanding and uprooting racism and inequality in our society and in ourselves—now updated, with a new preface.

“The most courageous book to date on the problem of race in the Western mind.”—The New York Times

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—The New York Times Book Review, Time, NPR, The Washington Post, Shelf Awareness, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews

Antiracism is a transformative concept that reorients and reenergizes the conversation about racism—and, even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. At its core, racism is a powerful system that creates false hierarchies of human value; its warped logic extends beyond race, from the way we regard people of different ethnicities or skin colors to the way we treat people of different sexes, gender identities, and body types. Racism intersects with class and culture and geography and even changes the way we see and value ourselves. In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi takes readers through a widening circle of antiracist ideas—from the most basic concepts to visionary possibilities—that will help readers see all forms of racism clearly, understand their poisonous consequences, and work to oppose them in our systems and in ourselves.

Kendi weaves an electrifying combination of ethics, history, law, and science with his own personal story of awakening to antiracism. This is an essential work for anyone who wants to go beyond the awareness of racism to the next step: contributing to the formation of a just and equitable society.

From the Publisher

A “groundbreaking” approach to understanding and uprooting racism says Time magazine

Books by Ibram X. Kendi

__________________________________________________


	Be Antiracist	Four Hundred Souls	Antiracist Baby	How To Be a (Young) Antiracist	Goodnight Racism	How to Raise an Antiracist

Customer Reviews	549	6,324	9,583	71	218	207
Price	$10.09	$16.46	$6.20	$11.31	$10.00	$14.91
	Reflect on your understanding of race and discover ways to work toward an antiracist future with this guided journal from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist and Stamped from the Beginning.	A "choral history" of African Americans covering 400 years of history in the voices of 90 writers, edited by the bestselling, National Book Award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi and award-winning historian Keisha N. Blain.	A #1 New York Times Bestseller! From the National Book Award-winning author How to Be an Antiracist comes a picture book that empowers parents and children to uproot racism in our society and in ourselves.	The #1 New York Times bestseller that sparked international dialogue is now a book for young adults!	National Book Award–winning and New York Times bestselling author Ibram X. Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist, Antiracist Baby) returns with a new picture book that serves as a modern bedtime classic.	The book that every parent, caregiver, and teacher needs to raise the next generation of antiracist thinkers, from the author of How to Be an Antiracist

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

An Amazon Best Book of August 2019: Most people will tell you that racism is all about hatred and ignorance. In How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi's follow-up to his National Book Award-winning Stamped from the Beginning, he explains that racism is ultimately structural. Racism directs attention away from harmful, inequitable policies and turns that attention on the people harmed by those policies. Kendi employs history, science, and ethics to describe different forms of racism; at the same time, he follows the events and experiences of his own life, adapting a memoir approach that personalizes his arguments. This is a very effective combination, fusing the external forces of racism with Kendi's own reception and responses to that racism—the result will be mind-expanding for many readers. Kendi's title encompasses his main thesis: simply not being racist isn't enough. We must actively choose to be "antiracist," working to undo racism and its component polices in order to build an equitable society. To read this book is to relate to the author as an individual and realize just how much we all have in common. As Kendi writes: race is a mirage, assigning an identity according to skin color, ignoring the individual. --Chris Schluep, Amazon Book Review

Review

“What do you do after you have written Stamped From the Beginning, an award-winning history of racist ideas? . . . If you’re Ibram X. Kendi, you craft another stunner of a book. . . . What emerges from these insights is the most courageous book to date on the problem of race in the Western mind, a confessional of self-examination that may, in fact, be our best chance to free ourselves from our national nightmare.”—The New York Times

“Ibram Kendi is today’s visionary in the enduring struggle for racial justice. In this personal and revelatory new work, he yet again holds up a transformative lens, challenging both mainstream and antiracist orthodoxy. He illuminates the foundations of racism in revolutionary new ways, and I am consistently challenged and inspired by his analysis. How to Be an Antiracist offers us a necessary and critical way forward.”—Robin DiAngelo, New York Times bestselling author of White Fragility

“Ibram Kendi’s work, through both his books and the Antiracist Research and Policy Center, is vital in today’s sociopolitical climate. As a society, we need to start treating antiracism as action, not emotion—and Kendi is helping us do that.”—Ijeoma Oluo, author of So You Want to Talk About Race

“Ibrahim Kendi uses his own life journey to show us why becoming an antiracist is as essential as it is difficult. Equal parts memoir, history, and social commentary, this book is honest, brave, and most of all liberating.”—James Forman, Jr., Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Locking Up Our Own

“A boldly articulated, historically informed explanation of what exactly racist ideas and thinking are . . . [Kendi’s] prose is thoughtful, sincere, and polished. This powerful book will spark many conversations.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A combination of memoir and extension of [Kendi’s] towering Stamped from the Beginning . . . Never wavering . . . Kendi methodically examines racism through numerous lenses: power, biology, ethnicity, body, culture, and so forth. . . . This unsparing honesty helps readers, both white and people of color, navigate this difficult intellectual territory. . . . Essential.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“In this sharp blend of social commentary and memoir . . . Kendi is ready to spread his message, his stories serving as a springboard for potent explorations of race, gender, colorism, and more. . . . With Stamped From the Beginning, Kendi proved himself a first-rate historian. Here, his willingness to turn the lens on himself marks him as a courageous activist, leading the way to a more equitable society.”—Library Journal (starred review)

About the Author

Ibram X. Kendi is a #1 New York Times bestselling author, a professor of history, and the founding director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research. He is a columnist at The Atlantic and a correspondent with CBS News. He is the author of five books including Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction; How to Be an Antiracist; Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, co-authored with Jason Reynolds; and Antiracist Baby, illustrated by Ashley Lukashevsky.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

MY RACIST INTRODUCTION

I despised suits and ties. For seventeen years I had been surrounded by suit-wearing, tie-choking, hat-flying church folk. My teenage wardrobe hollered the defiance of a preacher’s kid.

It was January 17, 2000. More than three thousand Black people—with a smattering of White folks—arrived that Monday morning in their Sunday best at the Hylton Memorial Chapel in Northern Virginia. My parents arrived in a state of shock. Their floundering son had somehow made it to the final round of the Prince William County Martin Luther King Jr. oratorical contest.

I didn’t show up with a white collar under a dark suit and matching dark tie like most of my competitors. I sported a racy golden-brown blazer with a slick black shirt and bright color-streaked tie underneath. The hem of my baggy black slacks crested over my creamy boots. I’d already failed the test of respectability before I opened my mouth, but my parents, Carol and Larry, were all smiles nonetheless. They couldn’t remember the last time they saw me wearing a tie and blazer, however loud and crazy.

But it wasn’t just my clothes that didn’t fit the scene. My competitors were academic prodigies. I wasn’t. I carried a GPA lower than 3.0; my SAT score barely cracked 1000. Colleges were recruiting my competitors. I was riding the high of having received surprise admission letters from the two colleges I’d halfheartedly applied to.

A few weeks before, I was on the basketball court with my high school team, warming up for a home game, cycling through layup lines. My father, all six foot three and two hundred pounds of him, emerged from my high school gym’s entrance. He slowly walked onto the basketball court, flailing his long arms to get my attention—and embarrassing me before what we could call the “White judge.”

Classic Dad. He couldn’t care less what judgmental White people thought about him. He rarely if ever put on a happy mask, faked a calmer voice, hid his opinion, or avoided making a scene. I loved and hated my father for living on his own terms in a world that usually denies Black people their own terms. It was the sort of defiance that could have gotten him lynched by a mob in a different time and place—or lynched by men in badges today.

I jogged over to him before he could flail his way right into our layup lines. Weirdly giddy, he handed me a brown manila envelope.

“This came for you today.”

He motioned me to open the envelope, right there at half-court as the White students and teachers looked on.

I pulled out the letter and read it: I had been admitted to Hampton University in southern Virginia. My immediate shock exploded into unspeakable happiness. I embraced Dad and exhaled. Tears mixed with warm-up sweat on my face. The judging White eyes around us faded.

I thought I was stupid, too dumb for college. Of course, intelligence is as subjective as beauty. But I kept using “objective” standards, like test scores and report cards, to judge myself. No wonder I sent out only two college applications: one to Hampton and the other to the institution I ended up attending, Florida A&M University. Fewer applications meant less rejection—and I fully expected those two historically Black universities to reject me. Why would any university want an idiot on their campus who can’t understand Shakespeare? It never occurred to me that maybe I wasn’t really trying to understand Shakespeare and that’s why I dropped out of my English II International Baccalaureate class during my senior year. Then again, I did not read much of anything in those years.

Maybe if I’d read history then, I’d have learned about the historical significance of the new town my family had moved to from New York City in 1997. I would have learned about all those Confederate memorials surrounding me in Manassas, Virginia, like Robert E. Lee’s dead army. I would have learned why so many tourists trek to Manassas National Battlefield Park to relive the glory of the Confederate victories at the Battles of Bull Run during the Civil War. It was there that General Thomas J. Jackson acquired his nickname, “Stonewall,” for his stubborn defense of the Confederacy. Northern Virginians kept the stonewall intact after all these years. Did anyone notice the irony that at this Martin Luther King Jr. oratorical contest, my free Black life represented Stonewall Jackson High School?

The delightful event organizers from Delta Sigma Theta sorority, the proud dignitaries, and the competitors were all seated on the pulpit. (The group was too large to say we were seated in the pulpit.) The audience sat in rows that curved around the long, arched pulpit, giving room for speakers to pace to the far sides of the chapel while delivering their talks; five stairs also allowed us to descend into the crowd if we wanted.

The middle schoolers had given their surprisingly mature speeches. The exhilarating children’s choir had sung behind us. The audience sat back down and went silent in anticipation of the three high school orators.

I went first, finally approaching the climax of an experience that had already changed my life. From winning my high school competition months before to winning “best before the judges” at a countywide competition weeks before—I felt a special rainstorm of academic confidence. If I came out of the experience dripping with confidence for college, then I’d entered from a high school drought. Even now I wonder if it was my poor sense of self that first generated my poor sense of my people. Or was it my poor sense of my people that inflamed a poor sense of myself? Like the famous question about the chicken and the egg, the answer is less important than the cycle it describes. Racist ideas make people of color think less of themselves, which makes them more vulnerable to racist ideas. Racist ideas make White people think more of themselves, which further attracts them to racist ideas.

I thought I was a subpar student and was bombarded by messages—from Black people, White people, the media—that told me that the reason was rooted in my race . . . which made me more discouraged and less motivated as a student . . . which only further reinforced for me the racist idea that Black people just weren’t very studious . . . which made me feel even more despair or indifference . . . and on it went. At no point was this cycle interrupted by a deeper analysis of my own specific circumstances and shortcomings or a critical look at the ideas of the society that judged me—instead, the cycle hardened the racist ideas inside me until I was ready to preach them to others.

I remember the MLK competition so fondly. But when I recall the racist speech I gave, I flush with shame.

“What would be Dr. King’s message for the millennium? Let’s visualize an angry seventy-one-year-old Dr. King . . .” And I began my remix of King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

It was joyous, I started, our emancipation from enslavement. But “now, one hundred thirty-five years later, the Negro is still not free.”

I was already thundering, my tone angry, more Malcolm than Martin.

“Our youth’s minds are still in captivity!”

I did not say our youth’s minds are in captivity of racist ideas, as I would say now.

“They think it’s okay to be those who are most feared in our society!” I said, as if it was their fault they were so feared.

“They think it’s okay not to think!” I charged, raising the classic racist idea that Black youth don’t value education as much as their non-Black counterparts. No one seemed to care that this well-traveled idea had flown on anecdotes but had never been grounded in proof.

Still, the crowd encouraged me with their applause. I kept shooting out unproven and disproven racist ideas about all the things wrong with Black youth—ironically, on the day when all the things right about Black youth were on display.

I started pacing wildly back and forth on the runway for the pulpit, gaining momentum.

“They think it’s okay to climb the high tree of pregnancy!” Applause.

“They think it’s okay to confine their dreams to sports and music!” Applause.

Had I forgotten that I—not “Black youth”—was the one who had confined his dreams to sports? And I was calling Black youth “they”? Who on earth did I think I was? Apparently, my placement on that illustrious stage had lifted me out of the realm of ordinary—and thus inferior—Black youngsters and into the realm of the rare and extraordinary.

In my applause-stoked flights of oratory, I didn’t realize that to say something is wrong about a racial group is to say something is inferior about that racial group. 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. The Black judge seemed to be eating it up and clapping me on my back for more. I kept giving more.

“Their minds are being held captive, and our adults’ minds are right there beside them,” I said, motioning to the floor. “Because they somehow think that the cultural revolution that began on the day of my dream’s birth is over.

“How can it be over when many times we are unsuccessful because we lack intestinal fortitude?” Applause.

“How can it be over when our kids leave their houses not knowing how to make themselves, only knowing how to not make themselves?” Applause.

“How can it be over if all of this is happening in our community?” I asked, lowering my voice. “So I say to you, my friends, that even though this cultural revolution may never be over, I still have a dream . . .”

I still have a nightmare—the memory of this speech whenever I muster the courage to recall it anew. It is hard for me to believe I finished high school in the year 2000 touting so many racist ideas. A racist culture had handed me the ammunition to shoot Black people, to shoot myself, and I took and used it. Internalized racism is the real Black on Black crime.

I was a dupe, a chump who saw the ongoing struggles of Black people on MLK Day 2000 and decided that Black people themselves were the problem. This is the consistent function of racist ideas—and of any kind of bigotry more broadly: to manipulate us into seeing people as the problem, instead of the policies that ensnare them.

The language used by the forty-fifth president of the United States offers a clear example of how this sort of racist language and thinking works. Long before he became president, Donald Trump liked to say, “Laziness is a trait in Blacks.” When he decided to run for president, his plan for making America great again: defaming Latinx immigrants as mostly criminals and rapists and demanding billions for a border wall to block them. He promised “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” Once he became president, he routinely called his Black critics “stupid.” He claimed immigrants from Haiti “all have AIDS,” while praising White supremacists as “very fine people” in the summer of 2017.

Through it all, whenever someone pointed out the obvious, Trump responded with variations on a familiar refrain: “No, no. I’m not a racist. I’m the least racist person that you have ever interviewed,” that “you’ve ever met,” that “you’ve ever encountered.” Trump’s behavior may be exceptional, but his denials are normal. When racist ideas resound, denials that those ideas are racist typically follow.

When racist policies resound, denials that those policies are racist also follow.

Denial is the heartbeat of racism, beating across ideologies, races, and nations. It is beating within us. Many of us who strongly call out Trump’s racist ideas will strongly deny our own. How often do we become reflexively defensive when someone calls something we’ve done or said racist? How many of us would agree with this statement: “‘Racist’ isn’t a descriptive word. It’s a pejorative word. It is the equivalent of saying, ‘I don’t like you.’” These are actually the words of White supremacist Richard Spencer, who, like Trump, identifies as “not racist.” How many of us who despise the Trumps and White supremacists of the world share their self-definition of “not racist”?

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. There is no in-between safe space of “not racist.” The claim of “not racist” neutrality is a mask for racism. This may seem harsh, but it’s important at the outset that we apply one of the core principles of antiracism, which is to return the word “racist” itself back to its proper usage. “Racist” is not—as Richard Spencer argues—a pejorative. It is not the worst word in the English language; it is not the equivalent of a slur. It is descriptive, and the only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it—and then dismantle it. The attempt to turn this usefully descriptive term into an almost unusable slur is, of course, designed to do the opposite: to freeze us into inaction.

The common idea of claiming “color blindness” is akin to the notion of being “not racist”—as with the “not racist,” the color-blind individual, by ostensibly failing to see race, fails to see racism and falls into racist passivity. The language of color blindness—like the language of “not racist”—is a mask to hide racism. “Our Constitution is color-blind,” U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Harlan proclaimed in his dissent to Plessy v. Ferguson, the case that legalized Jim Crow segregation in 1896. “The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country,” Justice Harlan went on. “I doubt not, it will continue to be for all time, if it remains true to its great heritage.” A color-blind Constitution for a White-supremacist America.

The good news is that racist and antiracist are not fixed identities. We can be a racist one minute and an antiracist the next. What we say about race, what we do about race, in each moment, determines what—not who—we are.

I used to be racist most of the time. I am changing. I am no longer identifying with racists by claiming to be “not racist.” I am no longer speaking through the mask of racial neutrality. I am no longer manipulated by racist ideas to see racial groups as problems. I no longer believe a Black person cannot be racist. I am no longer policing my every action around an imagined White or Black judge, trying to convince White people of my equal humanity, trying to convince Black people I am representing the race well. I no longer care about how the actions of other Black individuals reflect on me, since none of us are race representatives, nor is any individual responsible for someone else’s racist ideas. And I’ve come to see that the movement from racist to antiracist is always ongoing—it requires understanding and snubbing racism based on biology, ethnicity, body, culture, behavior, color, space, and class. And beyond that, it means standing ready to fight at racism’s intersections with other bigotries.

This book is ultimately about the basic struggle we’re all in, the struggle to be fully human and to see that others are fully human. I share my own journey of being raised in the dueling racial consciousness of the Reagan-era Black middle class, then right-turning onto the ten-lane highway of anti-Black racism—a highway mysteriously free of police and free on gas—and veering off onto the two-lane highway of anti-White racism, where gas is rare and police are everywhere, before finding and turning down the unlit dirt road of antiracism.

After taking this grueling journey to the dirt road of antiracism, humanity can come upon the clearing of a potential future: an antiracist world in all its imperfect beauty. It can become real if we focus on power instead of people, if we focus on changing policy instead of groups of people. It’s possible if we overcome our cynicism about the permanence of racism.

We know how to be racist. We know how to pretend to be not racist. Now let’s know how to be antiracist.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07D2364N5
Publisher ‏ : ‎ One World (August 13, 2019)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ August 13, 2019
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 13858 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 543 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #67,338 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #16 in Civil Rights & Liberties (Kindle Store)
- #18 in Political Advocacy Books
- #23 in Cultural Anthropology (Kindle Store)

Customer Reviews:
4.7 28,659 ratings

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Upload your video

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.

Ibram X. Kendi

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.

Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

Dr. Ibram X. Kendi is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University and the founding director of the BU Center for Antiracist Research. He is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and the author of many highly acclaimed books including Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, making him the youngest-ever winner of that award. He has also authored five #1 New York Times bestsellers, including How to Be an Antiracist, Antiracist Baby, and Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, co-authored by Jason Reynolds. Time magazine named Dr. Kendi one of the 100 most influential people in the world. He was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as the Genius Grant.

Customer reviews

4.7 out of 5

28,659 global ratings

How customer reviews and ratings work

Reviews with images

See all photos

Sort reviews by

Top reviews from the United States

There was a problem filtering reviews right now. Please try again later.

Joseph Psotka

To be an Antiracist you need to get rid of the racist idea of "Race".

Reviewed in the United States on June 12, 2020

Verified Purchase

How to Be an Antiracist
Ibram X. Kendi
I agree with Kendi, that I used to be racist most of the time. I am changing. I am no longer identifying with racists by claiming to be “not racist.” And I’ve come to see that the movement from racist to antiracist is always ongoing—it means standing ready to fight at racism’s intersections with other bigotries.
A racist idea is any idea that suggests one racial group is inferior or superior to another racial group in any way. Sadly, the implicit meaning of “race” to the vast majority of the world includes a racist hierarchy that puts one ethnic group above another. It certainly cannot mean that to an antiracist or someone struggling to become an antiracist.
I agree with Kendi that “race” is fundamentally a power construct of blended difference that lives socially. Race creates new forms of power for the powerful. But it also contains many surplus and implicit meanings that the vast majority of mankind without power also believes as a tenuous hold on power that is fictional.

This critique is basically about Chapter 4, about Xendi’s clinging to the word “Race”. I loved his first book because his ideas were growing and in transition, not yet congealed into an ideology, which may describe his ideas in this book. In “Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America” Ibram X. Kendi was still growing and exploring his ideas, and I especially admired his ability to integrate and go beyond Ta_Nehisi Coates. I especially loved his description of Bill Clinton’s avowal that the human genome offered proof that we are all one race, what Kendi in this book calls a:
BIOLOGICAL ANTIRACIST: One who is expressing the idea that the races are meaningfully the same in their biology and there are no genetic racial differences.
But now he goes on to say that “Only racists shy away from the R-word—racism is steeped in denial.” And this is the opposite conclusion that I arrive at: We need to remove “Race” from our language as a key step in becoming antiracist. The word “Race” has become a pillar upholding way too many racist ideas. We need to cut that pillar down.
He also says: “It is one of the ironies of antiracism that we must identify racially in order to identify the racial privileges and dangers of being in our bodies.” And I firmly do not believe that. We have many, way too many ways to identify racist ideas and institutions in our society. We don’t need to identify racially and we are all better off if we don’t hold on to racist ideas in any way. This is not assimilationist. It is a call for cultural diversity, but outside the shackles of racist racial concepts.

“Biological racism rests on two ideas: that the races are meaningfully different in their biology and that these differences create a hierarchy of value.” Kendi at one point in his past accepted the first, while he rejected the biological racial hierarchy, but he came to see that this was a doubtful ploy by racists to sneak in their racist ideals.
By elevating certain inherited abilities in abused minorities, such as improvisational decision making, that could explain why they predominate in certain fields such as jazz, rap, and basketball, and not in other fields, such as classical music, chess, and astronomy; by acknowledging certain almost irrelevant and certainly lower status ways that Blacks are superior, the racists justified a biological racist distinction that empowers other racist biological ideas that are even more abusive. By upholding a biological distinction between “races” racists could hold on to the fundamental racist idea of a biological sanction for racist hierarchies, and gave them power to subjugate. Racist power at once made biological racial distinction and biological racial hierarchy the components of biological racism.
One of the “great truths” this hid was “that in genetic terms, all human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9 percent the same.”
As Kendi justifiably points out, when geneticists compare different white populations to those in Africa, they find there is more genetic diversity between populations within Africa than between Africa and the rest of the world. Race is a genetic mirage.
Yet, even with this scientific proof, segregationists like Nicholas Wade figure if humans are 99.9 percent genetically alike, then they must be 0.1 percent distinct. And this distinction must be racial. And that 0.1 percent of racial distinction has grown exponentially over the millennia. And it is their job to search heaven and earth for these exponentially distinct races. This argument is not just fallacious and makes no sense; it is increasingly so. Segregationists and non-racists will find it increasingly impossible to cling to.
Anyway, they are not the real problem. The real problem are the millions of racists who believe their racist ideas, including “Race”, are just common sense. It is their implicit positions that have become untenable.
Even Christian fundamentalist Ken Ham, the co-author of One Race One Blood, asked in an op-ed in 2017. “For one, point out the common ground of both evolutionists and creationists: the mapping of the human genome concluded that there is only one race, the human race.”
Given all these sensible positions that Kendi emphasises and describes it came as a total shock to me that he next justified continuing to uphold and promulgate the word “Race”.
He begins by asserting that: “Race is a mirage but one that humanity has organized itself around in very real ways.”
This makes no sense to me as a justification, because humanity has also organized itself in very real ways around racist ideas, especially in America; and in no way does this justify us to hold on to them.
He next challenges an economic interpretation of race by asserting that “imagining away the existence of races in a racist world is as conserving and harmful as imagining away classes in a capitalistic world—it allows the ruling races and classes to keep on ruling.”
This seems self contradictory too. Doing away with classes is a very legitimate goal of modern politcal movements, with the expre3ss goal of taking power away from ruling classes, just as taking away the idea of races is an essential part of taking power away from ruling ethnic groups.
His next justification is a bit more powerful. He says: “They fail to realize that if we stop using racial categories, then we will not be able to identify racial inequity.”
This makes no sense to me. Surely we can identify racist ideas if we destroy the concept of race. If we rail against the concept of race, we begin to destroy racist ideas embedded within the concept of race, such as a hierarchy of inferiority and superiority.
And too, we can still identify economic and social inequities. Especially if races don't exist, the fictions that racisst create become even clearer fictions , and all our energies can be devoted to tearing them down.

Kendi is just plain wrong when he says that if “we cannot identify racial inequity, then we will not be able to identify racist policies. If we cannot identify racist policies, then we cannot challenge racist policies.”
That's just silly. Racist policies, like legal insistence on money for bail and voting can still easily be seen. After all, there are still ethnic groups of blacks and Hispanix to analyze, and arguments become even more powerful when all colored groups are united with other lower economic groups. And there are still huge inequities, especially internationally when we compare the developed northern against the undevelop southern world.
“Terminating racial categories is potentially the last, not the first, step in the antiracist struggle.”
Terminating racial categories may be difficult but may be easier than terminating implicit racist ideas in common sense views, and in many institutions like the police.

Replacing racist “racial” categories with anti-racist ethnic categories does not need to be the first step, and in fact it may be much too difficult in this world where “race” is embedded in all legal canons to be a first step; but for an antiracist it is an essential step in struggling against the racist ideas that dominate our world,

30 people found this helpful

Helpful

Luke Matthews

Read this book!

Reviewed in the United States on December 15, 2020

Verified Purchase

I first encountered Ibram X. Kendi’s work when I read his 2016 book STAMPED FROM THE BEGINNING: THE DEFINITIVE HISTORY OF RACIST IDEAS IN AMERICA. What a masterful, even magisterial, piece of work. Moving from the earliest moments of European invasion of the Americas to the present-day, in that work Kendi uncovered more than five centuries of the damage done by anti-Black racism has done and is doing in America to our society, our culture, our minds and bodies. (If you haven’t read it, you ought to.) Shortly after finishing that book, I saw that he had a new book titled HOW TO BE AN ANTIRACIST. I put it on my list, added it to my pile (as it were) and moved on to reading something else. Well, I’ve read a bunch of somethings else, and so have now gotten around to reading it.

I’ll admit that I felt prompted to read HOW TO BE AN ANTIRACIST (which was published just last year in 2019) as it seems that - at least at the college where I work - the book has become the center of a lot of attention. There are book clubs, discussion groups and the author is widely cited as an authority. It was time to read it to stay in the institutional conversation.

The ideas contained in HOW TO BE AN ANTIRACIST are there in STAMPED FROM THE BEGINNING as well. Both books make the assertion that simply recognizing the existence of racism is not enough, that if we are to make a more just society we must actively seek out and replace the laws, policies and traditions that have created and that are maintaining the social and cultural structures that naturalize inequality. Those ideas, however, are presented in HOW TO BE AN ANTIRACIST in a more personal, memoir like format in which Kendi takes the reader through his own struggle to divest himself of the effects of racism on his thoughts and actions. Frankly, I prefer the more historical approach but I can see how the more personal approach would appeal to others. But, whether you like to get the insights presented as history or as memoir, if you’re troubled by the parade of broken promises that is this country’s history and want to do something about it - something more than just acknowledging that ugly parade - you couldn’t go wrong by reading and studying this book.

I have a couple of quibbles - and neither takes away from the value of the book - with what Kendi has to say in HOW TO BE AN ANTIRACIST. One has to do with his linguistic concepts. He uses the term “Ebonics” - a term linguists shun - to refer to Black English (in the minds of some users of that term, the grammar of Black English has to do with an influence from the languages of West Africa and there is simply no evidence any such influence), and he uses the term “dialect” as if it its definition includes the idea of a speech variety being substandard - there is no such sense in the linguistic definition of dialect. His handling of linguistic concepts was strangely sloppy in a book that was otherwise pretty tightly argued. Another thing was that Kendi, building on his personal experience with cancer, likened racism in the US as a kind of cancer, and that we must endure the surgery and chemotherapy with their attendant pain and suffering to rid ourselves of the malignant growth of racism. But likening racism to cancer implies a dangerous and deadly thing that is not supposed to be there. This felt oddly out of place in the work of a scholar who has looked so closely at history of American institutions. An examination of American history actually seems to reveal that racism has been there from the beginning - it’s built into the structure of our institutions...it’s not a neoplasm, a new growth but a constituent part of the thing itself - it’s the mortar holding the bricks together, it’s the thread binding the seams. Being anti-racist then will then require us and future generations to tear down and re-build.

6 people found this helpful

Helpful

Top reviews from other countries

Translate all reviews to English

H. Poole

Great book - thorough, helpful and hopeful

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 11, 2024

Verified Purchase

I'd recommend this book to anyone wanting to see our world become equally free, enjoyed, and shared by all, and wanting to understand and explore more about how to think and act towards that end. I'd also recommend it to those who aren't there yet - it's an excellent starting place.

Beukema D.

super rapide

Reviewed in France on May 28, 2023

Verified Purchase

Super

M. Pereira

Leitura obrigatória!

Reviewed in Brazil on September 1, 2020

Verified Purchase

Como muita gente por aí, li esse livro depois de ver diversas recomendações nas mídias sociais durante os protestos que ocorreram esse ano. Antes de pegar ele, eu me achava informada até. Descobri que não sou nem um pouco. Dificuldades "básicas" que os negros sofrem desde a nascença são coisas que nunca pensei sobre e nem ouvi ninguém falando sobre, a minha vida inteira. E que erro imenso é esse que estamos cometendo como sociedade!
Entendo hoje que não sei nada mesmo, e que por ser uma mulher cis branca, conto com privilégios que eu nem sabia serem privilégios - como saber de onde a minha família vêm no mundo. O mínimo que posso fazer é me educar.

Translate review to English

Devin Hogg

An excellent book and very timely!

Reviewed in Canada on June 7, 2020

Verified Purchase

I highly recommend giving this book a read. The author shares his own journey into antiracism and in so doing holds up a mirror to all of us to choose again and again the antiracist in us. The book is filled with definitions and stories which bring clarity and help toward understanding and several chapters are devoted towards the importance of intersectionality. Everybody should give this book a read, especially in light of recent times. Everybody will benefit from doing so.

11 people found this helpful

Mamadou Bobo Diallo

Sehr gutes Buch

Reviewed in Germany on October 7, 2020

Verified Purchase

Das ist eins der besten Bücher über Rassismus.

One person found this helpful

Translate review to English

See more reviews