How to Be an Antiracist is part how-to and part memoir. Author Ibram X. Kendi, like many of us, grew up in a racist society and internalized many of its ideas. As a result, despite being Black, he was racist himself throughout much of his life. In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi describes what he’s learned about racism, how he changed his thoughts and actions to become antiracist, and how you can do the same.
Kendi is a historian, teacher, and activist. He’s also the director of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University. He was named one of Time’s 100 Most Influential People of 2020, a year after this book was published.
How to Be an Antiracist is Kendi’s third book. While his previous book—Stamped From the Beginning—focused purely on the history and sociology of racism in America, How to Be an Antiracist weaves those lessons together with Kendi’s own experiences with racism (both as a target and an instigator of it). How to Be an Antiracist was a New York Times bestseller in 2020.
In this guide, we’ve organized Kendi’s lessons into three clear and actionable steps toward becoming antiracist: First, learn what racism is and how it evolved. Second, become aware of subtly racist ideas you might be carrying, and start working to move beyond them. Finally, support antiracist policies and work for true equality. Our commentary explores how racism became so deeply ingrained in our culture and why it’s so hard for us to let go of our racist ideas on an individual level. We’ll also suggest some specific ways you can implement Kendi’s ideas and start taking antiracist action.
Before starting his journey toward antiracism, Kendi believed racism was an integral part of society that couldn’t be removed. He also denied that he personally held racist ideas and performed racist acts. Kendi didn’t want to reexamine his ideas about racism, and this isn’t uncommon; it’s hard for people to change beliefs that they hold strongly.
However, as he continued his studies and the Black Lives Matter movement launched, Kendi began to reassess his ideas about what racism is and what he could do about it. Eventually, he revised his definition of racism to the one given in this book: Racism includes all ideas and all policies that promote inequity between people of different races.
To start working toward being antiracist, Kendi first had to accept that he could sometimes be racist. He acknowledged that he held racist ideas and supported racist policies because he had grown up in a racist country, and he listed the racist ideas and policies that he personally subscribed to. Then, he intentionally let go of those beliefs and replaced them with antiracist ones—beliefs that promote equality.
(Shortform note: In Awaken the Giant Within, life coach Tony Robbins explains that it’s hard to change a belief (including racist beliefs) because we’re emotionally invested in our beliefs—the thought that something we believe might be wrong feels like a personal attack. Therefore, we only tend to change our beliefs when holding onto them becomes more frightening than changing them. For example, a racist might not try to change his or her racist beliefs unless the social consequences become too steep—say, if that person’s friends break off contact with him, and he suddenly finds himself unwelcome at his favorite places. For Kendi, the pain of realizing that he was part of the problem was greater than the fear of changing his beliefs.)
The next step was to start working to create antiracist policies. To that end, Kendi donated money to organizations that supported antiracist causes and became an antiracist activist himself. He also uses his influence as a teacher and an author to educate others about racism and antiracism.
Steps You Can Take Toward Antiracism
Devoting your life to antiracist activism like Kendi may not be realistic for everyone. However, there are some easily achievable steps that anyone can take, and that you could start taking today. For example, in her book So You Want to Talk About Race, antiracist writer and speaker Ijeoma Oluo says that a great way to start reexamining your views and beliefs is to diversify the media you consume.
Oluo says that most of our media, including movies, shows, books, and news, is White-dominated and White-centric. By making an effort to consume media from diverse creators, you’ll see and hear viewpoints that you might not normally get the chance to, and you’ll perhaps gain a greater understanding and appreciation of other cultures. Reading How to Be an Antiracist is a great start on this endeavor, and this Buzzfeed list has numerous other book suggestions.
The first step toward becoming antiracist is to understand what racism really is, and where it came from.
Historically speaking, most people assume that the concept of race came first; then, people developed racist ideas; and finally, they developed racist policies based on their racist ideas. However, Kendi tells us that the true order of events was different: A policy created to further powerful people’s self-interest came first—namely, European royalty began the lucrative slave trade of Africans—and people invented race afterward to justify the policy. Racist ideas came last, based on the now-established idea that certain groups of people are inherently different and “less” than others.
Before we examine these events in more detail, we need to understand why the order of these events matters. Kendi gives two crucial reasons.
First, the fact that discriminatory policies came before the idea of race shows that race is not an inherent, biological quality; rather, race is a social construct invented by those in power to justify and maintain that power.
Kendi explains that there’s no scientific basis for race—genetically speaking, we’re all practically identical. The genetic differences that do exist are purely superficial: skin pigmentation, hair texture, and the like.
Saying that Blacks and Whites are different races is like claiming that a yellow labrador is a different species from a black labrador; in reality, the only difference is hair color. To continue the example, using race to justify racist policy would be like arguing that black labs are inherently superior to yellow labs, and therefore it’s only natural that yellow labs should be subservient to black labs—scientifically speaking, it’s nonsense.
Racism’s Psychological Basis
While the specific idea of race is a social construct, the origins of racism might lie much farther back than Kendi says here. In Behave, biologist Robert Sapolsky explains that our brains naturally organize people into two groups: “us” and “others” (or “in-group” and “out-group”). We feel connection, compassion, and pride for those in our in-group; we feel hatred, suspicion, and fear toward those in the out-group.
Furthermore, one of the most simplistic ways we group people is by appearance: Our brains place those who look like us in the in-group and those who don’t in the out-group. Racism, then, is one version of that in-group / out-group dynamic. This tendency is hardwired into our biology, dating back to a time when other groups of humans were competition for resources at best and a direct threat to survival at worst.
However, that doesn’t mean that we’re biologically fated to be racist forever. In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins—another prominent biologist—says that humans are unique in that we can consciously override our genetic programming. In other words, even if instincts and genetics drive us toward a particular type of behavior (such as racism), we can make a reasoned decision not to engage in that behavior.
Because people assume that the idea of race came first, leading directly to racism, many think that “color blindness”—simply ignoring race and pretending they don’t see it—is a solution to racism. However, Kendi believes that’s a misguided idea.
If the concept of race had produced racist policies, then eradicating the concept of race as a means of eradicating racism would make sense. However, as the invention of race came after the implementation of racist policies, we must first eliminate those policies. If we start at the wrong end and get rid of race first, we’ll fail to see that some policies still negatively impact certain groups of people. In short, eliminating the idea of race may be one of the last steps toward creating an equitable society—it’s certainly not the first.
Color Blindness in Schools
In Biased, social psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt says that ignoring race—so-called color blindness—is especially common in schools, where educators use color blindness as an easy way to avoid difficult conversations about race and racism. However, far from helping to eliminate racism, Eberhardt says color blindness can actually make discrimination worse; ignoring race means ignoring the impacts that racism has on students, so any race-related struggles get chalked up to personal shortcomings like laziness or lack of intelligence.
Another way color blindness can harm Black people, especially young people, is that it erases Black culture and pride in Black heritage. Someone claiming not to see race will often follow that claim with a statement like, “I judge people based on their actions.” However, in a White-dominated society, people are expected to act White: to adopt White values, mannerisms, and dialects. In other words, color blindness is often a mask for wanting Black people to ignore their heritage and assimilate into White culture. For students, who naturally seek the approval of teachers and other adults, that pressure to “fit in” is especially harmful.
Kendi says that racism has its roots in the 15th century, before the concept of race even existed, when the Portuguese Prince Henry the Navigator decided to enter the highly profitable slave trade. However, he didn’t want to work with the existing Arab slave traders, who were enslaving a wide variety of people (including Europeans, Africans, and even other Arabs). Instead, Prince Henry sponsored voyages to West Africa and focused the Portuguese slave trade on Africans.
(Shortform note: In fact, if we’re using Kendi’s definition of racism as ideas and policies that favor certain groups and oppress others, then racism began long before the 15th century. As far back as the 6th century, Jews and Muslims were regularly vilified, oppressed, and slaughtered—all legally—in Europe. One could make the case that those are religions, not races, and therefore the label of racism doesn’t apply; then again, “African” isn’t a race either, just a description of where a person came from. As Kendi says, there’s no scientific basis for the concept of race, so it’s unclear why enslaving Africans is labeled racism while killing Jews and Muslims is not.)
Because the Islamic traders were enslaving people from a variety of areas, their policies (though horrifying) weren’t racist—they treated all groups equally badly. However, Prince Henry’s policy was racist because it focused on a particular group of people to mistreat.
(Shortform note: Racist policies and practices have impacts reaching far beyond the people directly affected by them. For example, it was common practice for Arab slavers to castrate black male slaves and forcibly impregnate black female slaves. This altered the genetic makeup of entire generations—and falls under the UN definition of genocide, which includes, “...imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group.”)
Twenty years later, it fell to Prince Henry’s biographer, Gomes de Zurara, to justify the enslavement of Africans. Kendi says that Zurara justified Prince Henry’s actions by inventing the idea of the African race.
In Zurara’s description of people being sold at a slave auction, he described the people as being different from each other in language, ethnic group, and skin color. Regardless, he lumped them into a single group of people, then said that they lived like animals and needed to be saved by the civilized, benevolent, and pious Europeans. In doing so, Zurara aimed to convince people that Portugal’s involvement in the slave trade was not only acceptable, but righteous—that they weren’t enslaving Africans for money, but rather lifting them out of misery and saving their souls from damnation.
Zurara’s goal was, first, to create a hierarchy of groups. For example, putting Africans into one group and slave traders and slave owners in another allowed for comparisons between the groups. That led directly to Zurara’s second goal, which was to legitimize treating the groups differently. Thinking of African people as an inferior group legitimized their enslavement and murder.
According to Kendi, Zurara’s book—titled The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea—contained the first racist ideas that we know of. As such, it quite literally represented the invention of racism.
Racism or Casteism?
Journalist Isabel Wilkerson believes that this hierarchy of groups is better described as a caste system, rather than as racism (although Wilkerson does concede that racism exists within this caste system). In her book Caste, Wilkerson explains how a caste system naturally gives some groups power over others—thus creating a hierarchy—and how those groups are defined by otherwise neutral characteristics like skin color or ethnicity. Therefore, what Zurara created under the guise of race was actually just another form of caste system, such as the one that already existed in India.
Wilkerson believes it’s important to talk in terms of caste systems rather than racism because racism’s definition has become highly personal: A racist is no longer just someone with biased ideas or who supports biased policies (possibly without knowing it). “Racist” now implies that someone actively hates different groups and is in favor of oppressing them. That relatively new and highly charged definition makes it hard to talk about racism in a productive way—saying that someone said or did something racist now sounds like accusing him or her of being a hateful, cruel person, which instantly shuts down the conversation.
According to Kendi, in the years and centuries following the publication of Zurara’s book, other scientists, writers, and philosophers began to make generalizations about race. Those generalizations often compared racial groups to one another, which is the foundation of racist ideas—ideas that imply that one race is in some way superior or inferior to another. Those racist ideas are now found all over the world.
(Shortform note: Many of these people echoing and building on Zurara’s ideas weren’t doing so just out of hatred for Black people; they truly believed what they were saying and writing. In Biased, social psychologist Jennifer Eberhardt explains how prominent scientists of the 19th century wrote books and reports “proving” that Black people were an entirely different species from White people and were naturally unintelligent and subservient—what Kendi calls biological racism. But these people believed they were being perfectly objective and merely reporting scientific facts.)
Now that we know modern racism grew out of selfish and biased policies, not inherent differences between people, we can understand racism and antiracism more precisely.
Kendi defines racism as policies and ideas that cause and maintain racial inequities. Meanwhile, he defines antiracism as policies and ideas that promote racial equity; in short, the opposite of racism. In other words, antiracism means actively working to fix racist policies and fight back against racist ideas.
(Shortform note: Some people dislike the term antiracism—perhaps they’d rather think about creating something or adding to the world, rather than simply being opposed to something else. Such people might prefer the word “diversity.” However, diversity alone doesn’t fix societal imbalances. In fact, some antiracist activists argue that diversity without antiracism actually reinforces racism because it only focuses on the differences between people, and it doesn’t take into account that those differences put some people at a distinct disadvantage in society.)
Note that antiracist isn’t the same thing as “not racist” or neutral toward the idea of race. One of Kendi’s most important points in this book is that it’s not possible to be neutral when it comes to racism—anything that is not antiracist is racist. This is because all policies and ideas either advance equality (and are thus antiracist) or hinder equality (and are thus racist). Trying to remain neutral means supporting the status quo, and the current status quo is unequal—therefore, neutrality is actually racist.
Neutrality May Hide White Fragility
Suggestions like this one of Kendi's—that being passively "not racist" is, itself, racist, and that each of us needs to be actively antiracist—sometimes triggers a phenomenon known as “White fragility.” In her book of the same name, Robin DiAngelo describes White fragility as White people becoming defensive or angry when confronted with the idea of systemic racism and the fact that they might be complicit in it.
White fragility comes from two sources: First, White people fear overturning the status quo because they benefit from it. Replacing racist policies with antiracist ones would take away their societal advantages. Second, White people become upset at the idea that they might be helping to uphold societal racism.
For these reasons, DiAngelo says that White people—even very progressive ones—often fall into patterns of White fragility in order to protect their own reputations and feelings. One such method of protecting themselves is to avoid the topic of race entirely by claiming neutrality toward race, or “color blindness.”
Like Kendi, most of us live in a society permeated with racist policies and racist ideas. All of us internalize these ideas to some extent, and a large part of becoming antiracist is reflecting on our beliefs and recognizing what racist ideas we hold.
There are many different types of racism, each based on different racist ideas:
Ethnic bias is a combination of racist policies that cause racial inequities between racialized ethnic groups. These policies are supported by racist ideas about the differences between racialized ethnic groups, the main idea being the belief that there’s a hierarchy within races—that certain ethnic groups within a race are better or worse than others within the same race.
Ethnic Racism in America
While people generally think of racism as referring to skin color, ethnic racism can affect people of any color. For example, near the end of the 19th century, the US experienced a surge of anti-Italian racism.
The late 1800s saw a large influx of Italian and Sicilian immigrants. In many cases, those people were viewed as somehow different from people born in America. Furthermore, people blamed them for taking jobs from “real” Americans. Magazines cast Italians as stupid, violent, and childish, or accused them of trying to spread anarchy and socialism in America.
In 1891, this ethnic racism led to one of the largest mass lynchings in US history, when a mob broke into a New Orleans jail and killed 11 Italian people.
Kendi defines colorism as a combination of racist policies and ideas that cause and maintain racial inequities between Light and Dark people, with the central belief being that Light people are superior to Dark people. In other words, the closer someone is to looking White, the better.
Note that “Light” and “Dark” refer to the varying skin colors of people of color. Light people have straighter hair and lighter skin, but they aren’t White. Dark people have bigger noses and lips, kinky hair, and darker skin. These two groups are made up of people from many nationalities, ethnicities, and races—membership is assigned based only on physical appearance.
(Shortform note: Colorism is still alive and well in the US today. For example, many schools and jobs have policies against curly or kinky hair, which is a common trait among Black people, especially dark-skinned Black people. Even though many people naturally have curly or kinky hair, it’s often deemed “unprofessional” or “inappropriate” for the workplace, so many Black people have to straighten their hair to fit in. California was the first state to ban discrimination against people based on their natural hair, an antiracist policy enacted by the Crown Act of 2019. To date, only 14 out of the 50 US states have passed such laws.)
Kendi defines anti-White racism as the belief that people of European descent are inferior in some way to other racial groups, or the belief that all White people support and uphold racist power structures. Note that the definition of anti-White racism doesn’t include racist policy because there are few, if any, examples of laws and policies that elevate other groups above White people.
Kendi makes the point that anti-White racism is misguided and harmful, just like any other form of racism; racist policies are the problem, not any particular group of people.
(Shortform note: There is some disagreement over the exact definition of racism, so you may encounter experts or educators who say that racism is systemic, not individual. Therefore, they argue, there’s no such thing as anti-White racism because society and policy tend to favor Whites. Others, like Kendi, use racism interchangeably with prejudice or bigotry—a definition that encompasses both individual and societal biases. In Kendi’s framework, anti-White racism does exist in the guise of bigotry aimed at individual White people by individual non-White people.)
So far, we’ve looked at various ways in which racism is directed at people, but racism can also be directed at spaces. Places that are governed or highly populated by racial groups can also be assigned races—a classic example would be the idea of the “ghetto,” a space inhabited mostly by poor Blacks, which is supposedly a dangerous and violent place for others to go. This is spatial bias: racist policies and ideas directed at places, rather than people.
(Shortform note: While in modern times the ghetto is associated with Black people—particularly in America—the first ghettos were designed to house Jews separately from other people. Furthermore, while modern ghettos are largely the result of unequal economic opportunities, those original ghettos were legally mandated and enforced; in other words, Jews were required to live there, rather than driven there by housing prices.)
This type of racism has two different goals. The first goal is to eliminate racialized spaces—in essence, to force those places to assimilate into White culture and take away places where minorities can experience and celebrate their cultures. Kendi argues that these racialized spaces should be protected.
(Shortform note: Racialized spaces in which people of color can be with each other and celebrate their shared experiences are crucial for minorities’ happiness and wellbeing. Such spaces provide places where marginalized people can fully express themselves, without worrying about other people judging them or feeling threatened by them. In short, racialized spaces are places of rest and healing for people who must constantly conform to the expectations of others.)
The second goal is to cause resource inequity between racialized spaces, based on the belief that certain racialized spaces are more deserving of resources than others; for example, supporting wealthy White-majority school districts instead of impoverished Black-majority ones.
In reality, no racialized spaces are any better or worse than others. Inequities are due to policy, not the people who live in or use those spaces, and we should champion policies that aim to restore equity of resources.
(Shortform note: As Kendi notes, racist policies typically provide White spaces with more funding and resources than Black spaces receive—and to correct that imbalance, antiracist policies would require investing more money and resources into Black communities. Since the book’s publication, US representatives have put forward policies that aim to address resource and spatial inequity: for example, the Neighborhood Homes Investment Act. The Act would offer tax credits to finance the development and rehabilitation of buildings in distressed and investment-starved neighborhoods, many of which have large Black populations. Rehabilitating these areas would not only improve local infrastructure but also increase residents’ home values and thus their overall wealth.)
Finally, intersectional bias is racism made worse by other types of bigotry, such as homophobia or classism—for example, someone who tolerates “successful” Blacks but is terrified of poor Black people, believing them all to be violent criminals. Importantly, for it to be intersectional bias, this person must also be tolerant of poor White people; the person’s prejudiced ideas arise at the intersection of race and class.
Kendi says that because intersectional bias is made up of a combination of racist ideas and classist, sexist, homophobic, or transphobic ideas, to be truly antiracist, we must also be anticapitalist, feminist, non-homophobic, and non-transphobic. For example, to believe that Black Lives Matter, we must believe that the lives of all Black people of every class, sexuality, and gender matter.
Resistance to Intersectionality
Intersectionality—the idea that people experience different types of discrimination based on many different parts of their identities—has recently become a hot-button issue in politics, especially in the US. The debate is not over the term itself, as most people agree that it’s an accurate description of society, but rather over how intersectionality could be used socially and politically.
For example, in 2018, conservative pundit Ben Shapiro released a video saying that intersectionality was creating a social hierarchy in which how much your opinion matters is based on how many “oppressed” groups you belong to: non-White races, the LGBTQA+ community, being female, and so on. Shapiro warns that intersectionality is therefore being used as a weapon against heterosexual white men—historically, the least oppressed of any group. In short, he is arguing that intersectionality isn’t just describing oppression but seeking to reverse it by giving more weight to the voices of historically oppressed groups.
Kimberlé Crenshaw, who developed the theory of intersectionality, says that arguments like Shapiro’s also rely on intersectionality being true, but come from the perspective of those who benefit from the current social hierarchy. In other words, Crenshaw believes that people ignore intersectional racism because they’re afraid that recognizing it and working to correct it could take away their societal advantages. They fear that society can only help oppressed groups by harming those who are less oppressed, which was never Crenshaw’s intent.
The third step toward becoming antiracist is to start addressing the root cause of racism—policy.
Kendi founded the Antiracist Research and Policy Center, which lays out the following process to work toward ending racial inequity:
To begin this process, we must first acknowledge that inequality is the result of policy, not people. In other words, don’t blame entire groups like Whites, conservatives, or baby boomers for societal issues; that would be engaging in the same type of bigoted thought that antiracism fights against.
Why Assigning Blame Is the Wrong Approach
Kendi’s first step toward becoming antiracist is to let go of the idea of blaming people, or groups of people, for the problems society faces today. In Meditations, Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius provides some thoughts about why looking for someone to blame for problems is the wrong approach.
First, blame is pointless. In short, there’s nobody to blame—everyone is doing the best they can with the situations they’re in and the knowledge they have. In the case of structural racism, there’s also nobody to blame because our society was built from the ground up around racist ideas and policies; blame for modern-day inequities would have to start with Gomes de Zurara and continue through practically everybody who’s lived since him. Singling out people or groups to blame is arbitrary at best, and racist at worst.
Second, blame is useless. Even if there were a person or group who was clearly at fault, assigning blame wouldn’t solve anything—racist policies and power structures would still be in place. That’s why Kendi says we must attack policies, rather than people.
Second, Kendi says we must acknowledge that racism is intersectional: Homophobia, classism, sexism, and all other forms of bigotry are part of the societal structure of oppression. Therefore, to solve racial inequity, we must create policies that correct all forms of inequity.
To that end, we should look for specific racist policies to fight against and antiracist policies to replace them. For example, if a hospital that serves predominantly Blacks and other minorities receives less funding and assistance than a hospital in a wealthy, predominantly White area, pressure local politicians to fix that imbalance.
As part of this process, determine which individuals or groups have the power to put antiracist policies into place. Get in touch with antiracist lawmakers to promote antiracist policies. Observe the impact those new policies have—if they aren’t having the equalizing effects that you hoped for, then work with those lawmakers to create better ones.
Where Do We Start With Racist and Antiracist Policy?
Racism can seem like an overwhelmingly large and complex issue, and while Kendi thoroughly explains the central problems and large-scale solutions to them, it may be hard for any one person to know how to help. In particular, what specific policies will help to correct systemic racism?
To that end, writer and public speaker Ijeoma Oluo’s book So You Want to Talk About Race suggests three specific types of antiracist policy you could support and push those in power to enact:
Increasing the minimum wage. A disproportionate number of minorities work minimum wage jobs, so raising it will help to correct the wealth imbalance between races.
Affirmative action. Affirmative action policies help Black people and other minorities to find employment opportunities that wouldn’t otherwise be open to them.
Police reform. Black people are much more likely to be victims of police discrimination, harassment, and violence than White people. Therefore, police reforms such as body cams, better training for officers, and clear procedures for filing complaints are crucial antiracist policies.
Finally, since policy ultimately reflects public opinion and public will, Kendi recommends doing what you can to inform people about specific racist policies and antiracist replacements for those policies. Keep it simple—many people won’t be open to changing their entire worldviews but will be willing to hear you out about a particular problem and the proposed solution to it.
Letter From Birmingham Jail: How and Why We Must Fight Inequity
Here, Kendi recommends discussing specific racist and antiracist policies with others to convince them to support antiracist initiatives. But what if the people you speak to are resistant to supporting antiracism, even through policy? How might you convince them that racism is an issue that we should all actively oppose?
One powerful expression of why it’s important for us all to fight injustice—and an argument that might win over those who are resistant to antiracism—comes from Martin Luther King Jr’s Letter from Birmingham Jail. The Letter includes the famous line, “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” and goes on to say that our lives are all interconnected: We’re all tied together by a shared country, a shared lifetime, and therefore a shared destiny. In fact, King went one step further than Kendi, saying that harming one marginalized group doesn’t just harm all marginalized groups, but all people.
It’s unclear whether King meant that such behavior will harm all people physically and economically, since oppressed people can’t contribute to society as effectively, or whether accepting injustice would harm us spiritually (as King was a very religious man). Either way, King was urging Americans to see themselves as a single people, rather than as a collection of different groups. This call for unity, and framing of oppression as a universal problem, may encourage otherwise resistant people to join the antiracist cause.
Letter from Birmingham Jail also lays out King’s methods of nonviolent protest and political pressure, which he called direct action. His tactics included marches, sit-ins, and civil disobedience: knowingly breaking unjust laws and peacefully accepting the punishment for doing so. The goal of direct action is, ultimately, to create political pressure: to create situations that are not dangerous to anyone but are impossible for White people to ignore. Such action also aims to show White sympathizers that protesters are being attacked and persecuted for their nonviolent action. Ultimately, King hoped that his demonstrations would win people over and get them to add their voices to the ongoing calls for justice.
In How to Be an Antiracist, author Ibram X. Kendi takes readers through his journey to become an antiracist—a person who believes that all racial groups are equal and supports policies that reduce inequity. Antiracists acknowledge that there are differences between races, but these differences aren’t responsible for inequities—policies are.
Part 1 covers what racism is and how it came into being. Part 2 covers different kinds of racism and how they intersect with each other. For each kind, we look at how and why it was invented, how its policies have affected society, and how it has affected Ibram specifically. We also describe how Ibram identified his own racist ideas and worked at dismantling them. Finally, in Part 3, we’ll look at some of the techniques Ibram and other antiracists use to combat racist policies on a societal rather than personal scale.
The goals of the book are to:
Race has only existed for about 600 years. Most people think that the concept of race came first, then people developed racist ideas, and then, finally, people developed racist policies stemming from their racist ideas. However, the true order of events is different: policy created to further self-interest—the lucrative slave trade of Africans—came first, and only then was race invented to justify the policy. Racist ideas came last.
In the fifteenth century, Prince Henry the Navigator wanted to get into the slave trade but didn’t want to work with Islamic slave traders, who were enslaving a variety of people including Europeans, Arabs, and Africans. Prince Henry sponsored voyages to West Africa and focused the Portuguese slave trade on Africans. His ships explored new regions of the continent, including the feared waters around Cape Bojador.
Because the Islamic traders were enslaving people from a variety of areas, their trading policies weren’t racist. However, Prince Henry’s policy, because it focused on a particular group of people, was racist.
In 1453, 20 years after Prince Henry had organized the African slave trade, the King of Portugal commissioned Gomes de Zurara to write a biography of Prince Henry. Zurara invented the African race when he described the people being sold at a slave auction in Lagos, Portugal. He described the people as being different from each other in language, ethnic group, and skin color, but he lumped them into a single group of people who lived like animals and needed to be saved by civilized Europeans, who were inherently superior.
Similarly, the “Indian” or negros da terra (“Blacks from the land”) race was invented by Portuguese and Spanish colonizers after they arrived in the Americas. All Indigenous people were lumped into this group. Alonzo de Zuazo, a Spanish lawyer, compared this race to the Black race, saying that the Blacks were strong and good at work while the Indigenous people were weak.
The goal of inventing races was twofold:
Zurara created the concept of sorting people into groups, but he didn’t actually call these groups “races.” Jacques de Brézé, a French poet, first used the word “race” in a poem in 1481. Then, in 1606, another Frenchman, Jean Nicot, defined the word “race” in a French dictionary to mean “descent.”
By the 18th century, the Asian and European races were invented. In 1735, Carl Linnaeus color-coded the four existing races as yellow (Homo sapiens asiaticus), white (Homo sapiens euopaeus), red (Homo sapiens americanus), and black (Homo sapiens afer), and he built a hierarchy in his text Systema Naturae. According to Linnaeus, Europeans were at the top and possessed positive traits such as intelligence and muscular bodies. Next were the Asians, who were melancholy, greedy, and haughty. Then the Indians, who were ill-tempered, stubborn, and free. Blacks were at the bottom and were lazy, careless, and ruled by caprice.
Even though race is not a legitimate scientific category, race has meaning because history, culture, society, and policy have given it meaning. It is, therefore, “real.” We have to acknowledge the existence of race in order to become antiracist—we have to identify racially so that we can see how our race is privileging or endangering us.
An important principle of antiracism is to clearly define words related to racism. Definitions are important for two reasons:
How to Be an Antiracist uses the following definitions:
A race, or racial group, is a hierarchical category into which people are sorted. These categories aren’t based on culture, biology, or ethnicity—they were invented by historical powers in order to gain power over groups of people. There are six races in the US: Latinx, Asian, African, European, Indigenous, and Middle Eastern.
A race maker is a person who creates racial groups and subgroups.
Racial is an adjective that means related to race. It doesn’t imply any hierarchy or superiority.
A racial inequity is an unjust imbalance between racial groups. It’s important to understand that racial inequities are caused by policies, not people within races.
Racist, as a noun, refers to a person who believes that some races are inferior to others and who supports racist policies, whether by creating them or by not working to dismantle them. “Racist” is a descriptive term, not a permanent identity—people can make both racist and antiracist decisions throughout their lives.
A racist idea is an idea that implies one racial group is better or worse than another.
Antiracist, as a noun, refers to a person who believes that all races are equal and who supports antiracist policies. It’s also a descriptive term, not a permanent identity.
An antiracist idea is an idea that implies all racial groups are equal.
A microaggression is the constant, daily abuse that White people subject people of color to. Most White people aren’t aware they’re committing microaggressions. While the term “microaggression” is widely used, Ibram doesn’t use it because “micro” implies that daily abuse is minor, which it isn’t, and “aggression” is vague. He prefers the term “racist abuse.”
Macroaggression is large-scale abuse directed at people of color.
A racist policy is any law, procedure, process, guideline, or rule, written or unwritten, that causes or maintains racial inequity. “Systemic racism,” “structural racism,” and “institutional racism” are synonyms, but Ibram prefers to use “racist policy” because it’s more straightforward and concrete.
An antiracist policy is any law, procedure, process, guideline, or rule, written or unwritten, that causes or maintains racial equity.
Racial discrimination is treating a group of people in a particular way based on their race. Racial discrimination is only racist when it creates inequity.
Racism is a combination of racist policies and ideas that causes and maintains racial inequities.
Antiracism is a collection of antiracist policies and ideas that cause racial equality.
You’ll notice there are no definitions of terms like “not racist” or “neutral policy.” That’s because there is no in-between when it comes to antiracism and racism—anything that’s not antiracist is racist. Likewise, there is no such thing as a “neutral policy”: All policies and ideas either advance or hamper equality.
(Shortform example: Racist policies have created funding imbalances between Black and White schools. A scholarship program open only to Black people is antiracist because it strives for educational equality between racial groups. Axing this scholarship program because White people aren’t allowed to apply may seem “neutral,” but, in fact, canceling the program would be racist because it would mean canceling something that’s aimed at remedying the current funding imbalance and thereby promoting racial equity.)
Race neutral programs can actually be more dangerous than the agenda of the alt right. While the alt right is unlikely to actually create a White ethnostate, race neutrality has a track record of leaving policies that create inequity in place and striking down programs that create equity.
Additionally, race neutrality often goes hand-in-hand with ideas around ignoring the existence of race (the notion of being “color blind”). While race is a power construct, not a meaningful scientific category, it still affects everyone’s lives. Pretending it doesn’t exist allows racists to carry out business as usual—if we ignore race, then we’re blind to racial inequity. Dispensing with racial groups will be one of the very last steps in the struggle to end racism, not the first.
There are three schools of thought on how to handle racial inequities:
Segregation. Segrationalists believe that some racial groups are inherently inferior and can’t rise to the level of other groups. They support programs that keep members of the inferior groups away from their groups by segregating, deporting, imprisoning, enslaving, or killing them. Segregationist ideas are racist.
Assimilation. Assimilationists believe that certain racial groups are inferior to others, but with work, the inferior group can reach the same level as the superior group. They support programs that will develop or civilize the inferior group. Assimilationist ideas are also racist—they set the White race as the standard everyone else has to match.
Antiracism. Antiracists believe that no racial group is superior to another. They support programs that aim to create racial equity.
Many people hold beliefs that fall into more than one of these schools of thought. People of color tend to hold both antiracist and assimilationist views and experience “dueling consciousness”—the sensation of looking at themselves from two angles: how they view themselves and how others view them. Antiracism suggests there’s nothing wrong with Black people and they’re perfectly capable of achieving success. But assimilation suggests that when Black people aren’t successful by White standards, it’s due to negative behaviors characteristic of the entire racial group. Consequently, Black people experiencing dueling consciousness are torn between the belief in their own inherent equality and the belief that Black people have only themselves to blame for the disproportional success of Whites in society.
Ibram experienced this dueling consciousness throughout his formative years. He was proud of being Black (an antiracist belief), but at the same time believed that Black people were responsible for their own problems—if Black students would just try harder (act more like White people and assimilate), they would be getting the same grades as White students.
How to Be an Antiracist is written in 18 chapters. We've reorganized the chapter order to be more coherent and logical. As a reference, here's a mapping of our chapter numbers to the original book:
There are several different types of racism, some of which intersect with other identities. Chapter 2 covers biological and ethnic racism, and subsequent chapters cover other types.
Biological racism is a combination of racist policies and ideas that causes and maintains racial inequities, the main idea being the belief that 1) there are biological or genetic differences between races, and 2) these differences make one race superior to another.
Example #1: A 1991 survey revealed that 50% of respondents thought that Black people had “more natural physical ability.”
Example #2: A generally held belief is that Black people are naturally good at improvisational decision making, which makes them good at basketball, rap, and jazz, and bad at astronomy, chess, and music.
There are no biological or genetic differences between races. Racial ancestry doesn’t exist. However, ethnic ancestry does exist—people who are from the same regions usually have similar genes, and these groups of people are called populations. Contrary to what most people believed, geneticists discovered that the populations within Africa are more genetically different from each other than they are from other continents’ populations. For example, genetically, Western African ethnic groups are more similar to groups in Western Europe than Eastern Africa.
There’s not a lot of historical or cultural support for biological racism—the Bible says that all humans descended from Adam and Eve, which suggests that all humans are the same, as does the American value of “all men are equal.”
However, biological racists wanted to find biological differences between racial groups so that they could arrange groups into a hierarchy. They came up with four theories:
Theory #1: The Curse of Ham. After surviving the Great Flood in his ark, Noah planted a vineyard, got drunk, and fell asleep naked in his tent. One of his sons, Ham, saw his father naked and told his brothers Shem and Japheth. His brothers avoided seeing Noah naked by walking backward into his tent and covering him. When Noah woke up, he was furious that Ham had seen him naked and cursed Ham’s son Canaan and his descendants to be the slaves of Shem. Writer George Best suggested that Canaan and his cursed descendants were the ancestors of African people. This theory lasted until the 19th century.
Theory #2: Polygenesis. Polygensis is the theory that each race has its own creation story and is a different species. Indigenous people aren’t mentioned in the Bible, so some White Christians wondered if they had descended from someone other than Adam—and if one group could come from “a different Adam,” then maybe Black people could have too. This idea was heresy, but some slaveholders preferred it to the Curse of Ham theory.
Polygenesis was debated through the Age of Enlightenment. People like Thomas Jefferson denounced it while people like Charles Darwin embraced it.
Theory #3: Natural selection and eugenics. Natural selection and eugenics acknowledge that all people come from the same ancestors, but suggest that not all people are equal. Darwin came up with a theory that the White race was naturally selected and the other races would either assimilate, be enslaved, or die out. Darwin’s half-cousin Francis Galton tried to speed up this natural selection via a transatlantic eugenics movement. He came up with policies that killed members of non-White groups and encouraged White people to reproduce with only each other.
Theory #4: Biological adaptations as a result of the slave trade. In 1988, Black researcher Clarence Grim suggested that African Americans have higher blood pressure because only the individuals who could tolerate high levels of salt had survived drinking ocean water during the Atlantic voyage to America. (Consuming large quantities of salt can increase blood pressure.) This was never proven and Grim didn’t come up with the idea in a lab; he thought of it while reading the fictional Roots.
It took until Nazi Germany’s genocide for the academic community to move away from the idea of biological racism. It took longer for this idea to permeate the general population.
In 2000, Bill Clinton announced that geneticists had finished surveying the entire human genome and discovered that humans share 99.9% of their genes. In spite of this proof, people still tried to find ways to justify biological differences between races. For example, segregationist Writer Nicholas Wade believes that the 0.1% difference in genes is race-related and that there’s a genetic component to behavior.
Growing up in the 90s, Ibram saw biological similarities, such as hair texture and nose shape, between himself and the other Black kids in his class. He also saw physical differences between himself and the White kids, and adults taught him that these differences weren’t simply superficial; they were related to the type of human he was.
In third grade, Ibram’s class was mostly Black. There were a few Latinx and Asian students and three White students, and the teacher subtly gave the White students preferential treatment. She wouldn’t punish them when they committed the same offenses other students had been punished for, and she would call on the White students even when others had their hands up.
One day, a quiet Black girl in the author’s class raised her hand. This was unusual—she was normally shy and rarely participated in class. The teacher noticed she had her hand up but ignored her. When a White hand went up, she called on that person instead. The Black girl was clearly upset that she’d been ignored, and Ibram was furious.
His class went to chapel service and after, Ibram refused to leave. His teacher ordered him to leave—she didn’t ask him what was wrong or why he was refusing to leave—and when that didn’t work, she called the principal. Racist teachers give misbehaving kids of color orders and punishments rather than empathy. The principal tried to order Ibram to move and again he refused to. Eventually, she sat down next to him and let him speak. He explained what had happened with his classmate and the principal said she would talk to the teacher. The teacher did improve, but Ibram switched schools the next year.
Ibram never believed that biological differences made any group superior (a biologically racist idea), but he did believe biological differences existed (also a biologically racist idea). In this way, he held both racist and antiracist views at the same time.
Ethnic racism is a combination of racist policies and ideas that causes and maintains racial inequities between racialized ethnic groups, the main idea being the belief that there’s a hierarchy within races—certain ethnic groups within a race are superior or inferior to others within the same race.
Example #1: European colonizers decided that there were “Five Civilized Tribes” of Indigenous people. The Seminole, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Cherokee were civilized, and all the other Indigenous ethnic groups were wild.
Example #2: The ethnicities African American and Indian are both racialized as Black. A 1999 study found that West Indian immigrants thought African Americans were lazy and lacking family values, and the African Americans thought West Indian immigrants were selfish and arrogant.
The truth is, there is no hierarchy of ethnicities. Ethnic groups are different from each other, but none of them are superior or inferior.
Ethnic racism comes from the slave trade—certain enslavers had favorite ethnic groups and thought these groups made better slaves than others. Most American planters thought Ghanaians made the best slaves and Angolans the worst. The reasoning was invented—one Frechman attributed the strong work ethic of captives from Ghana to the fact that that part of Africa is barren, so people who live there have to work hard to cultivate the land to survive. Allegedly, because Angola had fertile land, it was easy to find food without working hard for it, so Angolans were naturally lazier. However, Angolans were the most traded ethnic group and the first to arrive in the US.
Some ethnic racism may also stem from the idea that continental Africans allegedly enslaved “their own people.” However, Africans who enslaved other Africans didn’t see everyone in Africa as belonging to the same group—as we learned, the Portuguese made up the concept of race, and it wasn’t globally accepted until around the 20th century. Africans who were involved in the slave trade weren’t selling members of their own ethnic group, they were selling other Africans, who were just as different to them as White people.
Because inequities between races tend to be very obvious and inequities within races less so, racist policies that create inequalities within groups are less contested even though they can be just as bad as the inequalities between races.
For example, when studies began to reveal that Black immigrants, on average, have a higher family income than African Americans, people wondered why, and then made up their own justifications. For example, a 1996 Economist commentator wrote that Black immigrants are more hardworking and entrepreneurial than African Americans. Therefore, according to the commentator, racism couldn’t have a hand in the difficulties of African Americans because Black immigrants were Black too, and they were doing fine. African Americans were struggling because they were lazier and less motivated.
However, when Black immigrants are compared to immigrants from other racialized groups, the racism that people like the Economist commentator challenged rears its head again. Black immigrants are the most educated group of immigrants to the US, but they earn less than non-Black immigrants and have the highest rate of unemployment.
Black immigrants being more successful than African Americans doesn’t have anything to do with their ethnicity, it has to do with the fact that they’re immigrants. People who choose to immigrate are usually people who are ambitious and resilient or have a lot of resources. Ambition, resilience, and resources make it easier to succeed.
Even though some people inaccurately believe that Black immigrants are superior to African Americans, there were periods of US history where racist power didn’t want any people of color entering the country.
Policies included the Chinese Restriction Act (1882), Emergency Quota Act (1921), and President Coolidge’s Immigration Act (1924) that restricted the immigration of non-White people. Coolidge and his supporters thought that only White immigrants could keep America “American.”
In the 1990s, the Immigration and Nationality Act (1965), the Refugee Act (1980), and the Immigration Act (1900) were supposed to make up for the Coolidge-era policies by encouraging immigration to the US from non-European countries. The new policies did increase immigration, and by 2000, the Latinx immigrant population was 14.1 million (compared to 4.2 million in 1980) and in 2015, Black immigrants made up 8.7% (three times as high as the 1980 number) of the country’s Black population.
Now, 100 years later, Jeff Sessions and other American politicians are trying to go back to the Coolidge era. Sessions said that the current immigration numbers are as high as those of 1924 and that, as in 1924, the US should limit immigration again.
Ibram has had plenty of experience with ethnic racism over the years. When he was younger, he held ethnically racist ideas that he later realized were a problem.
In Ibram’s eighth grade class, everyone was made fun of for something. Because of his large head, Ibram was nicknamed Bonk, after a cartoon character with a ridiculously large head who headbutted his enemies.
Another student, Kwame, was Ghanaian, and the class made fun of him for being an immigrant. They likened him to Akeem, a prince from a fictional African country who comes to Queens to find a wife in the movie Coming to America. Throughout the movie, characters make fun of Akeem by suggesting that Africa is uncivilized and things like wearing clothes must be a new experience for him.
Ibram also experienced tensions between ethnic groups in his neighborhood. Ibram’s neighbors were a Haitian immigrant couple with sons Ibram became friends with. While the parents were polite, they kept Ibram at a distance. He thought it might have had something to do with the fact that at the time, African Americans were exhibiting bigotry towards Haitian immigrants.
People often assume Ibram is an immigrant because ethnic racists assume that as a successful writer and professor, he can’t be African American. When he answers that he’s from Queens, his father is from New York, his mother is from Georgia, and that he’s a descendant of enslaved Africans, the questioners give up. They either think he’s an exception, or they lecture him about how lazy his ethnic group generally is.
While the belief that races are genetically distinct has contributed to racism throughout history, there are many more common, and more subtle, beliefs that contribute to racism today. These commonly-held racist beliefs often fall into the categories of bodily racism and colorism, which are related to people’s physical appearance.
Bodily racism is a combination of racist policies and ideas that causes and maintains racial inequities, the main idea being the belief that people of certain races are more animal-like or dangerous than those of other races.
Example #1: Bill Clinton said that Black people have to understand White fear in America. He said that when White people encounter or see violence in the media, it’s often coming from Black people.
Example #2: Cops are scared of Black people, even unarmed kids. The US population is 13% Black, but people killed by police are disproportionately Black—in 2018, 21% of people killed by police were Black. White people are half as likely to be killed by police as Black people.
In reality, there are no inherently violent or dangerous races. Researchers have found that there’s a much stronger correlation between unemployment and violent-crime levels than race and violent crime levels, for example:
Additionally, all-Black neighborhoods have varying levels of crime. If Black people were inherently violent, crime levels in all-Black neighborhoods would be the same. Middle- and upper-income neighborhoods—in which people who have jobs tend to live—are less violent than low-income neighborhoods.
White people have consistently associated Black people with violence. Historical figures such as colonizer Captain John Smith called Black people “devilish” in 1631. In 1903, senator Benjamin Tillman said that Africans were “fiends” and “wild beasts.” Today, Americans view Black people’s bodies as more dangerous and violent than White people’s, even when they’re the same size.
This view of Black people as dangerous resulted in laws targeting violent crime that disproportionately affect Black people, such as the 1994 Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. This act created new minimum sentences, capital offenses, prisons, and federal three-strike laws. It also increased the number of police officers and made it possible to try anyone thirteen or older as an adult.
In response to the proposed act, the Congressional Black Caucus asked for additional funding for violence-prevention and drug treatment programs. Republicans opposed the funding and demanded it be significantly cut before they would support the bill. Democrats and members of the Black Caucus caved. They didn’t want to entirely lose funding, and they also believed the Black body was dangerous.
However, racist Americans didn’t think this act was enough. In 1995, John J. DiIulio Jr., a political scientist at Princeton, warned that “super-predators” were coming. Super-predators were a new generation of criminals developing in Black inner-city neighborhoods. Youth were being influenced by others in the neighborhood and raised with violent inclinations. DiIluio thought this generation would spawn the worst criminals to ever exist.
Superpredators never materialized and violent crime levels went down. In 1993, 7.4% of urban residents were victims of violent crime, but the percentage declined throughout the 90s, and in 2016 it was 3%. Researchers don’t completely trust these numbers—they think that many violent crimes aren’t reported. But even taking that into account, the numbers are a far cry from the idea that Black neighborhoods are perpetually and inherently violent.
Ibram had internalized, complicated, contradictory feelings about bodily racism growing up. In ninth grade, he went to a high school in central Queens that had a large population of Black, Asian, and Latinx students, and Ibram was scared of the other Black kids. There were some legitimately scary Black kids at his school, such as Smurf, who beat up kids on the bus and once pulled a gun on Ibram. Ibram defused the situation by telling Smurf he wasn’t scared and complimenting the weapon. Smurf bullied other people too, and Ibram was never brave enough to step in, which he regrets to this day.
However, a good portion of the time, Ibram’s fears of other Black people were unfounded. If he accidentally bumped into someone in the hall or walked through a group of crew members, nothing happened. The disinterested teachers, overcrowding, and large class sizes were probably more dangerous than the students.
Ibram’s parents also worried about other Black people. They didn’t like it when Ibram played basketball at neighborhood courts—they worried he’d get shot—and Ibram’s father eventually built a court in the backyard.
At the same time, Ibram thought his neighborhood was safe enough. He knew it had certain dangers but he didn’t think it was a hellhole of violence, and he never connected the violence to Blackness.
“Light” and “Dark” refer to the varying skin colors of people of color. Light people have straighter hair and lighter skin, but they aren’t White. Dark people have bigger noses and lips, kinky hair, and darker skin. These two groups are made up of people from many nationalities, ethnicities, and races—membership is assigned based on physical appearance.
Colorism is a combination of racist policies and ideas that causes and maintains racial inequities between Light and Dark people, the main idea being the belief Light people are superior to Dark people. Sometimes Light people are lumped in with White people when needed to maintain majority.
Example #1: In 2007, sports commentator Don Imus said that Tennesse’s Light basketball players were cute while Rutger’s Dark ones were “nappy-headed hos.”
Example #2: White female students are half as likely to be suspended as Dark ones, but White and Light female students have the same likelihood of suspension.
The truth is, there is no hierarchy of skin color. No color is better, worse, or more or less beautiful than any other.
In 1680, Morgan Godwyn wrote that Black people think as well of themselves as Europeans think of themselves. Enlightenment intellectuals tried to change this—Johan Joachim Winckelmann wrote that African Americans need to get it into their heads that beauty is White.
Colorism in the US was popularized by Samual Stanhope Smith. In 1787, he spoke to the American Philosophical Society about color. He said that domestic servants who worked closer to White people became more attractive—Lighter—and the people who worked in the fields and were farthest away had strange bodies and hair.
Slaveholders agreed that there was a color hierarchy. They thought that the Lighter an enslaved person was, the better they were, and the more they paid for them. Light people often worked in the house, while Dark people worked outside in the fields because slaveholders thought that Light people were more skilled. The hierarchy was White, Light, Dark, and then Animal. (However, some enslavers thought that “mulattos”—mixed-race people—were worse than Dark people.)
After emancipation in 1865, colorism lived on. White communities tried to keep Black people, both Light and Dark, away from them, and Light people tried to keep Dark people away from them. For example, in the 19th century, “Blue Vein” societies came into existence. These societies excluded anyone whose skin was too dark to see the blue of their veins through it. Light was a privilege that people wanted to keep.
Dark people didn’t want to associate with Light people either. Three rules came into effect:
In 1920, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote that Black people had gotten past colorism. He changed his mind when he met a biracial man named Walter White. White had blue eyes and blond hair, was pro-assimilation, and allegedly believed than non-biracial Black people were inferior.
Getting Lighter—to the point where you could pass as White or Light—became an industry. Black men used hair gel called congolene to straighten their hair, which made it look more similar to Light people’s hair. Skin lightening products became popular in 1938.
For a brief period in the early 1970s during the Black Power movement, Dark people embraced their natural hair, but the quest for Lightness returned in the 1980s. Looking Light had advantages—for example, Light people had higher incomes than Dark people.
The post-racial beauty ideal is Lightness. Lightness is racially ambiguous but includes things like lighter eye color, straighter hair, thinner noses, and medium buttocks and lips. These qualities are similar to the White beauty ideal, however, according to surveys, people think tanned skin, which looks like Light skin, is more attractive than Dark or pale skin.
As an undergraduate at Florida A&M University (FAMU), Ibram faced his dueling consciousness when it came to his appearance. He wore cornrows, which embraced his Darkness. Cornrows made racists think he was a thug, but he didn’t care. He also wore light-colored contact lenses. At the time, he didn’t think the contacts were an attempt to be Whiter or Lighter—he wore them because he thought they made him cuter. He never reflected on why he thought lighter eyes were cuter.
The first woman Ibram dated at FAMU was Light. All of Ibram’s friends at FAMU preferred Light women and treated them differently from Dark women. Ibram felt uncomfortable about liking a Light woman—he was afraid he was conforming to the colorist beauty standard—so he broke up with her and planned to date only Dark women. Although he was trying not to be colorist, this promise to himself to only date Dark women was a form of colorism, too—he’d flipped the hierarchy, but he was still assigning superiority to one color over another.
Bodily racism includes the idea that people of certain races are more animal-like or dangerous than those of other races.
Think about the last time you saw a person who was a different race than you at a distance. What was your first instinctive impression of them? Did they seem bigger or stronger than you, or smaller and weaker? Did you feel the need to do a particular action, such as cross the street to avoid getting close to them?
Where do you think this impression or instinct came from? (From experiences with people of that race, from culture, from the media, and from something else?
Thinking back on the encounter, do you think your first impression was accurate? Why or why not?
In addition to bodily racism and colorism, cultural and behavioral racism are types of common and sometimes subtle beliefs that contribute to racism today. Cultural and behavioral racism are related to how people act, both as a community and as individuals.
Cultural racism is a combination of racist policies and ideas that causes and maintains racial inequities, the main idea being the belief that there is a standard culture that is superior and the cultures of other racialized groups are inferior.
Example #1: Enslaved Africans created the language of Creole in Haiti. Racist powers deem these languages mere “dialects” of the “standard” English that White people speak, and they attach negative connotations to these languages such as “broken” or “nonstandard.”
Example #2: Columnist Jason Riley condemned Black youth culture in New York because it “celebrated thuggery.” He thought that the baggy pants and loose shirts people wore glorified jail fashion. This belief suggests that certain ways of dressing are inherently superior to others.
In reality, there is no hierarchy of cultures. Cultures are different from each other, but none of them are superior or inferior.
Cultural racism started back in the Age of Enlightenment when Europeans decided their culture was the normal standard and everyone else’s was inferior or pathological.
Enslaved Africans created new cultures in most European countries, influenced by what surrounded them and informed by their existing cultures. African American culture was created by Ibram’s ancestors. They created the language of Ebonics by mixing ancestral languages with English, and they created African Christianity, which includes call-and-response, lively funerals, and Holy Ghost worship.
Culturally racist scholars see this culture creation as assimilation. They expect that if African Americans still had culture, they would use the same languages and traditions that the people in Africa do. However, outward displays of culture such as fashion or food are only one facet of culture. Culture is also based in internal values and philosophies.
Culture is always evolving, and in the 1990s, Ebonics, hip-hop, and dressing “fresh” (stylishly) were part of Black New York culture. This culture wasn’t always popular with parents and grandparents, who particularly disliked hip-hop because they thought its lyrics about thugs and sex, among other things, reinforced stereotypes and was a bad influence. Critics also thought that hip-hop reinforced stereotypes and that its content turned people into delinquents. If only the Black culture could become more “civilized,” one critic argued, racial inequities would cease to exist. But, as we know, cultures don’t produce inequities (policies do), and distinguishing between “civilized” and “uncivilized” cultures is a culturally racist activity—it implies that one culture is superior to another.
(Mainstream culture, however, appreciated Black culture enough to appropriate elements of it such as fashion, music, and language.)
Ibram loved African American culture, which he first experienced in church. Strangers called each other brother and sister, the congregation called back at preachers, choir members swayed to the music, and funerals were full of life.
Ibram also experienced culture whenever he visited the Ave, the intersection of Jamaican Avenue and 164th Street. Ibram’s generation didn’t care if adults or White people didn’t like their clothes or language. They wore baggy jeans, bubble coats, Nike Air Force 1s, or dangling chains. It wasn’t just about what you wore, either, it was how you wore it—experimentation was part of the culture. Shoes were especially important. Ibram and his friends would take measures to make sure the fronts of the shoes didn’t crease, such as stuffing them at night or wearing them with a sock rolled up over their toes to pad out the front. It wasn’t comfortable, but it was fresh.
The Ave was also full of hip-hop. Cars and stores would play music, people walking by practiced out loud, and people rapped on corners. Ibram considered hip-hop to be oral poetry, short stories, and adventure fantasy.
In 1997, Ibram and his family moved to a predominantly White neighborhood in Manassas, Virginia. The first night Ibram was there, he was worried the KKK would show up because he’d heard plenty about Black people being abused in the South.
When Ibram was fifteen, he believed in multiculturalism. He knew his own culture was legitimate. However, that didn’t stop him from looking down on the cultures of Southerners. He thought their music was terrible, they couldn’t dress, and their basketball players were “scrubs.” He was arrogant, and this kept potential friends at a distance. Furthermore, he thinks his cultural elitism probably cost him a spot on the junior-varsity basketball team.
Ibram didn’t have the whole picture. He knew that generally looking down on a culture was wrong—he would never say Black people were culturally inferior. He would, however, judge specific Black cultures, and it took him two years to begin to respect the culture of North Virginia and make friends.
Behavioral racism is a combination of racist policies and ideas that causes and maintains racial inequities, the main idea being the belief that individuals represent their entire race, and racial groups represent the behavior of individuals.
Example #1: President Clinton claimed that no social program was going to be able to help Black people deal with absent fathers, welfare dependency, or pregnancy out of wedlock unless Black people first took some personal responsibility for getting themselves into these situations. Clinton’s ideas were racist because they suggested that the difficulties Black people faced were caused purely by their behavior, not by policy.
Example #2: In the 90s, Black parents held their children to a very high standard because both Black and White people held the idea that if an individual Black teenager did something wrong, it made the Black race as a whole look bad.
The truth is, racial-group behavior doesn’t exist. There’s no scientific evidence to link behavior and race—all theories are anecdotal and based on stories of individuals’ behavior. The actions of individuals can lead them to individual success, but group success depends on policy, not on any level of personal responsibility.
Additionally, culture and behavior are separate. Culture is a group tradition. Certain racial groups might share culture, but not every group within a race, or every individual member, participates in that culture.
Behavioral racism came into being in 1869 when Francis Galton (Darwin’s eugenicist cousin) tried to find a way to prove that Black people weren’t as smart as White people. He couldn’t come up with a way to prove this, but two of his successors did—they invented an IQ test. Lewis Terman, a Stanford psychologist, tested Americans and found that IQ varied by race.
Eugenicist Carl C. Brigham, a psychologist at Princeton, took these results to mean that an intellectual racial hierarchy existed. He later created that SAT, believing it would show that White people were by nature more intelligent than people of other races.
By the 1960s, the idea that an intellectual hierarchy existed was dying out, but there was still a gap between White and Black students’ results on standardized testing. This gap was named the “achievement gap” and initiatives such as Race to the Top, Common Core, and No Child Left Behind were implemented to try to close the gap. However, these initiatives only amplified the importance of standardized testing.
Standardized testing is a massively effective racist policy. It seems like a legitimate measure of intelligence, because it’s “standard” and relies on hard numbers, but it disfavors certain races. Test-taking is an art, and most tutors and test-prep courses are in White and Asian communities, so many Black students don’t have access to them. Even if you’re very intelligent, doing well on standardized tests requires learning how they work. The “achievement gap” is a gap in opportunity, not intelligence.
Behavioral racists link all sorts of behaviors to race, not just studiousness. Behavioral racists over time have attributed “Black behavior” to three sources:
In reality, “Black behavior” doesn’t exist, and even well-meaning attempts to explain “Black behavior” are damaging.
The “oppression-inferiority thesis” is related to the last two possible “causes” for bad Black behavior. This thesis states that oppression has negatively influenced the behavior of the oppressed.
A recent example is the idea of post-traumatic slave syndrome, PTSS, which is allegedly the reason for poor parenting, defeatism, and Black “infighting,” just to name a few behaviors. Author Joy DeGruy wrote that many African Americans have PTSS, which was based on anecdotal evidence, not real science. In fact, real science shows that enduring trauma doesn’t always result in post-traumatic stress. For example, only 13.5-30% of soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq have PTSD.
It was helpful for DeGruy to make the public aware of the trauma, but, again, it’s important to keep in mind the differences between individuals and groups. Some Black people have suffered trauma, but it’s inaccurate—and racist—to suggest that all Black people are traumatized.
Ibram’s grades were low throughout much of high school, and because it was the nineties and he was a Black teenager, people put a lot of pressure on him. They told him that his bad behavior reflected badly on the entire Black race. His grandparents’ and parents’ generations were fond of using Martin Luther King Jr. to shame individuals by saying that they were throwing away everything he’d fought for.
Part of the reason Ibram was checked out in the first place was racism—he’d gone to overcrowded schools (often the result of racist school-zoning policies) and regularly experienced racist abuse. However, he, like every Black person, was expected to overcome all this, and if he couldn’t, it was his fault.
When Ibram was in his senior year of high school, a classmate, Angela, told him about the Martin Luther King speech contest. She convinced him to participate and he wrote a speech about “Black behavior.” Reflecting on the speech today, Ibram thinks King would have hated it. It was a version of the shaming speeches directed at him from the civil-rights generation—it was about all the things that were wrong with Black youth, such as their lack of interest in education, lack of ambition for anything besides music or sports, and unwillingness to do anything about people’s perception of them as frightening.
It may have been racist, but when Ibram showed Angela his speech, she loved it. So did the judges—Ibram won his high school competition and went on to compete at the county level. Winning made him feel better about himself and his academics. Ironically, he only escaped the behavioral racism of others by engaging in behavioral racism himself, against other Black people.
Ibram got into two colleges and decided to attend Florida A&M University (FAMU). He told people he chose it because it “felt right,” which is often what people say when they don’t want to look into their motives too closely. Reflecting on the decision, Ibram realized he didn’t only want to be around other Black academic superstars; he wanted to get away from those he viewed as badly behaving Black people.
In previous chapters, we considered different types of racism. Now, it’s time to look at the intersections between race and other identities such as class, gender, and sexuality. Race is inextricably linked to these other identities, and bigotry towards any identity can have a multiplying effect on racism.
Because intersectional racism is made up of a combination of racist ideas and classist, sexist, homophobic, or transphobic ideas, to be truly antiracist, we must also be anticapitalist, feminist, non-homophobic, and non-transphobic. For example, to believe that Black Lives Matter, we must believe that the lives of all Black people—be they poor, female, or queer—matter.
Race-classes are combinations of race and economic class, for example, Black poor or “White trash.”
Class racism is a combination of racist policies and ideas that causes and maintains racial inequities between race-classes. Class racists link race and economic class, support capitalistic policies that have a disproportionately negative economic impact on members of certain races, and use racist ideas to justify those policies.
Although some people blame groups like the Black poor for their poverty, in reality, economic disparities are the result of policies, not a result of the actions of individual members of races.
Example #1: In 2017 in the US, the White poverty rate was a third of the Black poverty rate, indicating that Black poor people are affected by two sets of ideas and policies—those that disfavor them for being Black and those that disfavor them for being poor—while White poor people are affected only by the policies and ideas that disfavor the poor.
Example #2: Capitalist growth in Africa has benefited many foreign investors, but very few Africans. The majority of Africans in Sub-Saharan Africa, most of whom are Black, live in poverty, and as the continent’s wealth increases, its poverty rate also increases. In fact, by 2030, 9 out of 10 “extremely poor people” will live in Sub-Saharan Africa. This is clearly a systemic problem, not a problem with the behavior of individual Africans.
When tackling any type of intersectional racism, it’s important to target both elements, or else inequity will remain. For example, antiracist policies might eliminate economic differences between Latinx and Asian poor people, or middle-income Black and White people, but there would still be class differences. In the past decades, antiracist policies have made strides toward narrowing racial inequities, but economic ineqities have widened.
Capitalism is inherently racist because racism and capitalism developed hand in hand. Both came into being at the same time, during the slave trade. Enslaved people were sold for money, and then slaveholders used their labor to make money, power industrial revolutions, and finance empires.
Historically, and even according to defenders of capitalism who call everything from ending poverty to protecting the environment “anticapitalist,” capitalism is the exploitation of people and the environment, and the freedom to prioritize self-interest over anything else.
Some people, such as Elizabeth Warren, a US senator, define capitalism differently. Warren defines capitalism as a market that has rules, and the rules are critical to her definition. Some people call her anticapitalist because they don’t like her rules. Ibram agrees that the system she describes might help reduce inequity, but he doesn’t think the system should be called capitalism because it doesn’t match the more accurate definition of capitalism above.
Communists or socialists, while they’re not capitalist, aren’t necessarily antiracist. For example, in 1901 the Socialist Party of America wouldn’t take an anti-lynching position because it didn’t want to lose racist White supporters.
In the 1920s, Writer W.E.B. Du Bois started reading Marx, saw that the Great Depression had a larger effect on Black than White poor people, saw that the New Deal wasn’t helping the inequity, and wrote about antiracist anticapitalism, inspiring others to start looking into the divides between class and race.
The antiracist anticapitalists went into hiding or prison in the 1950s, when fear of communism was at its strongest, but they came out in the 1960s and have reappeared today, for example, in the Occupy and Black Lives Matter movements.
Over the years, many people have tried to explain why people are poor. The real reason is policy—policy creates an environment in which no matter how well poor people behave, it’s difficult for them to escape poverty.
However, plenty of people came up with other incorrect racist and classist explanations. In the 1960s, Oscar Lewis, an anthropologist, thought that poverty was related to culture—children raised by poor parents copied their behaviors, which resulted in the children also being poor. Other people thought poverty was related to welfare—welfare annihilated dignity and turned people into “animal creature[s],” according to Barry Goldwater, a US senator.
Black sociologist Kenneth Clark addressed the culture of poverty in 1965 in his book Dark Ghetto using the oppression-inferiority thesis. In earlier times, people thought slavery or segregation were responsible for bad Black behavior and inferiority. Clark wrote that now poverty and “ghetto” life were responsible. Kenneth Clark was aware of racist policies in existence at the time, but he subscribed to class racism. He thought that because he had escaped the ghetto and become wealthy, Black people who hadn’t were inferior, and their inferior culture kept them in poverty.
As opposed to the culture of poverty, the cycle of poverty accurately roots poverty in policy—it’s policy, not culture, that causes exploitation, lack of opportunity, and low income.
When Ibram moved to North Philadelphia to attend Temple University for graduate school, he chose to live in Hunting Park, which was allegedly one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Philadelphia. It was part of the “ghetto.”
Ibram wanted to live there because he had the idea that poor Black people were the most authentic Black people. In his mind, poverty, criminality, sex, and gambling in an urban setting were the defining features of the most authentic Black community. At the time, he thought culture started at the bottom and filtered up, and he wanted to be more authentic himself. He now realizes that in identifying the culture of one race-class as superior to another, he was being racist.
Race-genders are combinations of race and gender. For example, Black women and White men are two race-genders.
Gender racism is a combination of racist policies and ideas that causes and maintains racial inequities between race-genders. Gender racists link race and gender and arrange these race-genders into a hierarchy.
Example #1: Black men are 50 times more likely than White women to go to prison. This statistic is a result of two sets of policies and ideas: 1) those related to race (the stereotype that Black people are more dangerous than White people) and 2) those related to gender (the stereotype that men are more dangerous than women).
Example #2: The average wealth of a single Black woman is $100, while for a White woman, it’s $42,000. Even though all women are affected by sexist ideas and policies, Black women are additionally affected by racist ideas and policies.
Gender inequalities are the result of policies, not the actions of individual members of races.
In 1991, Philomena Essed, a scholar, came up with the term gendered racism. She noticed Black women had to deal with both sexism and racism and that it was impossible to consider them in isolation. Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, a critical race theorist, expanded on this idea and came up with the term “intersectionality.” She wrote that while sexism and racism are linked in real life, they’re rarely addressed in policy.
Though gender racism wasn’t named until 1991, it had been affecting people for far longer. For example, in 1965, a government report stated that nearly 25% of Black families were matriarchal (and therefore “broken,” in the words of the media). The author of the report said these matriarchies resulted in a host of negative consequences, including the emasculation of Black men. Following the author’s lead, others suggested Black women should mend their broken families and help empower Black men by being submissive toward their husbands, returning them to their rightful place at the head of the family. The government report also promoted the idea that Black men had been more affected by racism than Black women.
In the 1970s, Black feminist groups formed. Black women had to create their own spaces because in Black spaces, they had to contend with sexism, and in feminist spaces, they had to contend with racism. The most antiracist queer space of the time was the Combahee River Collective, which formed in 1974. The organization’s goal was for Black women to be seen as equals to any other group.
Gender racism particularly affected Black mothers. In the 1970s and 1980s, the public became worried about the growing percentage of Black single mothers. Some said that having a father around, even if he’s abusive, is better for children than being fatherless. Others suggested that a child can’t thrive without the income of two parents. Assumptions such as these didn’t take into account the various reasons single mothers are single—the fathers are dead, in prison, or dangerous.
In 1994, Charles Murray, a political scientist, got the word out that 68% of Black children were born into single-parent households. Murray attributed this to the “welfare system,” and liberals such as Ibram’s parents attributed it to sexual irresponsibility, poverty, disengagement from Christianity’s pre-marriage abstinence, or disregard of opportunities. None of this was accurate—the higher percentage was due to married Black women having fewer children, not single Black women having more.
Gender racism results in negative consequences for everyone, not only certain race-genders such as Black women. For example, here are the effects on White women:
Gender racism also affects men of color:
Ibram’s initial ideas on gender were shaped by his parents. They didn’t raise him to be sexist, but they didn’t train him to be a feminist either. Ibram’s parents didn’t always adhere to traditional gender roles—for example, when Ibram’s parents got married, the pastor recited the traditional wedding vows that included husbands loving their wives and wives obeying their husbands. But Ibram’s mother refused to agree to obey him, which shocked both the pastor and his father. His father asked if she would be all right with changing the vow to “submit one to another.”
However, sometimes his parents demonstrated sexist ideas. His mother called his father the head of the family, and he would lead while she submitted.
Ibram started to reevaluate his ideas about gender at Temple University when he met Kaila, a strong lesbian woman who was ahead of him in the doctoral program. Together with Yaba, another strong woman, Kaila led the program’s discourse. Whenever a homophobic, patriarchal, or racist idea came up, the two women went after it.
Ibram was terrified of them and tried to avoid them because he was worried he’d bring up an offensive idea and be called on it, but he also admired their confidence and intelligence. He read the books they brought up and tried to learn more about gender racism because he wanted to change his ideas.
Kaila and Yaba broke all the stereotypes of homophobia and the patriarchy—they weren’t sex-crazed, they weren’t abnormal, and they didn’t hate men or want female supremacy. They showed Ibram that it was power and policies, not specific groups of people, that were the problem.
Race-sexualities are combinations of race and sexualities, for example, Black gay men and White lesbian women.
Queer racism is a combination of racist policies and ideas that causes and maintains racial inequities between race-sexualities. Queer racists link race and sexuality and arrange these race-sexualities into a hierarchy.
Example #1: In the US, on average, transgender women of color have a life expectancy of 35 years because they face so much transphobia and racial violence.
Example #2: 7% of children raised by White heterosexuals live in poverty, while 14% raised by White male same-sex couples live in poverty, and 32% raised by Black male same-sex couples live in poverty. This statistic is a result of two sets of policies and ideas: 1) those related to race (policies favor White people over people of color), and 2) those related to sexuality (policies favor straight people over queer people).
Queer inequalities are the result of policies, not the actions of individual members of races.
Racism and homophobia have been related throughout history. In 1897, Havelock Ellis, a British physician, popularized the word “homosexual” in his first book about sex and wrote that sex was related to race. He was a biological racist and thought that there were biological differences between heterosexual and homosexual people as well. He didn’t condemn homosexuality—he thought it was a “congenital physiological abnormality,” not a crime—but he did, however, believe that all people of color are born criminals.
At the time, racist doctors were comparing the clitoris of White and Black women. White women supposedly had “bound together” clitorises, which meant they were more civilized. The “free” clitoris found in Black women meant they were wild and animal-like. These doctors suggested that the “free,” or abnormally prominent, clitoris was related to homosexuality.
The combination of the queer racist ideas that Black people are more hypersexual and queer people are more hypersexual suggested that Black queers were the most hypersexual race-sexuality, and you could identify these people by their prominent clitoris.
Like Ibram’s ideas on gender, his ideas on sexuality were shaped by his upbringing. His parents didn’t raise him to be homophobic or sexist, but they rarely talked about queer people.
Ibram had two close friends at Temple University, Weckea and Raena. One day, Raena told Ibram that Weckea was gay. Ibram wasn’t comfortable with homosexuality and thought Raena might be trying to break up his friendship with Weckea.
Up until this point, Ibram held some stereotypical beliefs about Black gay men, such as that they were reckless, sex-crazed, and performed feminity. (Performing femininity or masculinity refers to authentically expressing gender, as opposed to acting.) Weckea didn’t fit into Ibram’s stereotypes at all—he was private and performed masculinity.
Ibram was faced with a choice—maintain his homophobia or maintain his friendship with Weckea. Ibram chose Weckea and began dismantling his homophobia. He let his stereotypical beliefs go and learned from Weckea how to recognize homophobia in others.
Also, as Ibram had done with race as a child, he acknowledged his gender and sexuality. He identified as a cisgendered (his gender identity is the same as his birth sex) heterosexual Black male, and being cis, male, and hetero came with privilege he could use to support people of other sexualities.
In previous chapters, we looked at how racism is directed at people. In this chapter, we’ll look at how racism is directed at spaces. Spaces that are governed or highly populated by racial groups can be assigned race.
Space racism is a combination of racist policies and ideas that aim to eliminate racialized spaces or that cause resource inequity between racialized spaces, the main idea being the belief that certain racialized spaces are more deserving of resources than others.
Example #1: People believed that Black “ghetto” neighborhoods were full of violence and juvenile delinquency, and this would creep into surrounding areas if people weren’t careful. People assumed that the people living in these neighborhoods had fewer resources because they were less deserving of them.
Example #2: In South Carolina, school districts became racialized spaces, and there were White schools and Black schools. In 1930, South Carolina spent $53 on each White student and $5 on each Black one. This inequity implies that White students are more deserving of resources than Black students.
In reality, no racialized spaces are any better or worse than others. Inequities are due to policy, not the people who live in or govern spaces. The antiracist view of spaces is that racial spaces should be acknowledged and protected, that no spaces bar anyone from entry, and that all spaces are allocated equal resources. No race should have a majority in politics or culture.
Space racism begins in the US in the early 1800s. According to slaveholders, people in Africa, which was a Black space, were ignorant, immoral, and wild, and a space like this had no business existing. Thomas Jefferson proposed a solution—civilize and free Black people in the US and then send them to Africa so they could teach the rest of the country how to be civilized. However, Black people typically wanted to stay in their existing spaces and had no interest in going to Africa.
In 1865, Edwin M. Stanton, US secretary of war, and General William T. Sherman met with a group of Black leaders including Garrison Frazier. Stanton asked Frazier if his people would rather live in communities of Black people or spread out among White people. Frazier said Black people would rather live separately from Whites because it would take a long time for White people to get over their prejudices and it would be uncomfortable to interact with them in the meantime. Sherman gave Frazier and his people land and an army mule and ordered that they alone should be in charge of their land and affairs.
Frazier and his people wanted separation, not segregation, which is quite different. Antiracist separation is one group wanting to put some space between themselves and racist groups. Segregation is one group wanting to put some space between themselves and other groups that it views as inferior. Segregation was marketed as “separate but equal,” but racialized spaces were never treated equally because segregationists saw certain spaces as more deserving of resources than others.
In addition to separation and segregation, there’s one additional school of thought on spaces: integration. Integrationists believe that when people of color enter White spaces, they’ll become civilized, and that White people will let their racism go as a result of interacting with people of color. According to integrationists, integration will also prevent non-White spaces from becoming centers of White hate.
Integration doesn’t take into account the fact that it’s going to be hard for people of color to heal when White people haven’t finished attacking them. Additionally, following integration to its final end would result in every race being divided in every space based on their percentage of the national population. For example, in any given US space of 100 people, 12.7 of them would be black, 4.8 of them would be Asian, and 61.3 would be White. Every space would have more White people than any other race and all spaces would become White.
“Ghetto” neighborhoods are Black spaces that were formed by Black people moving from the South and White people fleeing their arrival. White people went to other neighborhoods that the government supported via loan guarantees, highway construction, and subsidies. Developers built new places to live for White people.
Black people stayed in the “ghettos,” which became overcrowded. However, “ghetto” wasn’t used to describe this progression of racist policies—it was used to describe bad Black behavior in certain areas.
In the 1960s, Kenneth Clark wrote about the “dark ghetto,” a dangerous Black neighborhood where he grew up that was full of violence and juvenile delinquency. The idea that Black neighborhoods are inherently dangerous is misleading. It results in people avoiding Black neighborhoods because they fear crime and trying to live in White neighborhoods.
White neighborhoods have crime too, especially white-collar crime. White-collar crime loses people somewhere between $300-600 billion every year. When violent crime was at its highest in 1995, robbery and burglary were costing only $4 billion. White neighborhoods also produce the White males who commit mass shootings.
It’s clear that no racialized neighborhood is better or worse than any other—all have both good and bad qualities and deserve equal resources.
(Shortform note: Parts of the “Ghetto” section appeared in the book’s Chapter 12.)
Throughout history, discrepancies in educational funding between White and Black school districts have been a major part of space racism. For example, in 1930, Alabama spent only $7 on each Black student and $37 on each White student. However, it was so hard for civil-rights activists to secure equal funding for racialized spaces that they decided to fight for integration instead, which would allow at least some Black people to access the same resources as White people.
In 1954, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) lawyers argued that separating two races makes the non-White race feel inferior. For evidence, they used a doll test, which involves giving Black children dolls with different skin colors and asking them to choose their favorite. Most Black children chose the White dolls. As a result of the NAACP’s efforts, in Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court ruled that segregation was unconstitutional, regardless of whether or not segregated spaces are equal in every other way.
The court did some things right with this decision—they noted that exclusionary White spaces completely dominated by White culture and people that take more than their share of public resources are a problem. However, they did some things wrong too—they noted that integrated White spaces mostly dominated by White culture and people that take more than their fair share of public resources aren’t a problem. The court also didn’t acknowledge the existence of integrated Black spaces that don’t get enough resources.
The integrated White space became the ideal. If a student stayed in a Black space, she was stuck—she could only develop if she moved to a White space.
Some people, such as Martin Luther King Jr., didn’t agree with integration in schools—he was worried about White, potentially-racist teachers being in charge of children’s education and development.
Only some Black children went to White schools, and in 1973, it became impossible to ignore funding inequities between Black and White schools. Funding for schools came from local property tax, which varied by neighborhood. When parents in the San Antonio Independent School District took the school district to court, the Supreme Court ruled that the tax allocations didn’t violate the Constitution’s equal-protection clause.
Some people, such as David L. Kirp, a Cal Berkeley professor, wrote in 2016 that integration made a huge difference for Black children. He based this on the fact that as more Southern Black students went to integrated White schools, the “achievement gap” narrowed. From 1989 to 2011, when the percentage of Black students attending White schools dropped, the gap widened. Kirp took this to mean that African-American students at integrated schools did better than those at segregated schools. This conclusion was incorrect—there are other ways to explain this trend, such as the fact that when Black students went to integrated schools, they were taught how to take the standardized tests everyone was using to measure intelligence.
Like public schools, HBCUs and Historical White Colleges and Universities (HWCUs) don’t receive equal funding. For example, Yale and Stanford have 36 times more endowment than Howard, the richest HBCU. UT Austin has 5 times more than Howard. Because there are wealth inequalities between races, certain groups can donate more or less.
Public colleges and universities also have to deal with inequity in state funding. Racist policies result in HWCUs getting more public funding than HBCUs.
Therefore, when people argue that the best Black colleges can’t keep up with White ones, this is an inherently unfair position. Comparing spaces without taking into account race-classes is like asking a flyweight to box a heavyweight. If you’re going to compare White and Black spaces, you have to compare them within the same economic level to find any meaningful results. For example, when you look at financially comparable HBCUs and HWCUs, HBCU graduates are more likely to be physically, socially, and financially successful, and more Black students graduate.
Some people think that HBCUs aren’t representative of the “real world,” which is majority-White. They think Black students should go to non-Black schools because once they graduate, they’re going to have to operate in a majority-White space. This is untrue—many Black Americans live and work in predominantly Black spaces. People can only think the Black spaces aren’t real if they’re looking at the world from a White point of view.
When Ibram studied African American studies at Temple University, he was part of a Black space. Black history, culture, thoughts, and people governed this space. Other spaces at the university that were governed by White versions of these things weren’t called “White spaces,” just “spaces,” because, incorrectly, many people viewed White spaces as the default, standard norm.
Temple was surrounded by low-income Black neighborhoods. White racists were worried about people from the “ghetto” coming onto campus, and security guards checked IDs before people were allowed to enter campus buildings. The fear of these Black neighborhoods and attempts to segregate White and Black spaces were clear examples of space racism.
Space racism involves the idea that certain racialized spaces are superior to others.
What spaces do you avoid living in or visiting? Why?
Who lives and/or works in these areas? Are they wealthy, middle-class, or poor? To what race or ethnic groups do these people belong?
Do you think your fears or dislike of these spaces are justified? Why or why not?
Where do you think you got your ideas about those spaces? From someone you met, from culture, from the media, or from somewhere else?
All the types of racism previously mentioned in Part 2 can be directed at any non-White race. The types of racism in this chapter are directed at specific races.
Before we explore anti-White racism and Black-on-Black racism, we need to confront the myth that Black people can’t be racist.
Powerless defense is the idea that it’s impossible for Black people to be racist because they lack power. This concept appeared in the 1960s as a response to accusations of anti-White racism. Black people defended themselves by saying that they couldn’t possibly be racist towards White people because they didn’t have any political power.
Suggesting that people of color don’t have power results in several negative consequences:
Additionally, the idea of powerless defense is flawed. Everyone, even those who don’t hold a high political position, has power. Black power is more limited than White power, but it exists—if White people had absolute power, they would control everyone’s minds, and not only would no Black people reach positions of power, it would never even occur to them to try for power.
Anti-white racism is the belief that people of European descent are behaviorally, biologically, or culturally lesser than those of other racial groups, or the belief that all White people are part of racist power. (The definition of anti-White racism doesn’t include racist policy that creates racial inequity because historically, White people have been favored by policy.)
White people have done a lot of terrible things, such as enslaving and massacring people. However, this isn’t because they’re genetically, culturally, or behaviorally evil. White people are only a problem when they create racist policies, subscribe to racist ideas, and then deny that they’re racist.
Similar to how White people made up creation stories and justifications for the inferiority of other races, non-White people did the same thing towards White people. There are four incorrect theories about how White people were created:
Theory #1: Created by an evil scientist. Elijah Muhammad, who led the Nation of Islam, wrote a book called Message to the Blackman in America in which he explained how White people came into being. Muhammad believed that 6,000 years ago, the world was all Black. Yakub, an evil Black scientist, was exiled. He wanted to get revenge on society so he created White people. When Yakub’s White people invaded Black society, Black authorities imprisoned them in caves, but Moses released them when he “lifted up the serpent in the wilderness.” Moses then taught White people how to rule, which ultimately led to the inequities between Black and White people today.
Malcolm X was influenced by Muhammad’s writings. He converted to the Nation of Islam and when he got out of prison in 1952, he used his speaking and organizing skills to grow the movement. However, he left in the Nation of Islam in 1964 and converted to orthodox Islam. By this point, he had rejected Muhammad’s ideas and creation story because he believed they were racist.
Theory #2: Two-cradle theory. This theory, created by Cheikh Anta Diop, a Senegalese scholar, states that people who developed in the northern cradle (Europeans) developed barbarianism and violence because they needed it to survive their harsh climate. People who developed in the south cradle (Africa) lived in a plentiful environment, so they developed spirituality and peacefulness instead.
Theory #3: Influenced by the Ice Age. Like the two-cradle theory, Michael Bradley’s explanation for the behavior of White people is based on environmental determinism. In 1978, Bradley wrote in The Iceman Inheritance that White people are ruthless because they developed in the harsh conditions of the Ice Age.
Theory #4: Recessive genes. This is the only biological theory. Frances Cress Welsing, a psychiatrist, wrote in 1982’s The Isis Papers that the genes that cause darker skin are dominant and those that cause white skin are recessive. White people are already a minority and fear that they’ll go extinct. This fear leads them to act the way they do.
The author believes that anti-White racism is actually a form of anti-Black racism, because it ends up hurting Black people as well as (if not more than) White people. White racist power does well in a climate of anti-White racism—when people of color direct their hatred towards regular White people, they’re no longer focusing on White racist power and its policies, which are the real problem.
Additionally, racist power can distract people from the real problem by convincing regular White people that there are no policy problems, and that changes to policy would result in them losing their jobs, rights, or privileges. Plenty of White people are worried about anti-White discrimination. For example, worker Tim Hershman complained to a reporter that he’d been passed over for a promotion because superiors seemed to favor Black candidates. (Hershman lost the job to a White finalist, so his perception was incorrect.)
However, while regular White people can benefit from the policies of racist powers, they would benefit far more from a more equal society. Racist power has been responsible for things such as slashing school budgets, creating economic inequity, and destroying unions. Many policies favor only superrich White men, not White people in general.
Ibram started believing in anti-White racist ideas after the 2000 election when Black voter suppression helped George W. Bush win the presidency. Gore, whom Ibram supported, would have won, but officials manipulated voters, the counts, and the ballots:
To Ibram’s disappointment, Gore conceded quickly, without a fight. Ibram felt the Democrats had passively let Bush “steal” the presidency, and he decided that all White people cared about was maintaining a functioning democracy for White people. Ibram maintained his anti-White racism throughout his second year of college and in 2003, wrote his first piece in FAMU’s student newspaper. Although it was about how Black people should stop hating White people, it still demonstrated his anti-white racism. In theorizing that White people were attempting to “destroy” Blacks because they were a “different breed” just trying to survive—they had recessive genes and were a global minority—Ibram suggested that White people as a whole were racist (a racist idea itself). He didn’t yet understand that the real reason it’s wrong to hate White people is thatthey aren’t the problem—racist policies are the problem.
Many people think Black people can’t be racist toward each other. Black people themselves often don’t call other Black people “racist;” they have other names, such as “sellouts” or “Oreos,” but “racist” is most accurate. Black people can be racist towards other Black people in two ways:
The first instance of written Black-on-Black racism comes from a book written in 1526. The author, a Morrocan Moor, was kidnapped in Africa and enslaved. He was given to the pope, who converted him and freed him. The book included lines about Black people behaving like animals.
In 1657, Richard Ligon, an Englishman, wrote a story he may have made up about slaves in Barbados. A group of slaves tell their master about a planned revolt and when their master tries to reward them, they refuse the reward, because they consider divulging the revolt to be their duty—these Black slaves believed Black people should be enslaved.
In 1818, when Denmark Vesey organized a revolt near Charleston, South Carolina, he had to contend with the fact that some enslaved people were loyal to their masters. He cautioned his army to be careful about who they recruited. Someone wasn’t—when a man named Peter Prioleau found out about the planned revolt, he told his master. Vesey’s army was destroyed and Vesey hung. Prioleau was emancipated and given a lifetime pension, which he used to acquire his own slaves. Prioleau cared more about his own interests than those of his race.
Black people have increasingly entered positions of power, starting in the 1960s, which saw more Black police, judges, and politicians. Many people thought that more Black people in power would mean less anti-Black racism from those in power, but often, this wasn’t the case: Black police, politicians, and the Black middle class still practiced Black-on-Black racism.
For example, in the 1960s, violent crime was on the rise in poor neighborhoods, and Black residents approached their leaders with their fears about Black criminals and Black drug addicts, as opposed to criminals and drug addicts in general. Nobody seemed to see the whole picture, which was that drug problems were a public-health crisis, not a specifically “Black problem,” and that violent crime is far more strongly related to poverty than race.
People thought hiring more Black cops would combat police brutality against Black people. However, some of the Black officers treated Black people as badly or worse than White officers. According to a study in 1966, Black officers were less likely to be racist than White officers, but some of them called Black people “savages” or said it was their own fault they weren’t educated. Some police killings, such as that of Shantel Davis, were by Black officers.
A 2017 survey found that White officers are far more likely to be racist than Black ones—only 6% of White officers thought the US has more work to do when it comes to racial inequity, compared to 69% of Black officers. Regarding police killings, however, Black officers are only twice as likely as White officers to attribute the death of Black people by police to “a broader problem,” even though in reality, all racial inequity is caused by policy.
In 2003, only 40% of Black people thought that the fact that Black people had worse housing, income, and jobs was due to racism. In 2013, it was only 37%. Everyone else found other reasons to explain racial inequity, which was likely a result of the internalization of racist ideas.
By 2017, after very public police killings, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the election of Donald Trump, the percentage of Black people attributing their inequity to racism was 59%. But around 33% of Black people still attributed the inequity to the personal fault of Black people.
After Ibram wrote his anti-White column in the FAMU student newspaper, the Black editor of the Tallahassee Democrat, whom Ibram was supposed to be doing an internship with, called him into his office. During the meeting, the editor mentioned that he had a nice car, and that he hated it when he was pulled over and treated like one of “them niggers.”
Ibram kept quiet even though he was very offended. He was furious that the editor would look down on people in his own race and see them as the problem, not the cops. However, Ibram had criticized Black people too. Before Gore had conceded and Ibram had transitioned to hating White people, Ibram had blamed Gore’s loss of the 2000 election on the fact that not enough Black people had voted, not on voter suppression policies, which was the actual reason.
Speaking with the editor helped Ibram discover that he could be racist even though he was Black, and he began to deal with his dueling consciousness. He took some courses in African American studies and realized that history was a struggle between antiracists and racists, not between different kinds of racists. He had been planning to go into sports journalism but found himself disinterested and pursued graduate studies in African American studies instead, at Temple University.
In Parts 1-2, we looked at what racism is and its various forms. Race may have been a made-up power construct, but its various iterations still very much affect us today. Part 3 covers how we can strive to be antiracist.
Chapter 8 covers some of the activism techniques antiracists have used to try to create an antiracist society.
To work towards ending racism, you have to treat the cause, not the symptoms. Many people think that racism is caused by ignorance and hate, but as we’ve learned in previous chapters, in fact, it’s actually caused by self-interest and policy. The ignorance and hate come later.
Therefore, any attempt to end racism that starts by addressing ignorance and hate instead of the root cause is never going to be successful. For example, mentoring programs might help individuals, but no behavioral program will have an effect on policy.
While racist power is very flexible—it will use whatever strategy is most effective—historically, antiracists have tried the same strategies over and over again, even though they’ve never worked and will never work because they focus in the wrong place.
According to Ibram, activism seeks power and creates policy change. Changing minds and critiquing doesn’t count as activism.
Suasion—trying to persuade people not to be racist—was and still is a popular method for fighting racism, even though it’s doomed to fail because it doesn’t address policy.
Uplift suasion is the idea that Black people can teach White people not to be racist by behaving exceptionally. For example, free Black people thought that if they set a good example, White people would free other enslaved Black people.
Uplift suasion, in addition to being an ineffective method for fighting racism, comes with some problematic ideas:
Early White abolitionists gave free Black people this idea, and it resurfaced in Ibram’s generation. For example, when Ibram was on a date with Sadiqa at a restaurant that had a Buddha statue, a drunk White man fondled the statue. Sadiqa said that she was glad the man wasn’t Black. Ibram had had this kind of thought before and they talked about it. If the man had been Black, Sadiqa would have been embarrassed because he made the whole race look bad in front of White people. As a result, White people would become more racist.
But uplift suasion didn’t work pre-Civil War and it doesn’t work now either.
Moral/education suasion is the idea that White people are only racist because they don’t know any better. Like uplift suasion, the responsibility falls on Black people to change White people’s ideas. Moral suasion is supposed to appeal to White people’s consciences and educational suasion is supposed to appeal to their intellect.
Moral/educational suasion, in addition to being an ineffective method for fighting racism, comes with some problems:
There are instances in history in which moral/educational suasion appeared to be effective. However, in most cases, changes in policy weren’t created by suasion—they were a result of self-interest.
For example, some people consider that educational suasion was effective because it resulted in the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, and desegregation rulings. However, these changes weren’t caused by educational suasion. They were created by self-interest—US foreign relations were suffering because visiting African diplomats experienced racist abuse. The civil rights legislation mentioned above was created to soothe foreign relations, and once enough nations were soothed, progress stopped.
Uplift, moral, and education suasion all suggest that racist policy can only be changed after racist ideas have changed. However, this order of operations is ineffective because antiracist policies benefit everyone, and it’s easier to get people to change their ideas once they’ve seen the benefits of policy change. (And they’ve seen that none of the negative consequences racist policymakers warn about have come to pass.)
There are several examples of policy changing first and ideas changing in response, once people see that the policy change was beneficial for everyone:
Demonstrations and protests are another technique for fighting racism. Though the terms are often used interchangeably, they don’t mean the same thing.
A protest has the end goal of getting a racist policy changed. Protests involve organizing people and take place over a long period of time.
The best protests create situations where changing policy is in racist powers’ best interests. For example, if teachers are on strike and racist power needs them to resume work, racist power might give the teachers raises. It’s hard to create situations like this, of course, because racist power tries to make the most threatening protests illegal.
A demonstration aims to raise awareness about a problem. Demonstrations involve mobilizing people in a particular place for a short period of time. Demonstrations aren’t as effective as protests because they only force change when power can’t deal with bad press, such as near election time. Most of the time, demonstrations don’t do anything except annoy racist power.
The best demonstrations help people become antiracist and emotionally support protests. For example, while Black women were boycotting buses in Montgomery, Alabama, they were supported by nighttime rallies.
In 2007, Black students stood under the “White tree” in Jena, Louisiana. The next day, White students had hung nooses in the tree. This sparked racist violence that eventually led to six Black students, the “Jena 6,” beating up a White student. One of the students was charged as a juvenile and the others were charged with attempted murder. The district attorney wanted to send them to prison for 100 years.
In response to this, Ibram came up with a plan to free the Jena 6 that he presented at a Black Student Union meeting. He called it the 106 Campaign, and it involved two phases. The first was to recruit 106 students on 106 campuses to rally and fundraise for a legal defense fund. The second phase was to organize all these students into a car caravan that would disrupt traffic in Washington, D.C. and force the president to work on the Louisiana governor, who would work on the local Jena government.
One woman asked if the car caravans were illegal, and others were scared of being towed or of police response. Ibram ignored their fears and kept outlining the plan. He said that they could go to prison, but they should be fine with that because their cause was important.
Ibram thought he was being radical, but what he was really doing was scaring people off. The Black Student Union officers voted down his plan. At the time, he thought they were ignorant—he was committed to educational suasion and thought the other students were the problem, not him. He later realized that although his ideas sounded radical, they weren’t. True radicalism changes the way people think and prompts real change in the world, neither of which he was doing.
The new, less risky plan was to demonstrate on campus and to fundraise for legal defense. The demonstrations didn’t have a large effect—the very next day after the demonstrations, the judge denied one of the six bail. This was hard on the demonstrators—if nothing causes change, what’s the point? However, the fundraising was effective—the new defense attorneys managed to get all of the six pleading guilty to simple battery, and no one went to jail.
The most effective way to create policy change is to make the change in the policymaker’s best interests.
Think of a policy that you’d like to see changed, whether it's a federal policy or a rule at work. How would you employ uplift suasion to this policy? How effective do you think it would be?
How would you employ moral/educational suasion to the same policy? How effective do you think this technique would be?
How would you make the policy change in the policymaker’s best interest? How effective do you think this would be?
Part of becoming antiracist is identifying your racist ideas and working to dismantle them, but another large part is changing your actions. In the previous chapter, we looked at some of the methods antiracists use and compared their success rates. In this chapter, we’ll look at how to harness the most effective techniques to achieve results. Ibram measures success by results, not by intentions.
In 1967, Charles Hamilton, a political scientist, and Kwame Toure, an activist, described two types of racism, overt and covert. Overt racism is individual racism—a specific White person targeting a specific Black person. An example of individual racism is White terrorist who attacks a Black church.
Covert racism is institutional racism—the entire White community going after the entire Black community. An example of institutional racism is Black children dying because they don’t have the same access to medical facilities that White people do.
The theory of overt and covert racism acknowledges that the system is the problem, not people. As a result, understanding overt and covert racism, also known as institutional racism, has both an enlightening and quashing effect. Rooting the problem in policy is enlightening. However, placing blame on the system makes racism less visible because it takes the focus away from specific policies and specific people who made them. For example, the policy that creates the circumstances in which Black children don’t have the same access to medical facilities as White people was made by someone. It’s possible to find out who made that policy, the same way it's possible for the police to identify a shooter.
Toure and Hamilton wouldn’t have expected their ideas would be used to make racism less visible. They were making the point that individual and institutional racism are different, and ignoring this difference allows individuals to think well of themselves even if they’re supporting a system that causes racism.
There are several steps the Antiracist Research and Policy Center take to end racial inequity that you can take too:
Shortly after graduating from the doctoral program at Temple University, Ibram went to a lecture in 2010 in which Boyce Watkins, a finance scholar, talked about how racism was a disease. Ibram had based most of his ideas on racism on Toure and Hamilton’s work and thought racism was more like an organ—it was an integral part of society and incurable.
Ibram didn’t want to change his idea of racism, and this isn’t uncommon. It’s hard for people to change beliefs that they hold strongly. An antiracist can have as much difficulty redefining racism as a racist can.
As Ibram studied racism further and the Black Lives Matter movement launched, Ibram began to reassess his ideas about racism. These were his steps to working toward being antiracist:
Ibram had become a college professor and writer because he believed in educational suasion, but the more he learned about racism as he researched his books, the more he realized ignorance wasn’t the cause of racism—the cause was self-interest. Hate and ignorance were byproducts that individuals picked up later. He realized that to truly be antiracist, he needed to start focusing on policy, and he founded the Antiracist Research and Policy Center in 2017.
The same night that Ibram spoke about the Antiracism Center’s vision, an unknown White male hung paper Confederate flags and cotton balls in some of the university’s buildings. Ibram didn’t let this scare him and kept working at his organization.
As Ibram worked with the Antiracism Center, he started having health problems. He lost weight, had digestive problems, and threw up. He went to see a doctor, who sent him for a precautionary colonoscopy. No one expected it to turn anything up—Ibram wasn’t in any of the risk groups for colon cancer. However, the colonoscopy determined he had stage-4 metastatic colon cancer, which kills about 88% of people within five years of diagnosis.
Ibram’s wife and mother had both survived breast cancer and during their battles, he’d noticed some parallels between cancer and racism. Cancer spreads throughout the whole body and affects all systems, like racism spreads across the country and intersects with bigotry. People deny both cancer and racism, and both can kill whole systems.
Ibram wanted to survive to spend more time with his family, be a better person, and write more, among other things. There are plenty of good reasons for society to want to survive racism too.
Ibram underwent six months of chemotherapy, which shrunk his tumors enough that he could be operated on, and during the operation, the surgeons found that the chemotherapy had fully erased the cancer.
Ibram believes that society can get through racism too, especially if we treat it like cancer instead of something that’s incurable. If racial inequity is a cancerous tumor, start by attacking it with the “chemotherapy” of antiracist policies. Then, surgically remove any lingering racist policies. Encourage a healthy diet of antiracist ideas. Then keep an eye on the system so that if any danger returns, it can be dealt with early, before it can spread again.
Being antiracist involves targeting racist policies.
How would you find out what some of the racial inequities are in your region? Consider connecting with antiracist groups, looking up statistics, or talking to activists.
How would you find out what policies are responsible for these inequities?
How would you find out who or what group is responsible for implementing or maintaining these policies?
How could you take power away from those responsible for racist policies? Consider supporting antiracist candidates to replace racist power, stepping into a position of power yourself, or protesting.
Like Ibram, most of us grew up in a society based on racist ideas. Identifying our racist ideas is an important step in becoming antiracist.
It’s impossible to talk about racism if we constantly deny that we’re racist. What’s an example of a racist idea that you once believed in or have realized you currently believe in?
Where did you get this idea? From someone you met, from culture, from the media, or from somewhere else?
Now that you’ve finished reading How to Be an Antiracist and understand the definitions of terms surrounding racism, what do you think of your original racist idea now? Can you identify the policy it stemmed from?