I'm moved to continue to recommend and share the truths told in these most important books and their remarkable author. Ibram X. Kendi's voice of truth and courage, wisdom and vision, and awakening and transformation is deeply needed. A profound gift to us all. May we listen, learn, be transformed and inspired, and awaken and act. — Molly
Quotes from the Work of
Ibram X. Kendi
Our world is suffering from metastatic cancer. Stage 4. Racism has spread to nearly every part of the body politic, intersecting with bigotry of all kinds, justifying all kinds of inequities by victim blaming; heightening exploitation and misplaced hate; spurring mass shootings, arms races, and demagogues who polarize nations, shutting essential organs of democracy; and threatening the life of human society with nuclear war and climate change. In the United States, the metastatic cancer has been spreading, contracting, and threatening to kill the American body as it nearly did before its birth, as it nearly did during its Civil War. But how many people stare inside the body of their nations' racial inequities, their neighborhoods' racial inequities, their occupations' racial inequities, their institutions' racial inequities, and flatly deny that their policies are racist? They flatly deny that racial inequity is a signpost of racist policy. They flatly deny the racist policy as they use racist ideas to justify the racial inequity. They flatly deny the cancer of racism as the cancer cells spread and literally threaten their own lives and the lives of the people and spaces and places they hold dear. The popular conception of denial-like the popular strategy of suasion-is suicidal.
* * * * *
Denial is the heartbeat of racism, beating across ideologies, races, and nations. It is beating within us.
The
opposite of racist isn't "not racist." It is "anti-racist." What's the
difference? One endorses either the idea of a racial hierarchy as a
racist, or racial equality as an anti-racist. One either believes
problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the
roots of problems in power and policies, as an anti-racist. One either
allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial
inequities, as an anti-racist. There is no in-between safe space of "not
racist."
The
good news is that racist and antiracist are not fixed identities. We
can be a racist one minute and an antiracist the next. What we say about
race, what we do about race, in each moment, determines what — not who
— we are.
Race is a mirage but one that humanity has organized itself around in very real ways. Imagining away the existence of races in a racist world is as conserving and harmful as imagining away classes in a capitalistic world—it allows the ruling races and classes to keep on ruling. Assimilationists believe in the post-racial myth that talking about race constitutes racism, or that if we stop identifying by race, then racism will miraculously go away. They fail to realize that if we stop using racial categories, then we will not be able to identify racial inequity. If we cannot identify racial inequity, then we will not be able to identify racist policies. If we cannot identify racist policies, then we cannot challenge racist policies. If we cannot challenge racist policies, then racist power’s final solution will be achieved: a world of inequity none of us can see, let alone resist.
I was taught the popular folktale of racism: that ignorant and hateful people had produced racist ideas, and that these racist people had instituted racist policies. But when I learned the motives behind the production of many of America’s most influentially racist ideas, it became quite obvious that this folktale, though sensible, was not based on a firm footing of historical evidence. Ignorance/hate-racist ideas-discrimination: this causal relationship is largely a historical. It has actually been the inverse relationship—racial discrimination led to racist ideas which led to ignorance and hate. Racial discrimination-racist ideas-ignorance/hate: this is the causal relationship driving America’s history of race relations.
If there's one thing we know about humans, it's that most of us are followers. Looking for something to be part of to make us feel better about our own selfishness.
Beleaguered White racists who can’t imagine their lives not being the focus of any movement respond to “Black Lives Matter” with “All Lives Matter."
* * * * *
Americans have long been trained to see the deficiencies of people rather than policy. It's a pretty easy mistake to make: People are in our faces. Policies are distant. We are particularly poor at seeing the policies lurking behind the struggles of people.
But crime bills have never correlated to crime any more than fear has correlated to actual violence. We are not meant to fear suits with policies that kill. We are not meant to fear good White males with AR-15s. No, we are to fear the weary, unarmed Latinx body from Latin America. The Arab body kneeling to Allah is to be feared. The Black body from hell is to be feared. Adept politicians and crime entrepreneurs manufacture the fear and stand before voters to deliver them—messiahs who will liberate them from fear of these other bodies.
Whenever
a Black person or group used White people as a standard of measurement,
and cast another Black person or group as inferior, it was another
instance of racism.
One of racism’s harms is the way it falls on the unexceptional Black person who is asked to be extraordinary just to survive—and, even worse, the Black screwup who faces the abyss after one error, while the White screwup is handed second chances and empathy.
Instead,
they define policies not rigged for White people as racist. Ideas not
centering White lives are racist. Beleaguered White racists who can’t
imagine their lives not being the focus of any movement respond to
“Black Lives Matter” with “All Lives Matter.” Embattled police officers
who can’t imagine losing their right to racially profile and brutalize
respond with “Blue Lives Matter."
“Racist
policy” says exactly what the problem is and where the problem is.
“Institutional racism” and “structural racism” and “systemic racism” are
redundant. Racism itself is institutional, structural, and systemic.
One
either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts
racial inequities, as an antiracist. There is no in-between safe space
of “not racist.” The claim of “not racist” neutrality is a mask for
racism.
* * * * *
“When
men oppress their fellow-men, the oppressor ever finds, in the
character of the oppressed, a full justification for his oppression.”
Douglass, amazingly, summed up the history of racist ideas in a single
sentence.
Racist ideas make people of color think less of themselves, which makes them more vulnerable to racist ideas. Racist ideas make White people think more of themselves, which further attracts them to racist ideas.
Time and again, racist ideas have not been cooked up from the boiling pot of ignorance and hate. Time and again, powerful and brilliant men and women have produced racist ideas in order to justify the racist policies of their era, in order to redirect the blame for their era’s racial disparities away from those policies and onto Black people.
Black people are apparently responsible for calming the fears of violent cops in the way women are supposedly responsible for calming the sexual desires of male rapists.
Black behavior—not the wrenching housing and economic discrimination—was blamed for these impoverished Black enclaves.
From their arrival around 1619, African people had illegally resisted legal slavery. They had thus been stamped from the beginning as criminals.
Resisting Africans were nearly always cast as violent criminals, not people reacting to enslavers’ regular brutality, or pressing for the most basic human desire: freedom.
The
principal function of racist ideas in American history has been the
suppression of resistance to racial discrimination and its resulting
racial disparities. The beneficiaries of slavery, segregation, and mass
incarceration have produced racist ideas of Black people being best
suited for or deserving of the confines of slavery, segregation, or the
jail cell. Consumers of these racist ideas have been led to believe
there is something wrong with Black people, and not the policies that
have enslaved, oppressed, and confined so many Black people.
For nearly six centuries, antiracist ideas have been pitted against two kinds of racist ideas: segregationist and assimilationist.
Assimilationist
ideas are racist ideas. Assimilationists can position any racial group
as the superior standard that another racial group should be measuring
themselves against, the benchmark they should be trying to reach.
Assimilations typically position White people as the superior standard.
Antiracist ideas are based in the truth that racial groups are equals in all the ways they are different, assimilationist ideas are rooted in the notion that certain racial groups are culturally or behaviorally inferior, and segregationist ideas spring from a belief in genetic racial distinction and fixed hierarchy.
Racist ideas love believers, not thinkers.
* * * * *
White supremacists love what America used to be, even though America used to be - and still is - teeming with millions of struggling White people. White supremacists blame non-White people for the struggles of White people when any objective analysis of their plight primarily implicates the rich White Trumps they support.
The saying “Black people can’t be racist” reproduces the false duality of racist and not-racist promoted by White racists to deny their racism. It merges Black people with White Trump voters who are angry about being called racist but who want to express racist views and support their racist policies while being identified as not-racist, no matter what they say or do.
Already, the American mind was accomplishing that indispensable intellectual activity of someone consumed with racist ideas: individualizing White negativity and generalizing Black negativity. Negative behavior by any Black person became proof of what was wrong with Black people, while negative behavior by any White person only proved what was wrong with that person.
The most threatening racist movement is not the alt right’s unlikely drive for a White ethnostate but the regular American’s drive for a “race-neutral” one. The construct of race neutrality actually feeds White nationalist victimhood by positing the notion that any policy protecting or advancing non-White Americans toward equity is “reverse discrimination.” That is how racist power can call affirmative action policies that succeed in reducing racial inequities “race conscious” and standardized tests that produce racial inequities “race neutral.” That is how they can blame the behavior of entire racial groups for the inequities between different racial groups and still say their ideas are “not racist.” But there is no such thing as a not-racist idea, only racist ideas and antiracist ideas.
The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity. If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist.
The
only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The
only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only
remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination. As President
Lyndon B. Johnson said in 1965, “You do not take a person who, for
years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the
starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all
the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely
fair.” As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun wrote in 1978, “In
order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is
no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat
them differently.”
“I do not use “microaggression” anymore. I detest the post-racial platform that supported its sudden popularity. I detest its component parts—“micro” and “aggression.” A persistent daily low hum of racist abuse is not minor. I use the term “abuse” because aggression is not as exacting a term. Abuse accurately describes the action and its effects on people: distress, anger, worry, depression, anxiety, pain, fatigue, and suicide.
What’s
the problem with being “not racist”? It is a claim that signifies
neutrality: “I am not a racist, but neither am I aggressively against
racism.” But there is no neutrality in the racism struggle. The opposite
of “racist” isn’t “not racist.” It is “antiracist."
There may be no more consequential White privilege than life itself. White lives matter to the tune of 3.5 additional years over Black lives in the United States, which is just the most glaring of a host of health disparities, starting from infancy, where Black infants die at twice the rate of White infants.
* * * * *
The only thing wrong with Black people is that we think something is wrong with Black people.
Generally
speaking, individual Black and Latinx and Asian and Middle Eastern and
European immigrants are uniquely resilient and resourceful—not because
they are Nigerian or Cuban or Japanese or Saudi Arabian or German but
because they are immigrants. In fact, immigrants and migrants of all
races tend to be more resilient and resourceful when compared with the
natives of their own countries and the natives of their new countries.
What if we realized the best way to ensure an effective educational system is not by standardizing our curricula and tests but by standardizing the opportunities available to all students?
When you truly believe that the racial groups are equal, then you also believe that racial disparities must be the result of racial discrimination. Committed to this antiracist idea of group equality, I was able to self-critique, discover, and shed the racist ideas I had consumed over my lifetime when I uncovered and exposed the racist ideas that others have produced over the lifetime of America.
I know that readers truly committed to racial equality will join me on this journey of interrogating and shedding our racist ideas. But if there is anything I have learned form my research, it's that the principal producers and defenders of racist ideas will not join us. And no logic or fact or history book can change them, because logic and facts and scholarship have little to do with why they are expressing racist ideas in the first place. Stamped from the Beginning is about these close-minded, cunning, captivating producers of racist ideas. But it is not for them.
To be antiracist is to think nothing is behaviorally wrong or right- inferior or superior- with any of the racial groups. Whenever the antiracist sees individuals behaving positively or negatively, the antiracist sees exactly that: individuals behaving positively or not, not representatives of whole races. To be antiracist is to deracialize behavior, to remove the tattooed stereotype from every racialized body. Behavior is something humans do, not races do.
Any gospel that does not…speak to the issue of enslavement” and “injustice” and “inequality—any gospel that does not want to go where people are hungry and poverty-stricken and set them free in the name of Jesus Christ—is not the gospel.
That is what it truly means to think as an antiracist: to think there is nothing wrong with Black people, to think that racial groups are equal. There are lazy and unwise and harmful individuals of African ancestry. There are lazy and unwise and harmful individuals of European ancestry. There are industrious and wise and harmless individuals of European ancestry. There are industrious and wise and harmless individuals of African ancestry. But no racial group has ever had a monopoly on any type of human trait or gene—not now, not ever.
I’m for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I’m a human being first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.
Critiquing racism is not activism. Changing minds is not activism. An activist produces power and policy change, not mental change. If a person has no record of power or policy change, then that person is not an activist.
Some of us are restrained by fear of what could happen to us if we resist. In our naïveté, we are less fearful of what could happen to us, or is already happening to us, if we don’t resist.
No one becomes racist or antiracist. We can only strive to be one or the other.
Like fighting an addiction, being an antiracist requires persistent self-awareness, constant self-criticism, and regular self-examination.
To know the past is to know the present. To know the present it to know yourself.
* * * * *
I still identify as Black. Not because I believe Blackness, or race, is a meaningful scientific category but because our societies, our policies, our ideas, our histories, and our cultures have rendered race and made it matter. I am among those who have been degraded by racist ideas, suffered under racist policies, and who have nevertheless endured and built movements and cultures to resist or at least persist through this madness. I see myself culturally and historically and politically in Blackness, in being an African American, an African, a member of the forced and unforced African diaspora. I see myself historically and politically as a person of color, as a member of the global south, as a close ally of Latinx, East Asian, Middle Eastern, and Native peoples and all the world’s degraded peoples, from the Roma and Jews of Europe to the aboriginals of Australia to the White people battered for their religion, class, gender, transgender identity, ethnicity, sexuality, body size, age, and disability. The gift of seeing myself as Black instead of being color-blind is that it allows me to clearly see myself historically and politically as being an antiracist, as a member of the interracial body striving to accept and equate and empower racial difference of all kinds.
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