How to Be an Antiracist

Ibram X. Kendi is the author of How to Be an Antiracist as well as other award-winning works including The Black Campus Movement—which won the W.E.B. Du Bois Book Prize—and Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America—a National Book Award winner. As a scholar and researcher of Black History, Kendi also founded and serves as the director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at Boston University, which gathers the efforts of researchers and practitioners “to figure out novel and practical ways to understand, explain, and solve seemingly intractable problems of racial inequity and injustice” (from the center’s Mission Statement). The work of the center focuses on viewing race and racism through antiracist questions, narratives, methods, policies, and advocacy campaigns in the effort to answer the question, “What is wrong with policies?”

Kendi’s personal narratives throughout How to Be an Antiracist detail his journey to becoming an antiracist advocate. His parents, Carol and Larry, were Christians who became politicized through the Black Power movement, instilling a strong sense of Black identity in Kendi from an early age. His awareness of his Blackness and the unfairness of White dominant spaces made him an outspoken student against injustice from childhood—before he even possessed the necessary language to define the issue.

Kendi’s journey in developing his political consciousness was not without errors in judgment. He holds himself accountable in different instances during which he exercised internalized racism—such as his participation in ethnic racist bullying of a Ghanaian classmate, Akeem. Later, he came to realize he was “angrily trashing the racist ideas about one’s own group but happily consuming the racist ideas about other ethnic groups” (65). Recognizing his own position as a US born Black man, he would further develop his understanding of his understanding of race in relationship to gender and sexuality during graduate school where he was challenged by Black queer and women colleagues.

Kendi models a willingness to learn from the racist ideas he internalized throughout his life in an effort to show that antiracist work requires a deep level of introspection. He expresses that antiracism is “a radical choice in the face of this history” (23) to help the reader understand that an antiracist stance requires active participation in challenging a historical legacy of racist policies. The conditions of racism are not natural but socially inscribed by these very policies. Thus, Kendi emphasizes that antiracist work cannot be complacently done.