A review by helenecats
How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi

challenging emotional informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

5.0

Genuinely one of the most thorough, fascinating, honest book I have ever read, about race relations, backed up by research and references to many historical figures and movements. It is not solely centred on American history either. Incredibly powerful.

These quotes speak for themselves:

"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."

"We all have the power to discriminate. Only an exclusive few have the power to make policy. Focusing on “racial discrimination” takes our eyes off the central agents of racism: racist policy and racist policymakers, or what I call racist power."

"Do-nothing climate policy is racist policy, since the predominantly non-White global south is being victimized by climate change more than the Whiter global north, even as the Whiter global north is contributing more to its acceleration."

"Nonviolent Black drug offenders remain in prisons for about the same length of time (58.7 months) as violent White criminals (61.7 months)."

"I had been taught that racist ideas cause racist policies. That ignorance and hate cause racist ideas. That the root problem of racism is ignorance and hate. But that gets the chain of events exactly wrong. The root problem— from Prince Henry to President Trump— has always been the self-interest of racist power. Powerful economic, political, and cultural self- interest— the primitive accumulation of capital in the case of royal Portugal and subsequent slave traders— has been behind racist policies."

"When scientists finished drawing the map of “our miraculous genetic code,” when they stepped back and looked at the map, one of the “great truths” they saw was “that in genetic terms, all human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9 percent the same”"

"Ethnic groups in Western Africa are more genetically similar to ethnic groups in Western Europe than to ethnic groups in Eastern Africa. Race is a genetic mirage."

"Singular-race makers push for the end of categorizing and identifying by race. They wag their fingers at people like me identifying as Black— but the unfortunate truth is that their well- meaning post- racial strategy makes no sense in our racist world. 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."

"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. If we don’t, then we are blamed for our own assaults, our own deaths."

"researchers have found a much stronger and clearer correlation between violent- crime levels and unemployment levels than between violent crime and race. Black neighborhoods do not all have similar levels of violent crime."

"Ebonics had grown from the roots of African languages and modern English just as modern English had grown from Latin, Greek, and Germanic roots. Why is Ebonics broken English but English is not broken German? Why is Ebonics a dialect of English if English is not a dialect of Latin? The idea that Black languages outside Africa are broken is as culturally racist as the idea that languages inside Europe are fixed."

"Hip-hop has had the most sophisticated vocabulary of any American musical genre. I read endlessly its poetic text. But parents and grandparents did not see us listening to and memorizing gripping works of oral poetry and urban reporting and short stories and autobiographies and sexual boasting and adventure fantasies. They saw— and still see— words that would lead my mind into deviance."

"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."

"White people and Dark people reject and envy Light people."

"Large slaveholders more often worked Light people in the house and Dark people in the fields, reasoning that Light people were suited for skilled tasks and Dark people for more physically demanding tasks. A body will be all the more animalistic the darker it is."

"Today, skin lighteners are used by 70 percent of women in Nigeria; 35 percent in South Africa; 59 percent in Togo; and 40 percent in China, Malaysia, the Philippines, and South Korea."

"Socialist and communist spaces are not automatically anti-racist. Some socialists and communists have pushed a segregationist or post- racial program in order not to alienate racist White workers."

"The top 1 percent now own around half of the world’s wealth, up from 42.5 percent at the height of the Great Recession in 2008."

"King had a nightmare that came to pass. Non-White students fill most of the seats in today’s public school classrooms but are taught by an 80 percent White teaching force, which often has, however unconsciously, lower expectations for non- White students. When Black and White teachers look at the same Black student, White teachers are about 40 percent less likely to believe the student will finish high school. Low- income Black students who have at least one Black teacher in elementary school are 29 percent less likely to drop out of school, 39 percent less likely among very low- income Black boys."

"My ideas of gender and sexuality reflected those of my parents. They did not raise me not to be a homophobe. They rarely talked about gay and lesbian people. Ideas often dance a cappella. Their silence erased queer existence as thoroughly as integrationists erased the reality of integrated White spaces."

"We must continue to “affirm that all Black lives matter,” as the co-founder of Black Lives Matter, Opal Tometi, once said. All Black lives include those of poor transgender Black women, perhaps the most violated and oppressed of all the Black intersectional groups. The average U.S. life expectancy of a transgender woman of color is thirty-five years."

"It is best to challenge ourselves by dragging ourselves before people who intimidate us with their brilliance and constructive criticism."

"ACTIVIST: One who has a record of power or policy change."

"Knowledge is only power if knowledge is put to the struggle for power. Changing minds is not a movement. 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."

"I try to keep everyday people in mind when I use “racist policies” instead of “institutional racism.” Policymakers and policies make societies and institutions, not the other way around. The United States is a racist nation because its policymakers and policies have been racist from the beginning."

"The source of racist ideas was not ignorance and hate, but self-interest. The history of racist ideas is the history of powerful policymakers erecting racist policies out of self- interest, then producing racist ideas to defend and rationalize the inequitable effects of their policies, while everyday people consume those racist ideas, which in turn sparks ignorance and hate."

"Racism is not even six hundred years old. It’s a cancer that we’ve caught early. But racism is one of the fastest-spreading and most fatal cancers humanity has ever known."