How To Be An Antiracist / How to Be an Antiracist

MY RACIST INTRODUCTION
 
I despised suits and ties. For seventeen years I had been surrounded by suit-wearing, tie-choking, hat-flying church folk. My teenage wardrobe hollered the defiance of a preacher s kid.
 
It was January 17, 2000. More than three thousand Black people with a smattering of White folks arrived that Monday morning in their Sunday best at the Hylton Memorial Chapel in Northern Virginia. My parents arrived in a state of shock. Their floundering son had somehow made it to the final round of the Prince William County Martin Luther King Jr. oratorical contest.
 
I didn t show up with a white collar under a dark suit and matching dark tie like most of my competitors. I sported a racy golden-brown blazer with a slick black shirt and bright color-streaked tie underneath. The hem of my baggy black slacks crested over my creamy boots. I d already failed the test of respectability before I opened my mouth, but my parents, Carol and Larry, were all smiles nonetheless. They couldn t remember the last time they saw me wearing a tie and blazer, however loud and crazy.
 
But it wasn t just my clothes that didn t fit the scene. My competitors were academic prodigies. I wasn t. I carried a GPA lower than 3.0; my SAT score barely cracked 1000. Colleges were recruiting my competitors. I was riding the high of having received surprise admission letters from the two colleges I d halfheartedly applied to.
 
A few weeks before, I was on the basketball court with my high school team, warming up for a home game, cycling through layup lines. My father, all six foot three and two hundred pounds of him, emerged from my high school gym s entrance. He slowly walked onto the basketball court, flailing his long arms to get my attention and embarrassing me before what we could call the White judge.
 
Classic Dad. He couldn t care less what judgmental White people thought about him. He rarely if ever put on a happy mask,

Ibram X. Kendi

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

How to Be an Antiracist couldn t come at a better time. . . . Kendi has gifted us with a book that is not only an essential instruction manual but also a memoir of the author s own path from anti-black racism to anti-white racism and, finally, to antiracism. . . . How to Be an Antiracist gives us a clear and compelling way to approach, as Kendi puts it in his introduction, the basic struggle we re all in, the struggle to be fully human and to see that others are fully human. NPR

Kendi dissects why in a society where so few people consider themselves to be racist the divisions and inequalities of racism remain so prevalent. How to Be an Antiracist punctures the myths of a post-racial America, examining what racism really is and what we should do about it. Time

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

Ibram Kendi s work, through both his books and the Antiracist Research and Policy Center, is vital in today s sociopolitical climate. As a society, we need to start treating antiracism as action, not emotion and Kendi is helping us