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If I came out of the experience dripping with confidence for college, then I’d entered from a high school drought. Even now I wonder if it was my poor sense of self that first generated my poor sense of my people. Or was it my poor sense of my people that inflamed a poor sense of myself?
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 5 | Location 94-96 2020-06-03 00:25:21
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.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 5 | Location 97-99 2020-06-03 00:25:30
“They think it’s okay not to think!” I charged, raising the classic racist idea that Black youth don’t value education as much as their non-Black counterparts. No one seemed to care that this well-traveled idea had flown on anecdotes but had never been grounded in proof.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 7 | Location 111-113 2020-06-03 00:26:37
I did not realize that to say something is inferior about a racial group is to say a racist idea. I thought I was serving my people, when in fact I was serving up racist ideas about my people to my people.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 7 | Location 121-122 2020-06-03 00:27:24
Internalized racism is the real Black on Black crime.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 8 | Location 132-133 2020-06-03 00:31:03
I was a dupe, a chump who saw the ongoing struggles of Black people on MLK Day 2000 and decided that Black people themselves were the problem. This is the consistent function of racist ideas—and of any kind of bigotry more broadly: to manipulate us into seeing people as the problem, instead of the policies that ensnare them.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 8 | Location 133-135 2020-06-03 00:31:17
Long before he became president, Donald Trump liked to say, “Laziness is a trait in Blacks.” When he decided to run for president, his plan for making America great again: defaming Latinx immigrants as mostly criminals and rapists and demanding billions for a border wall to block them. He promised “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States.” Once he became president, he routinely called his Black critics “stupid.” He claimed immigrants from Haiti “all have AIDS,” while praising White supremacists as “very fine people” in the summer of 2017.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 8 | Location 136-141 2020-06-03 00:31:50
When racist ideas resound, denials that those ideas are racist typically follow. When racist policies resound, denials that those policies are racist also follow.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 8 | Location 144-146 2020-06-03 00:32:08
Denial is the heartbeat of racism, beating across ideologies, races, and nations.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 9 | Location 146-146 2020-06-03 00:32:22
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.” What’s the difference? One endorses either the idea of a racial hierarchy as a racist, or racial equality as an antiracist. 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 antiracist.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 9 | Location 151-154 2020-06-03 00:33:05
THE COMMON IDEA of claiming “color blindness” is akin to the notion of being “not racist”—as with the “not racist,” the color-blind individual, by ostensibly failing to see race, fails to see racism and falls into racist passivity.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 10 | Location 162-163 2020-06-03 00:33:44
Born in the days of Malcolm X, Fannie Lou Hamer, Stokely Carmichael, and other antiracists who confronted segregationists and assimilationists in the 1950s and 1960s, the movement for Black solidarity, Black cultural pride, and Black economic and political self-determination had enraptured the entire Black world. And now, in 1970, Black power had enraptured my parents. They stopped thinking about saving Black people and started thinking about liberating Black people.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 16 | Location 240-243 2020-06-03 00:38:08
What is racism? Racism is a marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 17 | Location 266-267 2020-06-03 00:39:29
Racial inequity is when two or more racial groups are not standing on approximately equal footing.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 18 | Location 270-270 2020-06-03 00:39:38
A racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups. An antiracist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial equity between racial groups. By policy, I mean written and unwritten laws, rules, procedures, processes, regulations, and guidelines that govern people. There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy. Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity between racial groups.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 18 | Location 274-277 2020-06-03 00:40:12
“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.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 18 | Location 281-282 2020-06-03 00:40:40
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.”
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 19 | Location 300-303 2020-06-03 00:42:15
An antiracist idea is any idea that suggests the racial groups are equals in all their apparent differences—that there is nothing right or wrong with any racial group. Antiracist ideas argue that racist policies are the cause of racial inequities.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 20 | Location 310-312 2020-06-03 00:42:49
Racism is a powerful collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity and are substantiated by racist ideas. Antiracism is a powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to racial equity and are substantiated by antiracist ideas.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 20 | Location 313-315 2020-06-03 00:43:02
“Racist” and “antiracist” are like peelable name tags that are placed and replaced based on what someone is doing or not doing, supporting or expressing in each moment. These are not permanent tattoos. No one becomes a racist or antiracist. We can only strive to be one or the other.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 22 | Location 349-351 2020-06-03 00:45:37
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.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 28 | Location 425-427 2020-06-03 00:50:08
We are what we see ourselves as, whether what we see exists or not. We are what people see us as, whether what they see exists or not. What people see in themselves and others has meaning and manifests itself in ideas and actions and policies, even if what they are seeing is an illusion.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 37 | Location 562-564 2020-06-03 02:00:43
The obedient Gomes de Zurara created racial difference to convince the world that Prince Henry (and thus Portugal) did not slave-trade for money, only to save souls.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 42 | Location 636-637 2020-06-03 02:07:27
The root problem—from Prince Henry to President Trump—has always been the self-interest of racist power.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 42 | Location 649-650 2020-06-03 02:08:27
He defines microaggressions as “brief, everyday exchanges that send denigrating messages to certain individuals because of their group membership.”
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 46 | Location 703-704 2020-06-03 02:12:33
What other people call racial microaggressions I call racist abuse. And I call the zero-tolerance policies preventing and punishing these abusers what they are: antiracist. Only racists shy away from the R-word—racism is steeped in denial.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 47 | Location 714-716 2020-06-03 02:13:20
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.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 54 | Location 830-832 2020-06-03 02:22:31
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.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 54 | Location 832-833 2020-06-03 02:22:47
To be antiracist is to focus on ending the racism that shapes the mirages, not to ignore the mirages that shape peoples’ lives.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 54 | Location 842-843 2020-06-03 02:24:03
Ethnic racism is the resurrected script of the slave trader.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 58 | Location 898-899 2020-06-04 01:45:12
Africans involved in the slave trade did not believe they were selling their own people—they were usually selling people as different to them as the Europeans waiting on the coast. Ordinary people in West Africa—like ordinary people in Western Europe—identified themselves in ethnic terms during the life of the slave trade. It took a long time, perhaps until the twentieth century, for race making to cast its pall over the entire globe.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 59 | Location 922-926 2020-06-04 01:47:41
To be antiracist is to view national and transnational ethnic groups as equal in all their differences. To be antiracist is to challenge the racist policies that plague racialized ethnic groups across the world. To be antiracist is to view the inequities between all racialized ethnic groups as a problem of policy.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 64 | Location 994-996 2020-06-04 01:53:22
Unarmed Black bodies—which apparently look armed to fearful officers—are about twice as likely to be killed as unarmed White bodies.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 73 | Location 1134-1135 2020-06-05 01:07:23
We, the young Black super-predators, were apparently being raised with an unprecedented inclination toward violence—in a nation that presumably did not raise White slaveholders, lynchers, mass incarcerators, police officers, corporate officials, venture capitalists, financiers, drunk drivers, and war hawks to be violent.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 75 | Location 1175-1177 2020-06-05 01:10:52
Segregationists who consider Black neighborhoods to be war zones have called for tough policing and the mass incarceration of super-predators. Assimilationists say these super-predators need tough laws and tough love from mentors and fathers to civilize them back to nonviolence. Antiracists say Black people, like all people, need more higher-paying jobs within their reach, especially Black youngsters, who have consistently had the highest rates of unemployment of any demographic group, topping 50 percent in the mid-1990s.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 80 | Location 1244-1248 2020-06-05 01:17:13
The idea that Black languages outside Africa are broken is as culturally racist as the idea that languages inside Europe are fixed.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 83 | Location 1297-1298 2020-06-05 01:21:24
When we refer to a group as Black or White or another racial identity—Black Southerners as opposed to Southerners—we are racializing that group. When we racialize any group and then render that group’s culture inferior, we are articulating cultural racism.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 90 | Location 1407-1409 2020-06-05 01:30:01
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 negatively, 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.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 105 | Location 1641-1645 2020-06-05 21:21:24
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.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 124 | Location 1948-1949 2020-06-08 01:44:06
To be antiracist is to never mistake the global march of White racism for the global march of White people. To be antiracist is to never mistake the antiracist hate of White racism for the racist hate of White people. To be antiracist is to never conflate racist people with White people, knowing there are antiracist Whites and racist non-Whites. To be antiracist is to see ordinary White people as the frequent victimizers of people of color and the frequent victims of racist power.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 129 | Location 2016-2019 2020-06-08 23:57:01
White racists do not want to define racial hierarchy or policies that yield racial inequities as racist. To do so would be to define their ideas and policies as racist. 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.”
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 130 | Location 2044-2048 2020-06-08 23:59:51
White supremacists are the ones supporting policies that benefit racist power against the interests of the majority of White people. White supremacists claim to be pro-White but refuse to acknowledge that climate change is having a disastrous impact on the earth White people inhabit. They oppose affirmative-action programs, despite White women being their primary beneficiaries. White supremacists rage against Obamacare even as 43 percent of the people who gained lifesaving health insurance from 2010 to 2015 were White. They heil Adolf Hitler’s Nazis, even though it was the Nazis who launched a world war that destroyed the lives of more than forty million White people and ruined Europe. They wave Confederate flags and defend Confederate monuments, even though the Confederacy started a civil war that ended with more than five hundred thousand White American lives lost—more than every other American war combined.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 131 | Location 2064-2070 2020-06-09 00:02:45
White supremacists are the ones supporting policies that benefit racist power against the interests of the majority of White people. White supremacists claim to be pro-White but refuse to acknowledge that climate change is having a disastrous impact on the earth White people inhabit. They oppose affirmative-action programs, despite White women being their primary beneficiaries. White supremacists rage against Obamacare even as 43 percent of the people who gained lifesaving health insurance from 2010 to 2015 were White. They heil Adolf Hitler’s Nazis, even though it was the Nazis who launched a world war that destroyed the lives of more than forty million White people and ruined Europe. They wave Confederate flags and defend Confederate monuments, even though the Confederacy started a civil war that ended with more than five hundred thousand White American lives lost—more than every other American war combined. 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.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 131 | Location 2064-2073 2020-06-09 00:02:25
“They are aliens,” I told Clarence, confidently resting on the doorframe, arms crossed. “I just saw this documentary that laid out the evidence. That’s why they are so intent on White supremacy. That’s why they seem to not have a conscience. They are aliens.” Clarence listened, face expressionless. “You can’t be serious.” “I’m dead serious. This explains slavery and colonization. This explains why the Bush family is so evil. This explains why Whites don’t give a damn. This explains why they hate us so damn much. They are aliens!” I’d lifted off the doorframe and was in full argumentative mode.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 134 | Location 2099-2104 2020-06-09 00:05:20
Like every other racist idea, the powerless defense underestimates Black people and overestimates White people. It erases the small amount of Black power and expands the already expansive reach of White power. The powerless defense does not consider people at all levels of power, from policymakers like politicians and executives who have the power to institute and eliminate racist and antiracist policies, to policy managers like officers and middle managers empowered to execute or withhold racist and antiracist policies.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 140 | Location 2201-2205 2020-06-09 00:12:30
If we accept the idea that we have no power, we are falling under the sort of mind control that will, in fact, rob us of any power to resist.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 142 | Location 2226-2227 2020-06-09 00:14:12
Racist ideas are constantly produced to cage the power of people to resist.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 142 | Location 2229-2229 2020-06-09 00:14:41
“Live by ourselves,” Frazier responded, “for there is a prejudice against us in the South that will take years to get over.”
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 174 | Location 2733-2734 2020-06-09 23:12:10
“Husbands, love your wives, and wives, obey your husbands.” “I’m not obeying him!” Ma interjected. “What!” Pastor Quinby said in shock, turning to look at my father. “What!” Dad said, turning to look at my mother. “The only man I obeyed was my father, when I was a child,” she nearly shouted, staring into Dad’s wide eyes. “You are not my father and I’m not a child!”
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 185 | Location 2920-2924 2020-06-09 23:26:40
Black queer activists, too, had been marginalized after they launched the gay-liberation movement through the Stonewall rebellion in Manhattan in 1969. Braving homophobia in Black spaces and racism
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 187 | Location 2937-2938 2020-06-09 23:27:53
“To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough. “Our politics initially sprang from the shared belief that Black women are inherently valuable,” they wrote. “No other ostensibly progressive movement has ever considered our specific oppression as a priority….We realize that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us.”
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 187 | Location 2944-2947 2020-06-09 23:28:48
To be antiracist is to reject not only the hierarchy of races but of race-genders. To be feminist is to reject not only the hierarchy of genders but of race-genders. To truly be antiracist is to be feminist. To truly be feminist is to be antiracist. To be antiracist (and feminist) is to level the different race-genders, is to root the inequities between the equal race-genders in the policies of gender racism.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 189 | Location 2970-2973 2020-06-09 23:30:24
Gender racism is behind the thinking that when one defends White male abusers like Trump and Brett Kavanaugh one is defending White people; when one defends Black male abusers like Bill Cosby and R. Kelly one is defending Black people.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 189 | Location 2991-2994 2020-06-09 23:32:30
Black men raised in the top 1 percent by millionaires are as likely to be incarcerated as White men raised in households earning $36,000.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 190 | Location 3005-3007 2020-06-09 23:33:47
My journey to being an antiracist first recognized the intersectionality of my ethnic racism, and then my bodily racism, and then my cultural racism, and then my color racism, and then my class racism, and, when I entered graduate school, my gender racism and queer racism.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 191 | Location 3016-3018 2020-06-09 23:34:42
Queer antiracism is equating all the race-sexualities, striving to eliminate the inequities between the race-sexualities. We cannot be antiracist if we are homophobic or transphobic.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 197 | Location 3086-3087 2020-06-09 23:39:44
To be queer antiracist is to serve as an ally to transgender people, to intersex people, to women, to the non-gender-conforming, to homosexuals, to their intersections, meaning listening, learning, and being led by their equalizing ideas, by their equalizing policy campaigns, by their power struggle for equal opportunity.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 197 | Location 3095-3097 2020-06-09 23:40:28
It is best to challenge ourselves by dragging ourselves before people who intimidate us with their brilliance and constructive criticism.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 199 | Location 3121-3122 2020-06-09 23:42:42
Terms and sayings like “I’m not racist” and “race neutral” and “post-racial” and “color-blind” and “only one race, the human race” and “only racists speak about race” and “Black people can’t be racist” and “White people are evil” are bound to fail in identifying and eliminating racist power and policy.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 201 | Location 3161-3163 2020-06-10 08:59:01
Racist policymakers drum up fear of antiracist policies through racist ideas, knowing if the policies are implemented, the fears they circulate will never come to pass.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 208 | Location 3271-3272 2020-06-10 09:12:19
Racist policymakers drum up fear of antiracist policies through racist ideas, knowing if the policies are implemented, the fears they circulate will never come to pass. Once the fears do not come to pass, people will let down their guards as they enjoy the benefits. Once they clearly benefit, most Americans will support and become the defenders of the antiracist policies they once feared.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 208 | Location 3271-3274 2020-06-10 09:12:28
What if we measure the radicalism of speech by how radically it transforms open-minded people, by how the speech liberates the antiracist power within? What if we measure the conservatism of speech by how intensely it keeps people the same, keeps people enslaved by their racist ideas and fears, conserving their inequitable society?
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 211 | Location 3326-3328 2020-06-10 09:16:32
I try to keep everyday people in mind when I use “racist policies” instead of “institutional racism.”
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 223 | Location 3495-3496 2020-06-11 00:02:44
Racism has always been terminal and curable. Racism has always been recognizable and mortal.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 223 | Location 3500-3501 2020-06-11 00:03:08
When policies fail, do not blame the people. Start over and seek out new and more effective antiracist treatments until they work.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 232 | Location 3638-3639 2020-06-11 00:11:40
But before we can treat, we must believe. Believe all is not lost for you and me and our society. Believe in the possibility that we can strive to be antiracist from this day forward. Believe in the possibility that we can transform our societies to be antiracist from this day forward.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 238 | Location 3733-3735 2020-06-11 00:17:12
Racist power is not godly. Racist policies are not indestructible. Racial inequities are not inevitable. Racist ideas are not natural to the human mind.
<How to Be an Antiracist>(Kendi, Ibram X.) Highlight on page 238 | Location 3735-3737 2020-06-11 00:17:25