How to Be an Antiracist Main Ideas

Racism

Kendi explains that racism is not simply attitudes or individual biases but a combination of these racist ideas with racist policies. This combination creates and then upholds racial inequities in a society. Racist ideas include those that create a hierarchy of races in which one racial group is considered superior to others and are often supported and strengthened by racial stereotypes. A racist can also be someone who supports one or more racist policies by their actions, by their inaction, or by expressing ideas rooted in racism.  

Racist ideas support racist policies because they’re used as normal and acceptable justifications for racist policy. The idea that Black people are inherently inferior to white people or the notion that Black people excel at sports but are less capable of higher-level thinking are examples of racist ideas. Kendi does not view racist ideas as fixed or indelible, as evidenced by the many examples from his own life in which he held racist beliefs and then changed those ideas as he understood them to be racist. He describes racist ideas as more akin to “peelable name tags” that can be removed. Yet he dismisses the category of “non-racist.” For him, either a person’s actions or ideas support racist policies or don’t support such policies. A person who supports a racist policy is clearly racist. But a person who by their inaction refuses to work against racist policies can’t identify as not racist, even if their individual behavior is not racist. This is because, while racism is not indelible, it is deeply rooted, and so society’s momentum is behind racism rather than antiracism. For Kendi, the road to freeing oneself of racism is an ongoing process, in which a person—of any race—strives to recognize their racism and actively works to eliminate it.

Antiracist

In How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi defines an antiracist as anyone who supports “an antiracist policy through their actions or [by] expressing an antiracist idea.” Antiracist policies include laws, rules, guidelines, procedures, and the like that are written or unwritten. To successfully work against racism, antiracists must carefully examine every community, organization, and institution to identify both blatant and subtle forms of racism and then dismantle them. An antiracist opposes and fights against any measure that promotes racial inequity. An antiracist idea is one that suggests all racial groups are equal, although they have differences, and that no racial group has the moral high ground or is inherently inferior. The goal of antiracism is the implementation of antiracist policies that produce racial equity and are justified and underpinned by antiracist ideas.  

Kendi stresses that to be an antiracist, a person must recognize and acknowledge race, even though it has no basis in biology. That is, antiracists are not simply “not racist,” which implies a passivity that actually perpetuates racism. Kendi similarly rejects the notion of “color blindness,” which he associates with the idea of being “not racist,” and is, in his view, actually just a way to hide one’s racism or make an excuse for passivity. An antiracist must acknowledge the reality of race and how it is embedded in real policies and harmful stereotypes that affect the lives of real people. An antiracist is not passive but recognizes race in order to actively oppose and change the policies that cause racial inequity.

Intersectionality

The term intersectionality refers to the ways race, gender, and other traits, such as sexuality, combine to create unique experiences of discrimination and oppression. In How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi tackles the many types of intersectionality that affect societal inequities. For example, a person may be a Black woman and also a lesbian. As a Black person, she may experience racist oppression. As a woman, she may experience gender-based oppression, or sexism. As a lesbian, she may experience discrimination due to her sexuality. As a result, she may experience more severe discrimination—and discrimination of a different flavor—than a straight Black woman, a white lesbian woman, or a Black man. She lives at the intersection of these identities and their attendant negative stereotypes and biases. 

Intersectionality encompasses other identities besides race, gender, and sexuality. Kendi examines intersections involving class, skin color, ethnicity, nationality, and culture. Black people and other non-white racial groups experience greater inequity when their identities are at the intersection of race and any of the above identifying characteristics. For example, a poor Black person’s life is at the intersection of race and class, meaning that poor Black people endure greater inequity than middle-class Black people. Lighter-skinned Black people suffer less inequity than darker-skinned Black people, and so on for each identifying category that intersects with racial identity. Stereotypes often support intersectional discrimination. Stereotypes of Black people and LGBTQ people as hypersexual lead to intersectional stereotypes such as the recklessly hypersexual Black gay man—a stereotype that Kendi says he had to unlearn when he found out his good friend at college, a young Black man, was gay.