Antiracism is everyone’s work
“No one is born with racist ideas. People consume them, as others produce them to justify racist policies.”
Ibram X. Kendi won the National Book Award in 2016 for Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. He is the founding director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University in Washington, D.C., where he is professor of history and international relations. His memoir How to Be an Antiracist will be published this summer.
You’ve defined a racist idea as one that suggests a racial group is superior or inferior in any way to another racial group. And you’ve written that even figures such as Sojourner Truth, Frederick Douglass, and Barack Obama sometimes have espoused racist ideas, such as when Obama said African Americans needed “a new set of attitudes.” Can racist ideas infect even those fighting racism?
Yes, because there are Americans who are against racial policy but simultaneously think that black people, or another racial group of people, are in some ways culturally or behaviorally inferior. One of the more popular racist ideas among those fighting against racism is the idea that racism has made black people inferior, or what I call the oppression-inferiority thesis. The idea is that slavery and segregation and poverty did not just treat black people as less than but made them into less than and that oppression has devastated black attitudes and we need a new set of attitudes.
