Nonfiction: How to be an Anti-Racist by Ibram X. Kendi

Ibram X. Kendi combines powerful insights, meticulous research, and personal memoir in his best-selling book, How to be an Anti-Racist.  
     This is one of the most impactful books I have ever read and I strongly encourage everyone to read it.  
​Highlights:
     He says, “the consistent function of racist ideas--and any kind of bigotry more broadly [is] to manipulate us into seeing people as the problem, instead of the policies that ensnare them.” 
     “Institutional racism and structural racism and systemic racism are redundant. Racism is itself institutional, structural, and systemic.”

Discrimination

• “Focusing on racial discrimination takes our eyes off the central agents of racism: racist policy and racist policymakers…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.”

Racism

• The concept of race was introduced to the world in the 15th century by European colonizers to justify the slave trade and appropriation of natural resources from “their” colonies.
• “The source of racist ideas was not ignorance and hate, but self-interest.”
• “Race is a mirage, but one that humanity has organized itself around in very real ways.”
• “...in genetic terms, all human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9 percent the same”
• “We often see and remember the race and not the individual. This is racist categorizing, this stuffing of our experiences with individuals into color-marked racial closets. An anti-racist treats and remembers individuals as individuals.”
• “Racist ideas are not natural to the human mind.”

Assimilation

• “Assimilationists believe that people of color can…be developed, become fully human, just like White people. Assimilationist ideas reduce people of color to the level of children needing instruction on how to act.”
• Assimilation is based on the idea that Whiteness is the normative standard, that “To be American is to be White.” 

Ethnicity

• “The face of ethnic racism bares itself in the form of a persistent question: Where are you from?”
• “No evidence has ever been produced…to prove that Black people are louder, angrier, nicer, funnier, lazier, less punctual, more immoral, religious, or dependent; that Asians are more subservient; that Whites are greedier…Just as race doesn’t exist biologically, race doesn’t exist behaviorally.”

Fear

• “We are not meant to fear suits with policies that kill...we are to fear the weary, unarmed Lantix body from Latin America. The Arab body kneeling to Allah is to be feared. The Black body…is to be feared. Adept politicians and crime entrepreneurs manufacture [these fears] and stand before voters to deliver [them]…from fear of these other bodies.”
• “...researchers have found a much stronger and clearer correlation between violent-crime levels and unemployment levels than between violent crime and race.”

Welfare

• Welfare critics said “little to nothing about rich White people who depended on the welfare of inheritances, tax cuts, government contracts, hookup[s, and bailouts. They said little to nothing about the White middle class depending on the welfare of the New Deal, the GI Bill, subsidized suburbs, and exclusive White networks.”
• “Poor Blacks are much more likely to live in neighborhoods where other families are poor, creating a poverty of resources and opportunities.”
• “With Black poverty dense and White poverty scattered, Black poverty is visible and surrounds its victims; White poverty blends in.”

White Flight

• “The combination of government welfare--in the form of subsidies, highway construction, and loan guarantees--along with often racist developers opened new wealth-building urban and suburban homes to the fleeing Whites, while largely confining Blacks natives and new Black migrants to the so-called ghettos, now overcrowded and designed to extract wealth from their residents.”
• “...ordinary White people benefit from racist policies, though not nearly as much…as they could from an equitable society, one where the average White voter could have as much power as superrich White men to decide elections and shape policy. Where their kid’s business-class schools could resemble first-class prep schools of today’s superrich.”

Anti-racism

• “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.”
• “Behavioral enrichment programs, like mentoring and educational programs can help individuals but are bound to fail racial groups, which are held back by bad policies, not bad behavior.”
• “The most effective protests create an environment whereby changing racist policy becomes in power’s self-interest, like desegregating businesses because sit-ins are driving away customers…like giving teachers raises to resume schooling”
• ​“When it comes to healing America of racism, we want to heal America without pain, but without pain, there is no progress.”
• If we “fight to create an antiracist world, then we give humanity a chance to one day survive, a chance to live in communion, a chase to be free forever.”

For more insightful social science nonfiction, read my reviews of
A Paradise Built in Hell, Stories are Weapons, What Makes a Hero?, and Say the Right Thing

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