Ibram X. Kendi on Being an Antiracist

don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us.

Our guest on this episode is Abram X. Kendy, an American author, historian, and scholar of race and discriminatory policy in America. Abram is the director of the Center for Anti Racist Research at Boston University and received the National Book Award and National Book Award for Nonfiction for Stamped From the Beginning The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. Today, Eric and Abram discuss his new book, How to Be An Anti Racist. Hi, Abram, welcome to the show. Hey,

great to be on the show. It's a real pleasure to have you on. I have been spending a lot of time with your most recent book, How to Be An Anti Racist, although I guess it's not most recent because it looks like you published a children in the book in the last several days, so I didn't read that one yet. I'm a little bit behind on that one. Well, see, it's my most recent adult so I think, yeah, boy, this is one of those where I feel like I could talk with you for about four hours about all

the ideas in this book. But we're going to be on uh slightly shorter time frame than that, so I'd like to start off, though we always start our shows off with the Parable of the two Wolves. In the Parable of the Two Wolves, there's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, we all have two wolves inside of us that are always a battle. One's a good wolf. Which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf,

which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second. He looks up his grandfather's his grandfather which one wins, and the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to ask you to start off what that parable means to you in your life and in the work

that you do. For me, what it means is that we should be focused on feeding in anti racist world, and we should be focused on feeding our system with anti racist policies, meaning policies that are leading to equity and justice. We should be focused on feeding our minds with anti racist ideas, meaning ideas that say that there's nothing wrong or right with any racial group, that despite the differences in which people look, despite different cultures and

ethnic groups, we're all on the same level. We're all equal, I mean, and if there are disparities, they must be the result of of racist policies, because there's nothing wrong with with groups of people. Yep. I love your book in that you spend a lot of time defining what things mean, which I think is a really important thing, and and I want to go through what a couple

of those definitions are. But the first one I want to start with that I thought was really important is to define what a racist is, because you use that term very differently than most of us use that term. Will say that person is a racist, or you know, I'm not a racist, but you describe being a racist or not a racist more around actions and behaviors and

ideas that identity. Yeah, so most people think of a racist or even a not racist, or even they would have presumed that an anti racist are nouns, when when really their descriptive terms, they're more verbs and and and so I think that first and foremost, I define a racist as someone who is expressing a racist idea or

supporting a racist policy with their action or inaction. So what's critical in that definition is someone who is, in other words, in the moments that we are expressing a racist idea that something is wrong with lattox immigrants or or black people or um, you know, Asian Americans, the times in which we're expressing those ideas were being racist.

And if in the very next moment we are making the case that there's nothing wrong with any racial group of people in that very next moment would being anti racist If in one moment we are doing nothing in the face of racist policy, in the next moment we're challenging racist policy. We're going from racist too two anti racists.

These are descriptive terms. And I don't think Americans and other people around the world realize that when they use the term racist and even not racist as identities, When they think of racist as an attack word, as a pejorative term, almost like the our word, they are trafficking and really white nationalist ideology. White nationalists have long advocated that racist is a term willed it at white people to hurt them and to attack them, and I don't

think people realize that they hold so much white nationalist thought. Yeah, yeah, you say that racist and anti racists 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. And I really think that's an important idea. And as you said, if we use it as an insultive term, and if we think it's a permanent identity, it's very hard for us to ever say, oh wait,

I just expressed a racist viewpoint. Yeah, people are not gonna want to say that, because then they're gonna believe they admit the times they expressed the racistist viewpoint, they admit the times in which they were being racist, that the society's tattoo racist on their forehead. That's right, that's right.

You talk about a couple other ideas that I thought were really interesting, and one of the ideas that was hard for me to wrap my head around was that the problem of race has always had at its core a problem of power. We tend to think, or at least I tended to think, and I think a lot of people tend to think that people are racist or racist policies are created out of ignorance or misunderstanding or

perhaps in the worst case hate. But you really make the point that in the research you've done over and over that racist policies start out of a desire for power, or for gain or for wealth. The policy starts, and then the ideas come along to justify the policy. Let me take a contemporary example in which you've had some GOP politicians who recognize that more and more Americans are becoming more centrist or even more liberal, that you also

have a growing percentage of people of color. And since because they probably were looking at those trends, particularly during the first term of the Obama administration, and seeing that those trends were not amicable, you know, to their political prospects. And so what happens is some of these folks weren't like, well, we're in a democracy, so there's naturally not much I can do, you know, majority sort of wins and rules. No, they said, well, when you don't have enough votes, you

start figuring out way to suppress votes. And so then, out of political self interest, they started or continued to advocate for voter suppression policies like voter ID laws, and you know, those policies have been found to target African American voters with quote surgical precision, to quote a North Carolina court. But then they had to justify those policies.

They had to explain to their voters and other Americans why they were instituting the voter ID policies, why are they were purging so many voters from voter roles, why they were cutting early voting programs, And the case that

they made was voter fraud. So, in other words, they created this idea that all these people were voting fraudulently, which the data proved to be almost non existent problem, but it really harkened back to this idea that black and brown voters are essentially corrupting the system um and that was the dominant idea during the reconstruction era that ku kux klansmen and other neo confederates used to undermine these interracial Southern governments and and so then that was

the racist idea. So you have the self interest the power leading to the racist policies. Then out of the racist policies and the need to justify them, project them, campaign for them, we're racist ideas, and then you had everyday Americans who were believing these ideas, who went on to believe, yes, you know, these black and brown people

are voting fraudently and they're ruining this country. And then then some of them were obviously ignorant about who was actually corrupting the voting process, and then some of them were even hateful, and so then you had the racist policies leading to the racist ideas, and that's how historically it has been. You say that you don't prefer terms like systematic racism, institutional racism. You find that they are often confusing, and you prefer the simpler term racist policy

because it's easier to describe what we're talking about. So yes, So when we when we talk about racism with an M, so are a C. I s m um that I spell it right? Racism Um. When we when we think about racism, racism is essentially structural, it's essentially systematic. Uh, it is essentially institutional. And I think it's critical for us to distinguish between racism with an MD with racist with a T. So racist is individual, Racist is an

individual person or an idea or policy. And so I think first I wanted to convey that when we say racism, we're thinking we should be thinking about something systemic. So to me, systemic racism or institutional or structural racism, we don't need to add that extra sort of term. All racism is systemic if we're thinking about an individual, we

use racists with a team. Secondly, I think for everyday people, you know, when you go into a barbershop, or you know, you go to a bus stop, you know, you go into a church basement around people who may not have ever read a book on racism intended a lecture and you say, oh, yes, you know, America is experiencing systemic racism, and you ask them, well, what does that mean? Many people may not even be able to say that. Even college students, even some people who study it, cannot coherently

describe what that actually means. Right, And and so whenever we have terms that everyday people cannot understand, you know, we should think about different ways to explain. So that's why I use the term racist policies, because a racist policy, okay, people understand what a policy is, and then you're qualifying with a racist policy, and then people can then thinks, start thinking about their lives and seeing those racist policies, and then they begin to see, Okay, those policies are

making up the structure. And so I want people to focus on not the structure. I want them to focus on really the veins that really make up the structure, so that um, they can begin the process of undermining. And so you say that no policy is racially neutral. It's either racist or anti racist. And as I thought about that, I I sort of found myself wandering into lots of policies that I was like, well, I don't know if I can tell the difference. Like I, just for fun, I opened up I live in the state

of Ohio. I looked up some of the recent bills in the state of Ohio, and I was like, this one and again it was exempt veterans disability severance pay from income tax. And I was like, well, I can't tell. And I know you don't know anything about that bill necessarily, and I know the devil is always in the details, but in general, saying, Okay, the severance pay that we paid veterans is not going to be taxed. We're going

to exempt it from income tax. Does that seem to be an anti racist policy or or a racist policy? Because to me, I look at I go, well, it seems neutral. But I wanted to get your your sense of that because because you've obviously looked at it much more closely than I have. Not that policy, but these ideas so severants. So we're thinking about severance pay, we're thinking about something pay that can ultimately contribute to the wealth of a particular person or even once family, let's say,

or even they're just annual income. Right, And so I think one way to assess whether that policy is indeed racists or anti racist is we currently have a growing racial wealth gap in the state of Ohio, or even an income gap. So then the question becomes, is that bill is that new measure growing that wealth gap or closing it? Is it growing the income gap between on average black people and white people in the state of Ohio, or is it closing it? What's what's the impact of it?

And I think that's how we can sort of determine the answer as to whether that policy is indeed racist or anti racist. Let me give another example. You know, the tax bill uh that was passed I believe in in two thousand seven team you know, had no racial language in it. There was not a discussion about race there. There wasn't a statement of oh, that's past this bill to suppress the wealth of black people or increased the

wealth of white people. But what has happened as a result of that bill There has been an even greater concentration of wealth among those who are super rich because obviously they're getting taxed less, and people who are super rich are disproportionately white. And so ultimately, what's happened as a result of that bill, it's grown the racial wealth gap.

And so thereby it's a racist bill. So with the bill I brought up, if we wanted to know, we'd probably want to say, well, would we look at what percentage are people of color or would we just say if it's helping people of color put more money in their pocket based on this bill, it's an anti racist bill. And again I know we're going deep in the weeds here, which is not really where I meant to go in

a thirty minute conversation, but here we are. So I think with veterans, so to give an example, I think that again it's not something that I'm knowledgeable of, but from my understanding, the military is one of the most desegregated sectors in our society. In other words, with some militaries, I believe the army. You know, black people are higher in their national population, so typically and you know in national sectors were under represented or in prisons will be overrepresented.

But for my understanding and certain units of the armed forces, we are overrepresented. And so what that then means is if, for instance, in a sector where white people are overrepresented, the tax policy is allowing such that more people could keep their income, but in among veterans, where let's say, if it is the case that black people are overrepresented, the tax policies are making it such that people can keep less of their income, right and and so then

a bill is sort of easing that. Then it may be an anti racist bill. Again, I'm not really sure, but I'm just sort of thinking out loud, right right, yea. I'm not looking for your opinion on that bill so much as your thought process. And you formed a center which the whole goal was to bring together policy people to really look at what policies are racist, what policies you're not, and to try and change the sort of

policy that gets enacted. Well, certainly, I mean, you know, we've founded the Boston University Center for Anti Racist Research, and and certainly you know one of our goals will be to allow research to bear on sort of policies that are indeed maintaining or growing racial inequity and justice, so we then can see what policies need to be

eliminated from our body politics. There's a term that generally I would have thought was a term that would be a positive term in the fight for racial equality, but you've described is not um and it's the term racial discrimination. You said, racist power has been basically common beered that term since the sixties, So talk to me about why that term has become something that's not helpful in being

anti racist. So what's happened since the sixties is the term discrimination, especially because you know, people who were advocating against racism had long been making the case that one of the things that's happening as a result of racism is people of color are being discriminated against, and and

so we need to end racial discrimination. And many of the laws pre sixties, though certainly not all of them, but many within the actual law, there were language that specify the ways in which let's say, black people should or could be discriminated against. And so by the nineteen sixties, when some of those laws were deemed unconstitutional or were disallowed from us, the proposed solution to that was for laws to not have any racial language in them. Right.

The conception was that laws that have racial language of them discriminate, and then laws that don't apparently are neutral or race neutral. And so that's then would allow people who oppose affirm of action to make the case that affirm of action policies were a form of discrimination against white people, and thereby they were racists, and thereby they we're not allowing America to achieve its goals of equality,

and thereby they should be eliminated. And what I sort of tried to make a case for it and how to be an anti racist and in a small section that probably could have been a Hope book, was that I think, like with everything else, we should be focused

on the outcome of discrimination. In other words, there is a very different thing in which if you have a room that is a hundred percent white, and it's a hundred percent white because for a hundred years you've been discriminating against every non white person that have tried to come in, and you said, no, you can't come in

this room. And that's one thing. It's another thing when that room is white and you're trying to equalize that room, You're trying to create more representative numbers of people in that room, and you're being barred from making the room larger. So then how do you go about um creating racial parity in that room? If you're not allowed for making the room larger, you can only have a hundred seats,

how do you do that? Really? The only way to do that, again, if you're committed to racial parity and equity is two essentially discriminate, but it's a different outcome. One is the goal is equity, the other is the goal to maintained in equity. One is a temporary solution two equity is reached. The other is a permanent scenario which are permanently barring people who are not white until forever. I was just really playing with the term racist and

anti racist discrimination. I think we should again be focused on outcomes, and I think that this is something that

we do every single day with our children. To give an example, those of us who have multiple children, If one of our children goals, and you know, we've already served them dinner, and and one of them has taken off the plate of the other child, and so the other child has only a little bit right, and we have have any more food, how do we go about ensuring that those two children have an equitable amount of food. The only way we can do that is to take the food off the plate from the child who took

the food. And so it's easy to call that discrimination. Now you're discriminating against that child because you're taking food off. It's play, and it's it's the same thing and now you're taking food off his plate, just like you took food off the other person's plate, and both things are equally bad. But no, that's actually not what's happening. You

have to understand the history in the context. Yeah, in that section, you quoted uh US Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmen and saying that in order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally,

we must treat them differently. And and it's just like, for instance, you have an under resource school and that school has far and away less resources than let's say, and it's majority black, that a majority white school down the road, and you want to go about ensuring that the two schools have a relatively equal amount of resources. You know in one school is getting I'm just throwing the numbers out there. You know has a five million dollar annual budget and the other has a two million

dollar annual budget. You can then, okay, let's up that two million annual budget to five million. But then folks at that white school like, you're just scrimining and gets us because you're not giving us money to like, And and that's essentially the call of reverse discrimination. You say that a racist is somebody who sees problems in groups of people. They locate the problem in in a group of people, and an anti racist is someone who sees

problems in policies. You say, Americans have long been trained to see the deficiencies of people rather than policy. It's a pretty easy stake to make. People are in our faces. Policies are different. Yeah, it is easy. For instance, you have many Americans who it's easy for them, for instance, to blame those individual people who are engaged in violent crime in a neighborhood that's perceived as dangerous and and

and and violent. It's a little bit harder. And you know, you see those people, it's easy to blame those people, and it's easy to say those people are violent, and it's easy to say, then the community is violent. It's much harder to to take a step back and and start to think about, Okay, what potential policies are affecting that community that could be leading to those higher levels

of violent crime. Then what's happening in another community? And it's again, you know, for instance, when it comes to violent crime, we know, for instance that typically in the neighborhoods and higher levels of violent crime tend to have

higher levels of poverty and unemployment. And so, but we can't see those macro issues of poverty and unemployment for whatever reason, as the cause of that violent crime, because we're only looking at those individual people, right, and we're only focused and outraged about the acts of those individual people. And certainly, you know, anytime anyone harms and other person, we should be outraged, But we should also realize that

these aren't actually dangerous black neighborhoods. Because if I somehow it was the blackness of the people that was behind the violent crimes, in all black neighborhoods, no matter the levels of poverty and unemployment, would have the same levels of violent crime. But it just so happens that higher income black neighborhoods tend to have lower levels far lower levels of violent crime then extremely impoverished black neighborhoods. And so what that means is we actually do have dangerous

unemployed neighborhoods. We have davids impoverished neighborhoods. But then that changes the calculations in terms of what is the deficiency. Yeah, you make a case in that part of the book that there's much more correlation between high crime and high unemployment than there is between say, high crime and a

black neighborhood. And you look and you see where the real challenge is, and you persistently throughout the book encourage us to treat individual behavior as individual behavior, not racial, not ethnic, not cultural. You sort of dismantle all of that one thing after the other through the book, and it gets back to sort of this idea of we treat an individual's behavior as an individual's which makes a

lot of sense. But I think there's another version of that that to be careful of, because that is also a tool of saying every individual is responsible only for themselves, and that each person should be able to succeed regardless of the circumstances. Is if all we're doing is looking at individuals, then shouldn't all individuals be able to succeed equally? Well, I think I could see sort of see how that transfers into that, And I think that it is critically

important for us to do two things simultaneously. One, when we see an individual person acting negatively, we're seeing an individual person act negatively, right, Or if we if we see an individual person who is being lazy, we can put them in a group. We can put them in a group of lazy people. And it just so happens that there are people of all races in that group, right, it's not just black and brown people. And so if we're gonna group people, we should group in based specifically

on that characteristic. And also we should probably group it if we want to be really precise in that time. In other words, in this moment, the lazy people right now, because that person just could be having a lazy day and every other day they work hard. Right, So I

think there's that then simultaneous lee. If there are disparities between groups, we know thereby that there are all of these positive and negative characteristics among the individuals that make up any racial group, and all of those negativities and positivities make these two groups human, imperfect groups, and thereby equal.

So thereby, if there's disparities between them, it can't be because there's something wrong with black people, because there are things wrong with black individuals, but there are things wrong with white individuals too, so it must be something else,

and that's something else's policy. You've got a sentence, I'll just read, Uh, here before you wrap up, which I think really sums this up a lot for me, which you said one of racism's harms is the way it falls on the unexceptional black person who is asked to be extraordinary just to survive, and even worse, the black screw up who faces the abyss after one error, while

the white screw up is handed second chances and empathy. Yeah, because I mean for black people who struggle to make mistakes, many people do not see them as a human being making a mistake, thereby a human being who can correct the mistake, thereby a human being who has the potential

to be something great. What many people see is a black person, and they see that person's mistake as due to their blackness, and then they say that person can't change their blackness, so thereby they're always going to make those mistakes, so therefore let me not give them another chance, while with a white individual, they're more likely to understand and see the individuality and the humanity, and to be human is to make mistakes, um and to be empathetic

is to give people second chances. And I've said on this show to listeners before, I'm one of those white people that got a second chance when I was I was four years old addicted to heroin, and when I was arrested, I was given chances that I doubt I would have been given had I been black. You know, I I benefited from from that, that sort of thing, and so I kind of lived it, you know, myself, firsthand. And I think it's important for all of us, and

certainly white people, to to recognize that. And it doesn't diminish how hard it was for you to follow through on your second chance and how much work was needed. Um, but it does acknowledge that second chance, and it does acknowledge that other people, because of the color of the skin, they may not have had the opportunity to work as hard as you did. Because part of it is many people think if they just admit the opportunities that they've given that they're going to diminish all of the work

that they put in. No, it doesn't disminish the work at all. What it says is other people haven't been given this, and you want other people to be given the same opportunities that you did because you believe other people could succeed and recover in the way. Yep, yep, exactly right. Well, thank you so much for your time coming on the show and spending some time with us. Your books are excellent and highly recommended for people who are looking to learn more about ways to be anti

racist in their own life. Thank you, You're welcome. Thank you you take care of you too. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community. With this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support now. We are so grateful for the members of our community. We wouldn't be able to do what we do without their support,

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