How to Be Antiracist

want to whitewash or just completely ignore. And yet right now can be a more perfect time to teach Americans about the history of racism and how we can all do a better job of combating it in our society, which of course is why conservatives both protest so much. White people love talking about how they're not racist. But what if I told you it's not enough to simply not be racist, that you must, in fact be actively

anti racist. That is the argument made by Abram X. Kendy, director of the Center for Anti Racist Research at Boston University and the author of the book appropriately titled How to Be Anti Racist. He also has a new podcast simply titled Be Anti Racist, and he joined me on my podcast last week, which you can support right now at Patreon dot com, Slash woke af to talk all about anti racism and the myriad of ways he is

spreading the good word about this necessary practice. Ibram, We're at a time in our country following the murder that we all witnessed of George Floyd, the murders of Brianna Taylor, of Ahmad Aubrey, the list goes on and on and on. Twenty twenty was a cataclysm of events around race racism. I mean, we saw phone calls to the police for people that are bird watching. We saw you know so much and it seems like it's unrelenting. How do you

describe your work? And then the necessity not to just say I'm not racist, but to actively be anti racist? What does that mean to you and why at this important point I believe in our history, is it necessary that we change the narrative from I'm not racist to actively being anti racist. Well, first, I'm happy that we're able to have this conversation and thank you for bringing

me onto the onto your show. I think it's important for us to to start from a basic truth, and it's a basic truth that is under attack, just like truth itself right now. And that basic truth is that we live in a nation of racial disparities and inequities,

and injustice is all around us. Whether it's Black people being disproportionately incarcerated, whether that's Native ping Native people being disproportionately killed from COVID nineteen, whether that's you know, black women dying at higher rates from pregnancy than than than white women, whether that's you know, Latdex people being disproportionately impoverished, and on and on and so the status quo is racial inequity. And the fundamental question of our time is

why do these inequities exist? And there's two answers. One answer is because of racism, systemical structural racism. The other answer is because there's something wrong with those people on

the dying or lower end. And and so, if the status quo is inequity, and the cause of that inequity is racism, to do nothing in the face of a status quo is to allow that status quo to persist, and so literally, to not do anything while Black people are being enslaved, to not do anything, while while Native folks are being mass murdered, to not do anything, while that the NUX people are being mass supported, what's going

to happen? It's going to only continue right and and indeed slaveholders wanted people in Chicago at Boston where I lived, to do nothing, because that to do nothing was a form of complicity. And that's one of the things. So I've been trying to get the American people and really people around the world to realize that there's really only

two options. You know, Either we're being racist by allowing the status quote to persist by our active champion of it, or by doing nothing in the face of it, or we are actively challenging racism and thereby being anti racist. You know, I think that where I find issue, where I find myself some days, where it feels like I'm screaming into the ether, is that we are still I feel at a point where we are trying to convince

white Americans that racism actually exists. That we are still at a point where it took watching a black man have the life squeezed out of him for nine minutes in twenty nine seconds in public and broad daylight for folks in every state of this country to actively protest for black lives and then understand that by the time the fall came, steam had run out and the polls had started to change in terms of where people were falling, where white people were falling on their commitment to really

not just articulating that black lives matter, but actively doing something to say that black lives matter. We just this past this month recognize the hundred year anniversary remembrance of the massacre that happened in Tulsa, and it was considered an extraordinary feat for the first president of the United States to actually visit Tulsa and to call it what

it was, a massacre and not a riot. So if we are still I mean, it was a hundred years and we're still just getting to a place where a majority of people in this country didn't even know that that occurred. And not only that that occurred, but that

wasn't in an emily. So if all of these things are true, it's like, and we're still at this point of convincing you know, I'm just wondering how we get to a place where we're actively working against this system when I have to make you believe that the system actually exists and it was meant to purposefully work against marginalized people. That's the fundamental challenge. And let me say,

I think not to overly generalize white people. But there I suspect there were some white people who saw this horrific murder of George Floyd on their laptops, you know, on their phones, like like black folks did, and like other folks did, and they felt horrible. Some of them they have even felt guilty. They heard about a nearby demonstration, and they decided to go to that local demonstration, because indeed, there was demonstrations against police brutality and racism in almost

every county in this country. And so then they went to that demonstration, and that demonstration had speakers, had had signs that were you know that, and the experience, you know, was one that that allowed them to feel better. So then they went home and you know, the only thing

that changed were their feelings. And and and then you had other white folks who were mass and have been mass manipulated by by Trump and other Republicans and even other you know, Democrats really and and it sort of causes me to think, I don't know if you remember one of Malcolm X's great speeches when he was talking to black folks and he was like, you know who taught you to hate yourself? Yes, you've been hoodwinked you've

been had, You've been left right. In other words, you know you've had you know, you had the forces of racism, the very powerful forces of racism. You know, some very powerful officials who with a growing awareness among white people that racist power, racist policies and practices, that structural racism was a problem. They were like, WHOA, people are going to start looking at us, in our policies, in our rhetoric as the problem. No, no, no no, I need to clap back and say, no, no, no, we are not

the problem. Voters. Oppression policies aren't the problem. The ability for police officers to essentially, uh you know, execute people out will with no accountability based on bills that I passed are not the problem. Those people who are demonstrating against racism or the real problem. Those black people who are describing white people and other people as racist are

the real problem. And and so then people by the end of the summer, as you stated, and certainly by this time, we're like, WHOA, Well, maybe people are like George Floyd, we're not the victims. Maybe they are the problem. And and so now we're in this period in which we're still arguing what is the problem. Is it systemic racism or the people who are who are identifying systemic

racism as the problem. And so you've had so many Americans that have been misled into believing Nicolehennah Jones is the problem as opposed to the problems she pointed out in our Historical Memory over sixteen nineteen in slavery, we always say to ourselves, right, and that racism will die out right. I can't tell you how many times over the course of my life that I've heard that, you know, when the old racist die, right, everything everything, some type

of utopia is going to descend on America. And I say this, I'm okaf all the time because I'm a former educator for early childhood education, and one of the reasons I went into education was for the sheer fact that our public education system is the biggest perpetuator of white supremacy. That it is not. It is not a marker, a genetic marker that has passed down right through family. It is something that is actively taught. We actively decide who the classics are, right, who the evaders are, who

the leaders should be. And so when I see this pushback and not pushback, an essential decimation of the sixteen nineteen project being taught in schools. People be threatening to lose funding if you decide, if you even utter the word, utter the phrase sixteen nineteen project, that they are going to take away funding from schools. I just have to

ask you, like, where do you go from there? If we're not if we can't even agree upon the truth, if we can't even agree upon the fact that you know, when when Joe Biden was in Tulsa, he said in his speech, you know, great nations face their dark their dark periods, right, they don't try and run away from it. And yet this nation has consistently run away from and denied and gas lit the population into believing that it doesn't exist, that there is no problem. And so how

do you how do you grow from there? How do you activate from there? When the purpose of denying this body of work and just any critical conversations around race are to make white kids continue to be force fed

the lie of American exceptionalism. That is just so important And that's the type of question we should be asking and thinking about because you know, even like even the term woke itself, people are viewing it in a so sort of pejorative sense when you know, last I checked, I think it's important for human beings to walk through life awake. What what what what white? What racist ideas do? What? What teaching on white supremacy does two white children, let

alone children of color everyone. What it does to white children is it creates a scenario which they walk through life asleep. You know, because if you, you know, if you're an American today saying things like systemic racism doesn't exist, then what you, as a white American uh, perceived is that the cause of all these racial inequities and disparities that we talked about earlier is not the result of systemic racism, and it must be because of the inferiorities

of superiorities of racial groups. So you walk through life not actually awake to reality, and then you even assess your own life story through uh you know this these myths. See, you can't even understand the times in which you've survived, you know, police violence because you were white, or the ways in which you had access to capital, and so you just believe, I'm just the greatest person on earth and if only those black perks would work as hard

as me. So you have an individual that doesn't even able to understand their own sort of standing in the world, nor the standing you know of white people in the world, nor the sort of reality of you know, of racism in the world. And then this is what's crucial. If you don't teach white children and even adults about racist ideas, about racist policies, and you convinced them that everything is equal,

then you are able to easily manipulate them. You're able to be a billionaire and say to white working classmen, I am your defender. I'm going to push policies that help you. And then you're able to get into office not do anything to help those working class white men, and then you're able to maintain and if anything, grow their support, even as their own economic conditioning is worthy. And and that is essentially what happened. So white folks

are so easily manipulated based on their racist ideas. But when they're taught um and they begin to see those racist ideas and even the privilege, and they adopt the more anti racist perspective, they're no longer able to be manipulated by by by by elected officials like Donald Trump.

That is indeed the point. And it's so like, how do you through your work, right through your um, your new podcast, how will you continue to unpack that truth that racism is and and and the system of white supremacy built in this country is really about mass manipulation. As you have said, it is really about if you have young people in schools, because I'll go back to the education piece, begin to question why there is inequity,

why certain things are the way that they are. Why, like, you know, I have friends that will talk to me, white friends that will talk to me about, you know, their great grandparents that passed down wealth, homes, businesses, this then the other thing, oh, their family legacy, right, and that they've been able to then benefit from and build

off of. And I'm saying to myself, of course you were right because their businesses weren't burned down, they were able to get loans in the first place, they weren't run out of town. They were able to get loans to buy homes, to build, you know, to build businesses. And so if you don't see that it isn't laziness, it isn't It isn't this idea that we have created this stereotype around black people, that it really is these policies and these systems. If you don't get folks to question,

then they continue to perpetuated. I'm just if we're still at a point of questioning reality, it's like, are we losing? Why are we? Are we? How are we? How do we win? What does that? What does that look like? Winning more people over to recognizing that is not enough to not be racist or oh why don't say racist things? I actually think that we have a governing majority of

people who recognize racism as a problem. And but within that majority, you so, for instance, you have black men who are like, yes, racism is a problem, but they can't really recognize its intersection with sexism, so they then they're perpetuating that. Or you could have a white person who says, yes, racism theoretically is a problem, and it's a problem as it relates to environmental racism. You know,

educational inequities is a problem. But now we can't rethink public safety right, and and so you have people who who don't understand or I should say, aren't recognizing the connections, or have racist ideas when it comes to one racial group and anti racist ideas when it comes to another racial group, and reject the racist ideas about their own group and accept the racist ideas about others and and don't realize that they are actually reinforcing what they claim

to be battling. And again, I again, I want to sort of emphasize that, you know, as a man of color, you know, especially coming after a twenty twenty election where a growing number of men of color compared to twenty sixteen voted for Donald Trump on this pretext that he somehow was going to free them, right, And so I think there is a there is a a number of people who are have some level of awareness, but I think we have to get them to really connect the

dots and also get them to be self reflective and self critical. There are too many white liberals who are just focused on let's say, white conservatives as the problem and don't want to look in the mirror about how they may be in reinforcing racism. You know. One of the many speeches, but one of the things that that has always stuck out to me about doctor Martin Luther King was the warning about white moderates. Yea, though, I mean because I find that that warning is something that

we don't really take as an alarm. You know. Right now, we have a majority in Congress. You know, we have the White House, and yet we can't manage to pass a voting rights bill that is going to sustain our democracy. We are a ticking time bomb as a country with I don't know, roughly two and a half years left right before fascism completely descends. And so I just I guess my question to you, you know, my final question to you is knowing that truth, like, do you have

a level of hopefulness about where we are going? In the direction that we're going in? We have over three hundred and forty eight voter suppression bills that have been rolled out in forty seven states, passed in fourteen that are all about curbing the rights of people of color to be able to vote. And you had a man member of the Texas legislator that said, well, if it wasn't for our voting suppression bills in Texas, Texas would have gone for Biden literally said the quiet part out loud.

So are you hopeful? Do you have hope? Because you know, my listeners know that I struggle without on a regular basis, So I'm curious. So I think that it is a very very difficult sort of times as you just described. I mean literally, the Republican Party is gearing up too. If their candidate loses in the twenty twenty four election, that they essentially would not be willing to consummate Biden's reelection.

Like that's where everything is headed towards. And again that's if they're able to lose as a result of this series of voter suppression policies, which they're probably the favorites because of the voter suppression and because of even Democrats sniping sort of at each other, specifically centrist claiming that aggressives and other particularly black activists somehow lost uh you know, the the you know seats for Democrats, um and telling people to quote tone it down, uh, to so that

they can you know, keep Congress or regain the presidency. And and this just this constant telling particularly young people of color to wait, tone it down, and then you know, how long are we gonna wait? You know, I don't as I know as a young black male that any day when I walk outside and a police car passes

me by could be my last. Uh. And so like I think there's a certain level of urgency, but but ultimately, in terms of hope, I'm hopeful, not necessarily because of what's happening in society or what's not happening in society. I'm hoping from a philosophical standpoint that I believe you have to believe change as possible, radical change as possible in order to bring it about. And and and so

that's really why I maintain hope. And then as an historian, you know, and especially as a descendant, you know, as as as a Black American, as a descendant of enslave people, and you you know, black folks have in this country have done the impossible time and again. Uh. And and you know, I think we can, especially those of us who you know and black folks really have always been leading the anti racist sort of movement. Uh. You know, I think we can do the impossible again. I hope

that you are right. And I'm just you know, I'm I'm I'm so thankful for the work that you do, for the writings that you do, the teachings um that you do, because I I want to believe that we can do the impossible. Abolishing slavery was considered impossible, right like, Uh, America's first black president was considered impossible. Having a woman vice president that is a woman of color was considered impossible,

and we've done those things. UM, So I hope. My hope is that your work will continue to open up people's a lot eyes so that they stop walking around half asleep. UM. Please please tell folks, um some of the guests that are coming up on your on your podcast, that they are going to be able to wow. Yeah, I mean, we have a just an incredible lineup, you know, Robin d g Kelly, Julean Castro, Jamel Hill, we have Miriam Kava, we have Heather McGee, Rebecca Coakeley friends of mine,

David Truer. Yeah, we I mean, you know, we have a great lineup of folks. And and obviously each of them are experts about different sort of forms or areas or sectors of racism, and I'm really excited to dig deep with each of them in these different areas. The importance of anti racism cannot be overstated. In an era in which the right is pushing back against programs like the sixteen nineteen Project and the Boogeyman of critical race theory.

We need to defend these necessary educational programs while also practicing anti racism in our own lives and teaching those around us about the urgent benefits of being anti racists. To hear more from Ebrahm, do check out his podcast, be Anti Racists and to hear more from me, you can support me on Patreon. Five dollars a month gets you access to hundreds of shows, including five brand new

hour long shows in your feed every single week. Head over to patreon dot com slash wokeaf now and subscribe. We have had so many woke guests in the last few months that I have been excited to learn from and share with the woke af nation. Power to the people and to all the people. Power, get woke and stay woke as fuck.