How to Be an Antiracist

by Ibram X. Kendi

  Englishman Richard Ligon may have made up the stories in A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes, published in 1657. Led by Sambo, a group of slaves disclose a plot for a slave revolt. They refuse their master’s rewards. A confused master asks why, Ligon narrates. It was “but an act of Justice,” Sambo says, according to Ligon. Their duty. They are “sufficiently” rewarded “in the Act.”

  Slavery was justified in Sambo’s narrative, because some Black people believed they were supposed to be enslaved. The same was true of Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, who authored the first known slave narrative, in 1772. Born to Nigerian royalty, Gronniosaw was enslaved at fifteen by an ivory merchant, who sold him to a Dutch captain. “My master grew very fond of me, and I loved him exceedingly” and “endeavored to convince him, by every action, that my only pleasure was to serve him well.” The ship reached Barbados. A New Yorker purchased Gronniosaw and brought him home, where he came to believe there was “a black man call’d the Devil that lived in hell.” Gronniosaw was sold again to a minister, who transformed him from “a poor heathen” into an enslaved Christian. He was apparently happy to escape the Black Devil.

  Slaveowners welcomed ministers preaching the gospel of eternal Black enslavement, derived from the reading of the Bible where all Black people were the cursed descendants of Ham. A fifty-one-year-old free Black carpenter had to first teach away these racist ideas in 1818 as he began recruiting thousands of enslaved Blacks to join his slave revolt around Charleston, South Carolina. Denmark Vesey set the date of the revolt for July 14, 1822, the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille during the French Revolution. The aim of the revolt was to take down slavery, as in the successful 1804 Haitian revolution that inspired Vesey.

  But the revolt had to remain a secret, even from some slaves. Don’t mention it “to those waiting men who receive presents of old coats from their masters,” Vesey’s chief lieutenants told recruiters. “They’ll betray us.” One recruiter did not listen and told house slave Peter Prioleau, who promptly told his master in May. By late June 1822, South Carolina enslavers had destroyed Vesey’s army, which one estimate placed as high as nine thousand strong. Vesey, hung on July 2, 1822, remained defiant to the very end.

  The South Carolina legislature emancipated Peter Prioleau on Christmas Day, 1822, and bestowed on him a lifetime annual pension. By 1840, he’d acquired seven slaves of his own and lived comfortably in Charleston’s free Light community. Even when he was a slave, this Black man had no desire to get rid of his master. He used his power to spoil one of the most well-organized slave revolts in American history. He used his power to fully take on the qualities of his master, to become him: slaves, racist ideas, and all.

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  PETER PRIOLEAU RESEMBLED William Hannibal Thomas, a nineteenth-century Black man who wanted to be accepted by White people as one of their own. But as Jim Crow spread in the 1890s, Thomas was shoved more deeply into Blackness. He finally deployed the tactic self-interested Black racists have been using from the beginning to secure White patronage: He attacked Black people as inferior. When Thomas’s The American Negro appeared weeks before Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery in 1901, The New York Times placed Thomas “next to Mr. Booker T. Washington, the best American authority on the negro question.”

  Blacks are an “intrinsically inferior type of humanity,” Thomas wrote. Black history is a “record of lawless existence.” Blacks are mentally retarded, immoral savages, “unable practically to discern between right and wrong,” Thomas wrote. Ninety percent of Black women are “in bondage to physical pleasure.” The “social degradation of our freedwomen is without parallel in modern civilization.” In the end, Thomas’s “list of negative qualities of Negroes seemed limitless,” as his biographer concluded.

  Thomas believed himself to be among a minority of Light people who had overcome their inferior biological heritage. But this “saving remnant” was set “apart from their white fellow-men.” We show, Thomas pleaded to White people, that “the redemption of the negro is…possible and assured through a thorough assimilation of the thought and ideals of American civilization.” To speed up this “national assimilation,” Thomas advised restricting the voting rights of corrupt Blacks, intensely policing natural Black criminals, and placing all Black children with White guardians.

  Black people stamped William Hannibal Thomas as the “Black Judas.” Black critics ruined his credibility and soon White racists could no longer use him, so they tossed him away like a paper plate, as White racists have done to so many disposable Black racists over the years. Thomas found work as a janitor, before dying in obscurity in 1935.

  Black people would be betrayed by Black on Black criminals again and again in the twentieth century. In the 1960s, the diversifying of America’s police forces was supposed to alleviate the scourge of police brutality against Black victims. The fruit of decades of antiracist activism, a new crop of Black officers were expected to treat Black citizens better than their White counterparts did. But reports immediately surfaced in the 1960s that Black officers were as abusive as White officers. One report noted “in some places, low-income Negroes prefer white policemen because of the severe conduct of Negro officers.” A 1966 study found Black officers were not as likely to be racist as Whites, but a significant minority expressed anti-Black racist ideas like, “I’m telling you these people are savages. And they’re real dirty.” Or the Black officer who said, “There have always been jobs for Negroes, but the f—— people are too stupid to go out and get an education. They all want the easy way out.”

  To color police racism as White on the pretext that only White people can be racist is to ignore the non-White officer’s history of profiling and killing “them niggers.” It is to ignore that the police killer in 2012 of Brooklyn’s Shantel Davis was Black, that three of the six officers involved in the 2015 death of Freddie Gray were Black, that the police killer in 2016 of Charlotte’s Keith Lamont Scott was Black, and that one of the police killers in 2018 of Sacramento’s Stephon Clark was Black. How can the White officers involved in the deaths of Terence Crutcher, Sandra Bland, Walter L. Scott, Michael Brown, Laquan McDonald, and Decynthia Clements be racist but their Black counterparts be antiracist?

  To be fair, one survey of nearly eight thousand sworn officers in 2017 makes strikingly clear that White officers are far and away more likely to be racist than Black officers these days. Nearly all (92 percent) of White officers surveyed agreed with the post-racial idea that “our country has made the changes needed to give Blacks equal rights with Whites.” Only 6 percent of White officers co-signed the antiracist idea that “our country needs to continue making changes to give Blacks equal rights with Whites,” compared to 69 percent of Black officers. But the disparity shrinks concerning deadly police encounters. Black officers (57 percent) are only twice as likely as White officers (27 percent) to say “the deaths of Blacks during encounters with police in recent years are signs of a broader problem.”

  The new crop of Black politicians, judges, police chiefs, and officers in the 1960s and subsequent decades helped to create a new problem. Rising levels of violent crime engulfed impoverished neighborhoods. Black residents bombarbed their politicians and crime fighters with their racist fears of Black criminals as opposed to criminals. Neither the residents nor the politicians nor the crime fighters wholly saw the heroin and crack problem as a public-health crisis or the violent-crime problem in poor neighborhoods where Black people lived as a poverty problem. Black people seemed to be more worried about other Black people killing them in drug wars or robberies by the thousands each year than about the cancers, heart diseases, and respiratory diseases killing them by the hundreds of thousands each year. Those illnesses were not mentioned, but “Black on Black crime has reached a critical level that threatens our existence as a people,” wrote Ebony publisher John H. Johnson, in a 1979 special issue on the topic. The Black o
n Black crime of internalized racism had indeed reached a critical level—this new Black-abetted focus on the crisis of “Black crime” helped feed the growth of the movement toward mass incarceration that would wreck a generation.

  The rise of mass incarceration was partially fueled by Black people who, even as they adopted racist ideas, did so ostensibly out of trying to save the Black community in the 1970s. But the 1980s brought a more premeditated form of racism, as channeled through the Black administrators Ronald Reagan appointed to his cabinet. Under Clarence Thomas’s directorship from 1980 to 1986, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission doubled the number of discrimination cases it dismissed as “no cause.” Samuel Pierce, Reagan’s secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), redirected billions of dollars in federal funds allotted for low-income housing to corporate interests and Republican donors. Under Pierce’s watch in the first half of the 1980s, the number of public-housing units in non-White neighborhoods dropped severely. Poor Black people faced a housing crisis in the 1980s that Pierce made worse, even though he had the power to alleviate it, setting the stage for future secretaries of HUD like Trump’s appointee, Ben Carson. These were men who used the power they’d been given—no matter how limited and conditional—in inarguably racist ways.

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  AS THE EDITOR and I stared each other down, I had a heated conversation—and conversion—in my mind. Eventually, the silence broke and the editor excused me from his office. I received an ultimatum before the end of the workday: Terminate my race column for The Famuan or be terminated from my internship at the Tallahassee Democrat. I terminated my column in absolute bitterness, feeling as if I terminated a part of myself.

  And I did begin to terminate a part of myself—for the better. I began to silence one half of the war within me, the duel between antiracism and assimilation that W.E.B. Du Bois gave voice to, and started embracing the struggle toward a single consciousness of antiracism. I picked up a second major, African American studies.

  I took my first Black history course that fall of 2003, the first of four African and African American history courses I would take over three semesters with FAMU professor David Jackson. His precise, detailed, engaging, but somehow funny lectures systematically walked me back through history for the first time. I had imagined history as a battle: on one side Black folks, on the other a team of “them niggers” and White folks. I started to see for the first time that it was a battle between racists and antiracists.

  Ending one confusion started another: what to do with my life. As a senior in the fall of 2004, I found that sports journalism no longer moved me. At least not like this thrilling new history I was discovering. I ended up abandoning the press box for what Americans were saying was the most “dangerous” box.

  CLASS

  CLASS RACIST: One who is racializing the classes, supporting policies of racial capitalism against those race-classes, and justifying them by racist ideas about those race-classes.

  ANTIRACIST ANTICAPITALIST: One who is opposing racial capitalism.

  EXCITED TO BEGIN graduate school in African American studies at Temple University, I moved to North Philadelphia in the early days of August 2005. Hunting Park to be exact, steps away from Allegheny Avenue and the neighborhood of Allegheny West. My second-floor one-bedroom apartment overlooked North Broad Street: White people driving by, Black people walking by, Latinx people turning right on Allegheny. None of the people outside my building, a drab chocolate tenement adjoining an Exxon station, could tell that a few windows up over its vacant ground-floor storefront was home to a real human life. Its covered windows looked like shut eyes in a casket.

  Death resided there, too, apparently. My new Black neighbors had been told for years that Hunting Park and Allegheny West were two of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Philadelphia—the poorest, with the highest reported rates of violent crime.

  I unpacked myself in the “ghetto,” as people flippantly called my new neighborhood. The ghetto had expanded in the twentieth century as it swallowed millions of Black people migrating from the South to Western and Northern cities like Philadelphia. White flight followed. 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 Black natives and new Black migrants to the so-called ghettos, now overcrowded and designed to extract wealth from their residents. But the word “ghetto,” as it migrated to the Main Street of American vocabulary, did not conjure a series of racist policies that enabled White flight and Black abandonment—instead, “ghetto” began to describe unrespectable Black behavior on the North Broad Streets of the country.

  “The dark ghetto is institutionalized pathology; it is chronic, self-perpetuating pathology; and it is the futile attempt by those with power to confine that pathology so as to prevent the spread of its contagion to the ‘larger community,’ ” wrote psychologist Kenneth Clark in his 1965 book, Dark Ghetto. “Pathology,” meaning a deviation from the norm. Poor Blacks in the “ghetto” are pathological, abnormal? Abnormal from whom? What group is the norm? White elites? Black elites? Poor Whites? Poor Latinx? Asian elites? The Native poor?

  All of these groups—like the group “Black poor”—are distinct race-classes, racial groups at the intersection of race and class. Poor people are a class, Black people a race. Black poor people are a race-class. When we say poor people are lazy, we are expressing an elitist idea. When we say Black people are lazy, we are expressing a racist idea. When we say Black poor people are lazier than poor Whites, White elites, and Black elites, we are speaking at the intersection of elitist and racist ideas—an ideological intersection that forms class racism. When Dinesh D’Souza writes, “the behavior of the African American underclass…flagrantly violates and scandalizes basic codes of responsibility, decency, and civility,” he is deploying class racism.

  When a policy exploits poor people, it is an elitist policy. When a policy exploits Black people, it is a racist policy. When a policy exploits Black poor people, the policy exploits at the intersection of elitist and racist policies—a policy intersection of class racism. When we racialize classes, support racist policies against those race-classes, and justify them by racist ideas, we are engaging in class racism. To be antiracist is to equalize the race-classes. To be antiracist is to root the economic disparities between the equal race-classes in policies, not people.

  Class racism is as ripe among White Americans—who castigate poor Whites as “White trash”—as it is in Black America, where racist Blacks degrade poor Blacks as “them niggers” who live in the ghetto. Constructs of “ghetto Blacks” (and “White trash”) are the most obvious ideological forms of class racism. Pathological people made the pathological ghetto, segregationists say. The pathological ghetto made pathological people, assimilationists say. To be antiracist is to say the political and economic conditions, not the people, in poor Black neighborhoods are pathological. Pathological conditions are making the residents sicker and poorer while they strive to survive and thrive, while they invent and reinvent cultures and behaviors that may be different but never inferior to those of residents in richer neighborhoods. But if the elite race-classes are judging the poor race-classes by their own cultural and behavioral norms, then the poor race-classes appear inferior. Whoever creates the norm creates the hierarchy and positions their own race-class at the top of the hierarchy.

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  DARK GHETTO WAS a groundbreaking study of the Black poor during President Johnson’s war on poverty in the 1960s, when scholarship on poverty was ascendant, like the work of anthropologist Oscar Lewis. Lewis argued that the children of impoverished people, namely poor people of color, were raised on behaviors that prevented their escape from poverty, perpetuating generations of poverty. H
e introduced the term “culture of poverty” in a 1959 ethnography of Mexican families. Unlike other economists, who explored the role of policy in the “cycle of poverty”—predatory exploitation moving in lockstep with meager income and opportunities, which kept even the hardest-working people in poverty and made poverty expensive—Lewis reproduced the elitist idea that poor behaviors keep poor people poor. “People with a culture of poverty,” Lewis wrote, “are a marginal people who know only their own troubles, their own local conditions, their own neighborhood, their own way of life.”

  White racists still drag out the culture of poverty. “We have got this tailspin of culture in our inner cities in particular of men not working, and just generations of men not even thinking about working, and not learning the value and the culture of work,” Wisconsin representative Paul Ryan said in 2015. “So there’s a real culture problem here that has to be dealt with.”

  Unlike Lewis and Ryan, Kenneth Clark presented the hidden hand of racism activating the culture of poverty, or what he called “pathology.” In Clark’s work, the dueling consciousness of the oppression-inferiority thesis resurfaced. First slavery, then segregation, and now poverty and life in the “ghetto” made Black people inferior, according to this latest update of the thesis. Poverty became perhaps the most enduring and popular injustice to fit into the oppression-inferiority thesis.

  Something was making poor people poor, according to this idea. And it was welfare. Welfare “transforms the individual from a dignified, industrious, self-reliant spiritual being into a dependent animal creature without his knowing it,” U.S. senator Barry Goldwater wrote in The Conscience of the Conservative in 1960. Goldwater and his ideological descendants said little to nothing about rich White people who depended on the welfare of inheritances, tax cuts, government contracts, hookups, 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. Welfare for middle- and upper-income people remained out of the discourse on “handouts,” as welfare for the Black poor became the true oppressor in the conservative version of the oppression-inferiority thesis. “The evidence of this failure is all around us,” wrote Heritage Foundation president Kay Coles James in 2018. “Being black and the daughter of a former welfare recipient, I know firsthand the unintended harm welfare has caused.”