How to Be an Antiracist
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a nuclear ideology that poses an existential threat to human existence: Ibram X. Kendi, “A House Still Divided,” The Atlantic, October 2018.
Diop’s two-cradle theory: Cheikh Anta Diop, The Cultural Unity of Negro Africa: The Domains of Patriarchy and of Matriarchy in Classical Antiquity (Chicago: Third World Press, 1978).
Bradley’s version of the same: Michael Bradley, The Iceman Inheritance: Prehistoric Sources of Western Man’s Racism, Sexism and Aggression (New York: Warner Books, 1978).
The Isis Papers: Frances Cress Welsing, The Isis Papers: The Keys to the Colors (Chicago: Third World Press, 1991).
The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy: Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1921).
Chapter 11: Black
Chris Rock in his 1996 HBO special: See “Chris Rock—Bring the Pain,” HBO, June 1, 1996, available at www.youtube.com/watch?v=coC4t7nCGPs [inactive].
“the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man”: Alexander H. Stephens, “Cornerstone Address, March 21, 1861,” in The Rebellion Record: A Diary of American Events with Documents, Narratives, Illustrative Incidents, Poetry, etc., Volume 1, ed. Frank Moore (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1862), 44–46.
53 percent of Black people were surveyed: “Fewer Blacks in U.S. See Bias in Jobs, Income, and Housing,” Gallup, July 19, 2013, available at news.gallup.com/poll/163580/fewer-blacks-bias-jobs-income-housing.aspx.
59 percent of Black people expressed: “The Partisan Divide on Political Values Grows Even Wider: 4. Race, Immigration and Discrimination,” Pew Research Center, October 5, 2017, available at www.people-press.org/2017/10/05/4-race-immigration-and-discrimination/.
racist Whites dismissing antiracist policies and ideas as racist: It is most obvious through the attack on Black Power activists. See “Humphrey Backs N.A.A.C.P. in Fight on Black Racism,” The New York Times, July 7, 1966.
“Black people can’t be racist”: Here is a typical argument: “Black People Cannot Be Racist, and Here’s Why,” The University Star, February 15, 2016, available at star.txstate.edu/2016/02/black-people-cannot-be-racist-and-heres-why/.
154 African Americans: Ida A. Brudnick and Jennifer E. Manning, “African American Members of the United States Congress: 1870–2018,” Congressional Research Service, updated December 28, 2018, available at www.senate.gov/CRSpubs/617f17bb-61e9-40bb-b301-50f48fd239fc.pdf.
more than seven hundred Black judges on state courts: “National Database on Judicial Diversity in State Courts,” American Bar Association, available at apps.americanbar.org/abanet/jd/display/national.cfm.
more than two hundred Black judges on federal courts: “African American Judges on the Federal Courts,” Federal Judicial Center, available at www.fjc.gov/history/judges/search/african-american.
more than fifty-seven thousand Black police officers: “The New Racial Makeup of U.S. Police Departments, Newsweek, May 14, 2015, available at www.newsweek.com/racial-makeup-police-departments-331130.
three thousand Black police chiefs, assistant chiefs, and commanders: “Blacks in Blue: African-American Cops React to Violence Towards and from Police,” NBC News, July 11, 2016, available at www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/blacks-blue-african-american-cops-react-violence-towards-police-n607141.
more than forty thousand full-time Black faculty: “Table 315.20. Full-time Faculty in Degree-Granting Postsecondary Institutions, by Race/Ethnics, Sex, and Academic Rank: Fall 2013, Fall 2015, and Fall 2016,” Digest of Education Statistics, National Center for Education Statistics, available at nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d17/tables/dt17_315.20.asp.
eleven Black billionaires and the 380,000 Black millionaire families: “The Black Billionaires 2018,” Forbes, March 7, 2018, available at www.forbes.com/sites/mfonobongnsehe/2018/03/07/the-black-billionaires-2018/#19dd12935234; and “Black Millionaires Hardly Exist in America,” Newsmax, October 4, 2017, available at www.newsmax.com/antoniomoore/black-millionaires-wealth-wealth-disparity/2017/10/04/id/817622/.
sixteen Black CEOs: “The Number of Black CEOs at Fortune 500 Companies Is at Its Lowest Since 2002,” Fortune, February 28, 2018, available at fortune.com/2018/02/28/black-history-month-black-ceos-fortune-500/.
“When you control a man’s thinking”: Carter G. Woodson, The Miseducation of the Negro (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2005), 55.
Blackwell directed county boards: “GOPer Behind Ohio’s Botched 2004 Election Eyes Senate Run,” Mother Jones, April 21, 2011, available at www.motherjones.com/politics/2011/04/ken-blackwell-ohio-brown-senate/.
174,000 potential votes walked away: “Was the 2004 Election Stolen?”, Common Dreams, June 1, 2006, available at www.commondreams.org/views06/0601-34.htm.
“Blackwell made Katherine Harris look like a cupcake”: Ibid.
Trump officials had not forgotten Blackwell’s state-of-the-art racist work: Ken Blackwell, “Time to Clean Up Our Elections,” CNS News, July 17, 2017, available at www.cnsnews.com/commentary/ken-blackwell/time-clean-our-elections.
“Negroes…leade a beastly kind of life”: Leo Africanus, trans. John Pory, and ed. Robert Brown, The History and Description of Africa, 3 volumes (London: Hakluyt Society, 1896), 130, 187–90.
“but an act of Justice” Sambo says: Richard Ligon, A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2011), 105–6.
authored the first known slave narrative: James Albert, A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince (Leeds: Stanhope Press, 1811), 11, 12, 16, 25.
“to those waiting men who receive presents of old coats”: For this quote and other details on the rebellion, see David M. Robertson, Denmark Vesey: The Buried Story of America’s Largest Slave Rebellion and the Man Who Led It (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009), 70.
By 1840, he’d acquired seven slaves of his own: Ibid., 123.
“next to Mr. Booker T. Washington, the best American authority”: “The Negro Arraigned,” The New York Times, February 23, 1901. Also, for an excellent analysis of how William Hannibal Thomas fits in with discussions of Blackness at this time, see Khalil Gibran Muhammad, The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
“intrinsically inferior type of humanity”: William Hannibal Thomas, The American Negro: What He Was, What He Is, and What He May Become (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1901), 129, 134, 195.
Thomas’s “list of negative qualities of Negroes seemed limitless”: John David Smith, Black Judas: William Hannibal Thomas and the American Negro (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2000), 161–64, 177–78, 185–89.
But this “saving remnant” was set “apart from their white fellow-men”: Thomas, The American Negro, xxiii, 69, 410.
“national assimilation”: Ibid., 397–432.
stamped William Hannibal Thomas as the “Black Judas”: See Smith, Black Judas.
Black officers were as abusive: James Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2017), 107–8.
survey of nearly eight thousand sworn officers: “Black and White Officers See Many Key Aspects of Policing Differently,” Pew Research Center, January 12, 2017, available at www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/01/12/black-and-white-officers-see-many-key-aspects-of-policing-differently/.
The new crop of Black politicians, judges, police chiefs, and officers: Forman Jr., Locking Up Our Own, 147.
“Black on Black crime has reached a critical level”: John H. Johnson, “Publisher’s Statement,” Ebony, August 1979.
doubled the number of discrimination cases it dismissed: See Manning Marable, Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Black America, 1945–2006 (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 196.
redirected billions of dollars in federal funds: Ibid., 206–7.
Chapter 12: Class
two of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Philadelphia: And they are still being told this. See “These Are the 10 Worst Philadelphia Neighborhoods for 2019,” Road Snacks, December 28, 2018, available at www.roadsnacks.net/worst-philadelphia-neighborhoods/.
millions of Black people migrating from the South: For more on the migration and what happened to them when they arrived, see Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: Vintage Books, 2011); and Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
“The dark ghetto is institutionalized pathology”: Kenneth B. Clark, Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power (2nd edition) (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), 81.
“the behavior of the African American underclass”: Dinesh D’Souza, The End of Racism: Principles for a Multicultural Society (New York: Free Press, 1996), 527.
poor Whites as “White trash”: See Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America (New York: Penguin Books, 2017).
“We have got this tailspin of culture”: “Paul Ryan’s Racist Comments Are a Slap in the Face to 10.5 Million Americans,” Mic, March 13, 2014, available at mic.com/articles/85223/paul-ryan-s-racist-comments-are-a-slap-in-the-face-to-10-5-million-americans.
“The evidence of this failure is all around us”: Kay Cole James, “Why We Must Be Bold on Welfare Reform,” The Heritage Foundation, March 12, 2018, available at www.heritage.org/welfare/commentary/why-we-must-be-bold-welfare-reform.
He positioned the Black poor as inferior: Clark, Dark Ghetto, xxix, xxxvi.
Obama made a similar case: “Barack Obama’s Speech on Race,” The New York Times, March 18, 2008, available at www.nytimes.com/2008/03/18/us/politics/18text-obama.html.
poor Blacks are more optimistic: See Carol Graham, Happiness for All? Unequal Hopes and Lives in Pursuit of the American Dream (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).
“wage” of Whiteness: W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), 700. And also see David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991).
as the “Talented Tenth”: See W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” in The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative American Negroes of Today (New York: James Pott & Company, 1903).
As Martin Luther King said in his critique of capitalism in 1967: Martin Luther King Jr., “ ‘Where Do We Go from Here?,’ Address Delivered at the Eleventh Annual SCLC Convention,” April 16, 1967, The Martin Luther King, Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University, available at kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/where-do-we-go-here-address-delivered-eleventh-annual-sclc-convention.
what world-systems theorists term the “long sixteenth century”: Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974).
Prince Henry’s Portugal birthed conjoined twins: For histories of the conjoined origins of racism and capitalism, see Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Nation Books, 2016); Eric Williams, Capitalism & Slavery (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); and Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014).
The Black poverty rate in 2017 stood at 20 percent: “Poverty Rate by Race/Ethnicity,” Kaiser Family Foundation Database, available at www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/poverty-rate-by-raceethnicity/.
The Black unemployment rate has been at least twice as high: “Black Unemployment Rate Is Consistently Twice That of Whites,” Pew Research Center, August 21, 2013, available at www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/08/21/through-good-times-and-bad-black-unemployment-is-consistently-double-that-of-whites/.
The wage gap: “Wage Gap Between Blacks and Whites Worst in Nearly 40 Years,” CNN, September 20, 2016, available at money.cnn.com/2016/09/20/news/economy/black-white-wage-gap/.
median net worth of White families is about ten times that of Black families: “White Families Have Nearly 10 Times the Net Worth of Black Families. And the Gap Is Growing,” The Washington Post, September 28, 2017, available at www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/09/28/black-and-hispanic-families-are-making-more-money-but-they-still-lag-far-behind-whites/.
White households are expected to own eighty-six times more wealth than Black households by 2020: Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, Chuck Collins, Josh Hoxie, and Emanuel Nieves, “The Road to Zero Wealth: How the Racial Wealth Divide Is Hollowing Out America’s Middle Class,” Institute for Policy Studies, September 2017, available at ips-dc.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/The-Road-to-Zero-Wealth_FINAL.pdf.
Africa’s unprecedented capitalist growth over the past two decades: “Africa’s Capitalist Revolution: Preserving Growth in a Time of Crisis,” Foreign Affairs, July/August 2009, available at www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/africa/2009-07-01/africas-capitalist-revolution.
nearly nine in ten extremely poor people will live in Sub-Saharan Africa by 2030: “The Number of Extremely Poor People Continues to Rise in Sub-Saharan Africa,” The World Bank, September 19, 2018, available at blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/number-extremely-poor-people-continues-rise-sub-saharan-africa.
In Latin America, people of African descent: “Behind the Numbers: Race and Ethnicity in Latin America,” Americas Quarterly, Summer 2015, available at www.americasquarterly.org/content/behind-numbers-race-and-ethnicity-latin-america.
The global gap between the richest (and Whitest) regions of the world and the poorest (and Blackest) regions of the world has tripled: “Global Inequality May Be Much Worse Than We Think,” The Guardian, April 8, 2016, available at www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2016/apr/08/global-inequality-may-be-much-worse-than-we-think.
Upward mobility is greater for White people: Randall Akee, Maggie R. Jones, and Sonya R. Porter, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 23733, August 2017, available at www.nber.org/papers/w23733.
the highest-income quintile: “The Racial Wealth Divide Holds Back Black Earners at All Levels,” AlterNet, April 3, 2018, available at www.alternet.org/2018/04/racial-wealth-divide-holds-back-black-earners/.
Black middle-income households have less wealth: See “1 in 7 White Families Are Now Millionaires. For Black Families, It’s 1 in 50,” The Washington Post, October 3, 2017.
White poverty is not as distressing as Black poverty: “Black Poverty Differs from White Poverty,” The Washington Post, August 12, 2015, available at www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/08/12/black-poverty-differs-from-white-poverty/?utm_term=.6069bf66fb16.
Antiracist policies in the 1960s and 1970s narrowed these inequities: “Equality Still Elusive 50 Years After Civil Rights Act,” USA Today, January 19, 2014, available at www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/01/19/civil-rights-act-progress/4641967/.
as chronicled by historian Devyn Spence Benson: Devyn Spence Benson, Antiracism in Cuba: The Unfinished Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 30–71.
Socialist Party of America (SPA) in 1901
refused to adopt an anti-lynching petition: “Race and the U.S. Socialist Tradition,” Socialist Worker, November 18, 2010, available at socialistworker.org/2010/11/18/race-and-us-socialist-tradition.
“The discovery of gold and silver in America”: Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, Part 2 (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007), 823.
pleaded with Du Bois to reconsider: David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois, 1919–1963: The Fight for Equality and the American Century (New York: Macmillan, 2000), 309–10.
what scholars now call racial capitalism: See Robin D. G. Kelley, “What Did Cedric Robinson Mean by Racial Capitalism,” Boston Review, January 12, 2017, available at bostonreview.net/race/robin-d-g-kelley-what-did-cedric-robinson-mean-racial-capitalism.
“The lowest and most fatal degree” and “working-class aristocracy”: Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois, 1919–1963, 308–9.
“Instead of a horizontal division of classes”: W.E.B. Du Bois, Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1984), 205.
called for a “Guiding One Hundredth”: See W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth: Memorial Address,” in ed. David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 347–53.
“inextricable link between racism and capitalism”: Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, “Race, Class and Marxism,” Socialist Worker, January 4, 2011, available at socialistworker.org/2011/01/04/race-class-and-marxism.
The history of capitalism: For an honest history of capitalism and the United States, see Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 1492–Present (New York: HarperCollins, 1982).
“capitalist to the bone”: “Elizabeth Warren’s Theory of Capitalism,” The Atlantic, August 28, 2018, available at www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/elizabeth-warrens-theory-of-capitalism/568573/.