Ibram X. Kendi is a black man and an award-winning scholar who’s studied the history of racist ideas. Conventional wisdom would have you believe that Kendi, by virtue of his identity and life experiences, couldn’t be racist himself.
In his latest book, How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi doesn’t just upend this assumption — he obliterates it with an unflinching examination of the racist ideas and beliefs he previously held, before embracing antiracist values and views.
He writes about once believing that education and hard work would “uplift” black people, no matter the policies that specifically made such success improbable for many black Americans. He confesses to internalizing racist ideas about black youth behavior as a teen, only to realize that the “mind can never be antiracist” when it thinks there is something wrong with an entire racial group. Read more…
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