How to Be an Antiracist
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their parents are more likely than Black heterosexual and White queer couples to be poor: See “Beyond Stereotypes: Poverty in the LGBT Community,” TIDES, June 2012, available at williamsinstitute.law.ucla.edu/williams-in-the-news/beyond-stereotypes-poverty-in-the-lgbt-community/.
“the question of sex”: Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 1 (London: Wilson and Macmillan, 1897), x.
a popular summary of Lombroso’s writings: Havelock Ellis, The Criminal (London: Walter Scott, 1890).
“As regards the sexual organs it seems possible”: Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (Philadelphia: F. A. Davis, 1933), 256.
racist physicians were contrasting: Morris, “Is Evolution Trying to Do Away with the Clitoris?,” Paper presented at the meeting of the American Association of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, St. Louis, September 21, 1892, available at archive.org/stream/39002086458651.med.yale.edu/39002086458651_djvu.txt.
“will in practically every instance disclose”: Perry M. Lichtenstein, “The ‘Fairy’ and the Lady Lover,” Medical Review of Reviews 27 (1921), 372.
which “is particularly so in colored women”: Ibid.
Black gay men are less likely to have condomless sex: and use drugs: “What’s at the Roots of the Disproportionate HIV Rates for Black Men?,” Plus, March 6, 2017, available at www.hivplusmag.com/stigma/2017/3/06/whats-root-disproportionate-hiv-rates-their-queer-brothers.
“affirm that all Black lives matter”: “Black Lives Matter Movement Awarded Sydney Peace Prize for Activism,” NBC News, November 2, 2017, available at www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/black-lives-matter-movement-awarded-sydney-peace-prize-activism-n816846.
U.S. life expectancy of a transgender woman of color: “It’s Time for Trans Lives to Truly Matter to Us All,” Advocate, February 18, 2015, available at www.advocate.com/commentary/2015/02/18/op-ed-its-time-trans-lives-truly-matter-us-all.
from the personal stories of transgender activist Janet Mock: See Janet Mock, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2015); Janet Mock, Surpassing Certainty: What My Twenties Taught Me (New York: Atria, 2017).
watching Kayla Moore defend her husband: “Kayla Moore Emerges as Her Husband’s Fiercest and Most Vocal Defender,” The Washington Post, November 15, 2017, available at www.washingtonpost.com/politics/kayla-moore-emerges-as-her-husbands-fiercest-and-most-vocal-defender/2017/11/15/5c8b7d82-ca19-11e7-8321-481fd63f174d_story.html.
“even though we had slavery”: “In Alabama, the Heart of Trump Country, Many Think He’s Backing the Wrong Candidate in Senate Race,” Los Angeles Times, September 21, 2017, available at www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-alabama-senate-runoff-20170921-story.html.
Chapter 16: Failure
“our parental care” and Black “conduct must, in some measure”: See David Scholfield and Edmund Haviland, “The Appeal of the American Convention of Abolition Societies to Anti-Slavery Groups,” The Journal of Negro History 6:2 (April 1921), 221, 225.
“The further decrease of prejudice”: “Raising Us in the Scale of Being,” Freedom’s Journal, March 16, 1827.
the judges of “uplift suasion”: See Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (New York: Nation Books, 2016), 124–25.
“Have you not acquired the esteem”: William Lloyd Garrison, An Address, Delivered before the Free People of Color, in Philadelphia (Boston: S. Foster, 1831), 5–6.
“accomplish the great work of national redemption”: “ ‘What we have long predicted…has commenced its fulfillment,’ ” in The Boisterous Sea of Liberty: A Documentary History of American from Discovery Through the Civil War, eds. David Brion Davis and Steven Mintz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 390.
fit his personal upbringing: For a good biography of Garrison, see Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008).
astounding growth of slavery: Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2016).
“If I could save the Union without freeing any slave”: Abraham Lincoln, “To Horace Greeley,” in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, Volume 5, ed. Roy P. Basler (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 388.
“necessary war measure”: Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, January 1, 1863, American Battlefield Trust, available at www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/abraham-lincolns-emancipation-proclamation.
“want nothing to do with the negroes”: See Leonard P. Curry, Blueprint for Modern America: Nonmilitary Legislation of the First Civil War Congress (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1968), 79.
The “White man’s party”: See Francis P. Blair Jr., The Destiny of the Races of this Continent (Washington, DC, 1859), 30.
militarily defending the Negro from the racist terrorists: For an excellent study of the decline of Reconstruction, see Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: HarperCollins, 2011).
“Expediency on selfish grounds”: Mayer, All on Fire, 617.
“For many years it was the theory of most Negro leaders”: W.E.B. Du Bois, “A Negro Nation Within a Nation,” in W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 565.
“astonishing ignorance”: Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (New York: Harper, 1944), 48.
“There is no doubt, in the writer’s opinion”: Ibid., 339.
“Gunnar Myrdal had been astonishingly prophetic”: Gene Roberts and Hank Klibanoff, The Race Beat: The Press, the Civil Rights Struggle, and the Awakening of the Nation (New York: Vintage Books, 2007), 406. Aside from this assessment, this is a stunning work of journalism history.
“discrimination against minority groups in this country has an adverse effect”: Mary L. Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 100.
“in waging this world struggle” and Seventy-eight percent of White Americans agreed: Ibid., 185–87.
In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. admitted: Martin Luther King, “ ‘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.
Look at the soaring White support: Lawrence D. Bobo et al., “The Real Record on Racial Attitudes,” in Social Trends in American Life: Findings from the General Social Survey Since 1971, ed. Peter V. Marsden (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 38–83.
Look at the soaring support for Obamacare: “Support for 2010 Health Care Law Reaches New High,” Pew Research Center, February 23, 2017, available at www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/23/support-for-2010-health-care-law-reaches-new-high/.
wanted to free the Jena 6: For a good interview that details the case, see “The Case of the Jena Six: Black High School Students Charged with Attempted Murder for Schoolyard Fight After Nooses Are Hung from Tree,” Democracy Now, July 10, 2007, available at www.democracynow.org/2007/7/10/the_case_of_the_jena_six.
used the Malcolm X line out of context: The full quote is, “When I was in prison, I read an article—don’t be shocked when I say I was in prison. You’re still in prison. That’s what America means: prison.” See Malcolm X, “Message to the Grassroots,” December 10, 1963, available at blackpast.org/1963-malcolm-x-message-grassroots.
“The action of President Roosevelt in enterta
ining that nigger”: Stephen Kantrowitz, Ben Tillman & the Reconstruction of White Supremacy (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 259.
the Hamburg Massacre: Ibid., 64–71.
“The purpose of our visit to Hamburg was to strike terror”: Benjamin R. Tillman, The Struggles of 1876: How South Carolina Was Delivered from Carpet-bag and Negro Rule (Anderson, SC, 1909), 24. Speech at the Red-Shirt Re-Union at Anderson, available at babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015079003128.
That day, thousands of us thought we were protesting: See “Thousands Protest Arrests of 6 Blacks in Jena, La.,” The New York Times, September 21, 2007, available at /www.nytimes.com/2007/09/21/us/21cnd-jena.html.
quietly got the charges reduced to simple battery: “Plea Bargain Wraps Up ‘Jena 6’ Case,” CBS News, June 26, 2009, available at www.cbsnews.com/news/plea-bargain-wraps-up-jena-6-case/.
sustained those courageous Black women: For a fascinating firsthand account of the boycott, see Jo Ann Gibson Robinson, The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the Women Who Started It: The Memoir of Jo Ann Gibson Robinson (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1987).
Chapter 17: Success
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders spoke of “institutional racism”: “Hillary: ‘America’s Long Struggle with Race Is Far from Finished,’ ” The Hill, September 23, 2015, available at thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/245881-hillary-americas-long-struggle-with-race-is-far-from; and “The Transcript of Bernie Sanders’s Victory Speech,” The Washington Post, February 10, 2016, available at www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/02/10/the-transcript-of-bernie-sanderss-victory-speech/.
“Racism is both overt and covert”: Kwame Toure and Charles V. Hamilton, Black Power: The Politics of Liberation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011), 4–5.
“ ‘Respectable’ individuals can absolve themselves”: Ibid., 5.
The rain fell on his gray hooded sweatshirt: For perhaps the best overview of the Travyon Martin story, see Rest in Power: The Trayvon Martin Story, Paramount Network, available at www.paramountnetwork.com/shows/rest-in-power-the-trayvon-martin-story.
on the Black Campus Movement: Ibram X. Kendi, The Black Campus Movement: Black Studies and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965–1972 (New York: Palgrave, 2012).
Zimmerman told the 911 dispatcher: “Transcript of George Zimmerman’s Call to the Police,” available at archive.org/stream/326700-full-transcript-zimmerman/326700-full-transcript-zimmerman_djvu.txt.
Chapter 18: Survival
produces public scholarship: For more on this concept of public scholarship, see Keisha N. Blain and Ibram X. Kendi, “How to Avoid a Post-Scholar America,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 18, 2017.
copies of Confederate flags with cotton balls inside several buildings: “Confederate Flags with Cotton Found on American University Campus,” The New York Times, September 27, 2017, available at www.nytimes.com/2017/09/27/us/american-university-confederate.html.
About 88 percent of people diagnosed with stage-4 colon cancer die within five years: “Survival Rates for Colorectal Cancer, by Stage,” American Cancer Society, available at www.cancer.org/cancer/colon-rectal-cancer/detection-diagnosis-staging/survival-rates.html.
that the heartbeat of racism is denial, the heartbeat of antiracism is confession: “The Heartbeat of Racism Is Denial,” The New York Times, January 14, 2018.
trillions of tax dollars we spend: “War on Terror Facts, Cost, and Timelines,” The Balance, December 11, 2018, available at www.thebalance.com/war-on-terror-facts-costs-timeline-3306300.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
IBRAM X. KENDI is a New York Times bestselling author and the founding director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University. A professor of history and international relations and a frequent public speaker, Kendi is also a columnist at The Atlantic. He is the author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, and The Black Campus Movement, which won the W.E.B. Du Bois Book Prize. Kendi lives in Washington, D.C.
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Facebook.com/ibramxkendi
Twitter: @dribram
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