How to Be an Antiracist

What’s the problem with being “not racist”? It is a claim that signifies neutrality: “I am not a racist, but neither am I aggressively against racism.” But there is no neutrality in the racism struggle. The opposite of “racist” isn’t “not racist.” It is “antiracist.” What’s the difference? One endorses either the idea of a racial hierarchy as a rac

three years before my birth. In the United States, African Americans are 25 percent more likely to die of cancer than Whites. My father survived prostate cancer, which kills twice as many Black men as it does White men. Breast cancer disproportionately kills Black women.

beating across ideologies, races, and nations. It is beating within us. Many of us who strongly call out Trump’s racist ideas will strongly deny our own. How often do we become reflexively defensive when someone calls something we’ve done or said racist? How many of us would agree with this statement: “ ‘Racist’ isn’t a descriptive word. It’s a pej

Racist ideas argue that the inferiorities and superiorities of racial groups explain racial inequities in society.

I no longer believe a Black person cannot be racist.

Racial inequity is when two or more racial groups are not standing on approximately equal footing.

I loved and hated my father for living on his own terms in a world that usually denies Black people their own terms.

One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist.

When racist ideas resound, denials that those ideas are racist typically follow. When racist policies resound, denials that those policies are racist also follow.