Olivia: What if the opposite of 'racist' isn't 'not racist'? What if claiming to be 'not racist' is actually part of the problem? Jackson: Whoa, that's a heavy opener. You're saying that the one phrase most people use to defend themselves might be the very thing holding us back? Olivia: That’s the bombshell idea at the heart of the book we’re tackling today, and it will change how you see everything. Today we are diving into the incredibly influential and often polarizing book, How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi. Jackson: And Kendi is not just an author; he’s a MacArthur "Genius" Fellow and a leading historian. What’s fascinating is that he wrote this book as a follow-up to his National Book Award-winning Stamped from the Beginning, aiming to create a practical guide. He wanted to move the conversation from just identifying racism to actively dismantling it. Olivia: Exactly. And it landed in 2019, just before the global racial justice protests of 2020, which catapulted it into a cultural touchstone. It’s a book that blends memoir, history, and a call to action. And Kendi kicks this off not with a lecture, but with a deeply personal, almost shocking, confession.

Jackson: I’m intrigued. A confession from one of the world's leading antiracist scholars? Olivia: You got it. He takes us back to the year 2000. He’s a high school senior in Virginia, participating in a Martin Luther King Jr. oratorical contest. He feels like an outsider, a bit insecure, surrounded by academic stars. But he gets up there and delivers this passionate speech. Jackson: And he wins, right? I read that part. Olivia: He wins. The crowd, mostly Black, is on its feet. The judges are moved. There's just one problem. As he reflects on it years later, he realizes the speech was filled with racist ideas. Jackson: Hold on. He won a Martin Luther King Jr. award for a racist speech? That feels like a paradox. How can a Black kid be racist against Black people? Olivia: That’s the million-dollar question that unlocks the entire book. Kendi argues that we've been using the word 'racist' all wrong. We treat it like a fixed identity, a permanent tattoo on someone's soul, a slur for a bad person. He says that’s not it at all. For him, 'racist' and 'antiracist' are temporary descriptors, like a hat you're wearing in a given moment. Jackson: A hat? Okay, I need you to explain that analogy. Olivia: Think of it this way. Kendi provides us with some very clear definitions. A racist idea is any idea that suggests one racial group is superior or inferior to another in any way. An antiracist idea is one that suggests racial groups are equals. In his speech, he was criticizing Black youth for their own struggles, suggesting their behavior was the problem. That's a racist idea, because it implies an entire group is behaviorally inferior. Jackson: Okay, so he was unknowingly spouting racist ideas. What about policies? Olivia: That's the other half. A racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity. An antiracist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial equity. So, in any given moment, if you are expressing a racist idea or supporting a racist policy, you are, in that moment, being racist. Jackson: Okay, so it's less like a permanent tattoo and more like a hat you're wearing in a given moment. You can be wearing a 'racist' hat when you support a bad policy, and an 'antiracist' hat five minutes later when you challenge one. Is that it? Olivia: Exactly! And that's why he says the phrase 'not racist' is so dangerous. It's a claim of neutrality, of standing still. But in a society with racist policies, standing still means you're being carried along by the current of racism. The opposite of 'racist' isn't 'not racist.' The opposite is 'antiracist'—actively pushing against that current. Jackson: That is a fundamental shift in thinking. It takes the shame and the finger-pointing out of it and turns it into a constant state of self-awareness. It's not about being a good or bad person, but about what you are doing or thinking right now. Olivia: Precisely. He even points to historical examples, like Justice Harlan's famous dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson. Harlan wrote the iconic words, "Our Constitution is color-blind," which people love to quote. But in the very same dissent, he also wrote that the White race "is the dominant race in this country... and will continue to be for all time." Jackson: Wow. So he was being antiracist and racist in the same breath. Olivia: It shows how these ideas can coexist. Kendi's point is that we all do this. The goal isn't to be a perfect, pure 'antiracist.' The goal is to constantly strive to be antiracist, to catch ourselves when we're being racist, and to correct course. It’s a journey, not a destination. Jackson: That reframing is huge. It shifts the focus from 'who is a bad person' to 'what policies are causing harm.' Which makes me wonder, where do these harmful policies even come from? It can't just be random hate.

Olivia: You've just hit on the second major pillar of the book. Kendi argues that racist policies are almost never born from simple hate or ignorance. They are born from economic self-interest. Jackson: So, follow the money. Olivia: Always. He gives this incredible historical origin story for racism that makes it crystal clear. He takes us back to the 15th century, to Prince Henry the Navigator of Portugal. Prince Henry was a businessman. He saw a massive economic opportunity in circumventing Islamic traders and creating a direct-to-Europe transatlantic slave trade. Jackson: A brutal business plan. Olivia: Absolutely. But he needed a way to justify it, to make this horrific policy palatable. So, he commissioned his biographer, a man named Gomes de Zurara, to write a history. And in that book, Zurara essentially invents the Black race as we know it. He describes the Africans being captured not as people from diverse ethnic groups, but as a single, monolithic group of "beasts" who were "without reason" and lived in "bestial sloth." Jackson: So he created a racist idea to justify a racist policy. Olivia: Exactly. He argued that enslavement was actually a form of salvation for these "savage" people. It was a marketing campaign. And it worked. It justified the policy, which made Prince Henry and the Portuguese monarchy incredibly wealthy. Jackson: So this is what he means by 'racial capitalism'? The policy of exploitation comes first, and the racist idea is basically the PR spin to sell it to the public? Olivia: Precisely. It flips the script on how we usually think about this. We assume the chain of events is: Ignorance and Hate → Racist Ideas → Racist Policies. Kendi argues the real chain is: Economic Self-Interest → Racist Policy → Racist Ideas → Ignorance and Hate. The ideas are produced to defend the policies that make people rich and powerful. Jackson: Wow. And you can see that pattern today. Think about policies that benefit a certain industry, and suddenly you see a flood of media narratives blaming the people who are being harmed by those policies for their own problems. It’s the same playbook. Olivia: It's the same playbook. He argues that racism and capitalism are "conjoined twins." They were born together and they function together. You can't fully understand one without the other. This is why he critiques both segregationists, who want to keep Black people separate and exploited, and assimilationists, who want Black people to adopt White cultural norms to succeed. Both, he says, are rooted in the idea that there's something wrong with Black people, rather than something wrong with the policies. Jackson: So an antiracist approach has to be anticapitalist, and an anticapitalist approach has to be antiracist. They're inseparable. Olivia: That’s his argument. He points to figures like W.E.B. Du Bois, who realized that even in a class struggle, racism created a "vertical fissure," where White workers would often side with White capitalists against Black workers. The two systems feed each other. Jackson: That’s a heavy, but clarifying, concept. It explains why just "educating" people out of their prejudice often doesn't work. Their prejudice might be tied to a system that benefits them, even if they don't realize it.

Olivia: And if the problem is power and policy, not just ignorance, that completely changes how we should fight it. This is where Kendi gets really critical of past antiracist strategies. Jackson: I'm guessing he's not a fan of just holding hands and singing "Kumbaya." Olivia: Not exactly. He shares another deeply personal story of failure. In 2007, he was a graduate student at Temple University, trying to organize support for the Jena 6—a group of Black teenagers in Louisiana facing wildly disproportionate charges for a school fight. Jackson: I remember that case. It was a huge deal. Olivia: It was. And Kendi, full of fire, devises this massive plan called the '106 Campaign' to mobilize students on over a hundred campuses for a march on Washington. It was ambitious and radical. He presents it to his Black Student Union, and they vote it down. Jackson: They rejected it? Why? Olivia: Because they were scared. His rhetoric was about "shutting down" the capital, and they were afraid of getting arrested, of jeopardizing their futures. Instead, they organized a much safer, smaller march on campus. Kendi was devastated, but he learned a crucial lesson. He realized he had failed to distinguish between a demonstration and a protest. Jackson: What’s the difference in his mind? Olivia: A demonstration publicizes a problem. It makes noise, it raises awareness, it shows solidarity. A protest, he argues, is a sustained campaign to seize power and change policy. His failure wasn't in his passion, but in his strategy. He scared away the very people he needed to build power with. Jackson: This connects to his critique of 'uplift suasion'—the idea that Black people just need to act 'better' to convince White people to stop being racist. It sounds like he's saying that's a total waste of time. Olivia: A complete waste. Because it misdiagnoses the problem. The problem isn't Black behavior; it's racist policy. He uses a powerful analogy from his own life. In 2018, Kendi was diagnosed with Stage 4 metastatic colon cancer. Jackson: Oh, wow. I didn't know that. Olivia: He survived, thankfully. But he says the experience clarified his thinking. You don't treat cancer by trying to 'persuade' the tumor to be nicer. You don't try to 'educate' it or prove you're a worthy body for it to live in. You identify it, you cut it out with aggressive surgery—that's policy change—and you flood the body with chemotherapy to kill any remaining cells and prevent recurrence. That's antiracist policy. Jackson: That is an incredibly powerful and clarifying metaphor. It’s about treatment, not persuasion. Olivia: Exactly. And that's why he's so critical of what he calls "moral and educational suasion." The belief that we can end racism by appealing to the morality of racists or by simply educating them has a long history of failure. Racist power, he says, is often not ignorant. It knows exactly what it's doing. It's acting out of self-interest. Jackson: So for the listener, the takeaway isn't 'go out and change a racist's mind.' It's 'identify a racist policy in your community—in housing, in schools, in voting—and organize to change that policy.' That's a much more concrete, if daunting, task. Olivia: It is. But it's a task with a clear goal. It’s about shifting power. He argues that changing minds is not activism. Activism is what produces power and policy change. The changed minds are often a result of that change, not the cause of it.

Jackson: This has been a whirlwind. We’ve gone from a high school speech contest to 15th-century Portugal to a cancer diagnosis. It’s a lot to process. Olivia: It is. But ultimately, Kendi's message is both radical and hopeful. It's radical because it asks us to stop seeing racism as a character flaw—a permanent stain on 'bad people'—and start seeing it as a system of power that we are all participating in, either as racists or antiracists, moment by moment. Jackson: And it's hopeful because it means 'racist' isn't a life sentence. It’s a behavior. And behaviors can change. The work isn't about achieving personal purity or being a perfect person; it's about the relentless, ongoing struggle to support policies that create equity. Olivia: He argues that denial is the heartbeat of racism, but confession is the heartbeat of antiracism. Admitting our own moments of racist thinking, like he did with his speech, is the first step. Admitting our society's racist policies is the first step to treating the cancer. Jackson: It’s a call for constant vigilance, not just toward others, but toward ourselves. Olivia: It leaves us with a powerful question to ask ourselves every day: In this moment, are my actions and beliefs supporting racist policy and inequity, or am I actively working for antiracist policy and equity? Jackson: A question worth sitting with. This is Aibrary, signing off.