His mission: changing how we think about racism

NOT LONG AFTER HOW TO BE AN ANTIRACIST WAS PUBLISHED in August 2019, the book’s author, the historian and National Book Award winner Ibram X. Kendi, found his work an unexpected touch point in the conversation about the persistence of racism in American society.

- JANELL ROSS

Initially I was wary: The title had the ring of self-help, the ideology that personal effort can fix anything. It sounded like one of those books that make the bold and arguably illogical claim that just about everything is within the individual’s control. They do not demand system change, but personal effort.

But its new companion volume, How to Be a (Young) Antiracist, co-authored by young-adult novelist Nic Stone and published on Jan. 31, illuminates just how much that’s not the case. In a format accessible to younger readers, the book explores how we are gradually drafted into the thinking and lies that can render a person unable, or at least unwilling, to challenge the systems and practices that masquerade as normal, functional, and fair. In reality, many of those systems drive inequality along with pervasive belief in group inferiority or superiority. In it, I found a book that tries to equip young people living in the midst of surround-sound injustice and almost gleeful bigotry with the language and skills to recognize they too have been enlisted. Then it calls on them to decide if, where, and how they revolt.

Kendi and Stone do this by encouraging the reader to follow Kendi through his journey from an academically insecure Black teen to a leading thinker and writer on race, a professor and director of the Boston University Center for Anti racist Research. I sat down with Kendi in January.

Many people are not capable of public vulnerability and self-critique. You were a Black high school student who in the 1990s stood before an audience and blamed Black teens, their clothing, their priorities for educational achievement gaps, and received resounding applause.