How to Be an Antiracist (31 page)
Read How to Be an Antiracist Online
Authors: Ibram X. Kendi
two of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Philadelphia
:
And they are still being told this. See “These Are the 10 Worst Philadelphia Neighborhoods for 2019,”
Road Snacks,
December 28, 2018, available at
www.roadsnacks.net/worst-philadelphia-neighborhoods/
.
millions of Black people migrating from the South
:
For more on the migration and what happened to them when they arrived, see Isabel Wilkerson,
The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration
(New York: Vintage Books, 2011); and Thomas J. Sugrue,
The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).
“The dark ghetto is institutionalized pathology”
:
Kenneth B. Clark,
Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power
(2nd edition) (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), 81.
“the behavior of the African American underclass”
:
Dinesh D’Souza,
The End of Racism: Principles for a Multicultural Society
(New York: Free Press, 1996), 527.
poor Whites as “White trash”
:
See Nancy Isenberg,
White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
(New York: Penguin Books, 2017).
“We have got this tailspin of culture”
:
“Paul Ryan’s Racist Comments Are a Slap in the Face to 10.5 Million Americans,”
Mic,
March 13, 2014, available at
mic.com/articles/85223/paul-ryan-s-racist-comments-are-a-slap-in-the-face-to-10-5-million-americans
.
“The evidence of this failure is all around us”
:
Kay Cole James, “Why We Must Be Bold on Welfare Reform,” The Heritage Foundation, March 12, 2018, available at
www.heritage.org/welfare/commentary/why-we-must-be-bold-welfare-reform
.
He positioned the Black poor as inferior
:
Clark,
Dark Ghetto,
xxix, xxxvi.
Obama made a similar case
:
“Barack Obama’s Speech on Race,”
The New York Times,
March 18, 2008, available at
www.nytimes.com/2008/03/18/us/politics/18text-obama.html
.
poor Blacks are more optimistic
:
See Carol Graham,
Happiness for All? Unequal Hopes and Lives in Pursuit of the American Dream
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).
“wage” of Whiteness
:
W.E.B. Du Bois,
Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999), 700. And also see David R. Roediger,
The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class
(New York: Verso, 1991).
as the “Talented Tenth”
:
See W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” in
The Negro Problem: A Series of Articles by Representative American Negroes of Today
(New York: James Pott & Company, 1903).
As Martin Luther King said in his critique of capitalism in 1967
:
Martin Luther King Jr., “ ‘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
.
what world-systems theorists term the “long sixteenth century”
:
Immanuel Wallerstein,
The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century
(New York: Academic Press, 1974).
Prince Henry’s Portugal birthed conjoined twins
:
For histories of the conjoined origins of racism and capitalism, see Ibram X. Kendi,
Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America
(New York: Nation Books, 2016); Eric Williams,
Capitalism & Slavery
(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); and Edward E. Baptist,
The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism
(New York: Basic Books, 2014).
The Black poverty rate in 2017 stood at 20 percent
:
“Poverty Rate by Race/Ethnicity,” Kaiser Family Foundation Database, available at
www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/poverty-rate-by-raceethnicity/
.
The Black unemployment rate has been at least twice as high
:
“Black Unemployment Rate Is Consistently Twice That of Whites,” Pew Research Center, August 21, 2013, available at
www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/08/21/through-good-times-and-bad-black-unemployment-is-consistently-double-that-of-whites/
.
The wage gap
:
“Wage Gap Between Blacks and Whites Worst in Nearly 40 Years,” CNN, September 20, 2016, available at
money.cnn.com/2016/09/20/news/economy/black-white-wage-gap/
.
median net worth of White families is about ten times that of Black families
:
“White Families Have Nearly 10 Times the Net Worth of Black Families. And the Gap Is Growing,”
The Washington Post,
September 28, 2017, available at
www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/09/28/black-and-hispanic-families-are-making-more-money-but-they-still-lag-far-behind-whites/
.
White households are expected to own eighty-six times more wealth than Black households by 2020
:
Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, Chuck Collins, Josh Hoxie, and Emanuel Nieves, “The Road to Zero Wealth: How the Racial Wealth Divide Is Hollowing Out America’s Middle Class,” Institute for Policy Studies, September 2017, available at
ips-dc.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/The-Road-to-Zero-Wealth_FINAL.pdf
.
Africa’s unprecedented capitalist growth over the past two decades
:
“Africa’s Capitalist Revolution: Preserving Growth in a Time of Crisis,”
Foreign Affairs,
July/August 2009, available at
www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/africa/2009-07-01/africas-capitalist-revolution
.
nearly nine in ten extremely poor people will live in Sub-Saharan Africa by 2030
:
“The Number of Extremely Poor People Continues to Rise in Sub-Saharan Africa,” The World Bank, September 19, 2018, available at
blogs.worldbank.org/opendata/number-extremely-poor-people-continues-rise-sub-saharan-africa
.
In Latin America, people of African descent
:
“Behind the Numbers: Race and Ethnicity in Latin America,”
Americas Quarterly,
Summer 2015, available at
www.americasquarterly.org/content/behind-numbers-race-and-ethnicity-latin-america
.
The global gap between the richest (and Whitest) regions of the world and the poorest (and Blackest) regions of the world has tripled
:
“Global Inequality May Be Much Worse Than We Think,”
The Guardian,
April 8, 2016, available at
www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionals-network/2016/apr/08/global-inequality-may-be-much-worse-than-we-think
.
Upward mobility is greater for White people
:
Randall Akee, Maggie R. Jones, and Sonya R. Porter, National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 23733, August 2017, available at
www.nber.org/papers/w23733
.
the highest-income quintile
:
“The Racial Wealth Divide Holds Back Black Earners at All Levels,”
AlterNet,
April 3, 2018, available at
www.alternet.org/2018/04/racial-wealth-divide-holds-back-black-earners/
.
Black middle-income households have less wealth
:
See “1 in 7 White Families Are Now Millionaires. For Black Families, It’s 1 in 50,”
The Washington Post,
October 3, 2017.
White poverty is not as distressing as Black poverty
:
“Black Poverty Differs from White Poverty,”
The Washington Post,
August 12, 2015, available at
www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/08/12/black-poverty-differs-from-white-poverty/?utm_term=.6069bf66fb16
.
Antiracist policies in the 1960s and 1970s narrowed these inequities
:
“Equality Still Elusive 50 Years After Civil Rights Act,”
USA Today,
January 19, 2014, available at
www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2014/01/19/civil-rights-act-progress/4641967/
.
as chronicled by historian Devyn Spence Benson
:
Devyn Spence Benson,
Antiracism in Cuba: The Unfinished Revolution
(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), 30–71.
Socialist Party of America (SPA) in 1901 refused to adopt an anti-lynching petition
:
“Race and the U.S. Socialist Tradition,”
Socialist Worker,
November 18, 2010, available at
socialistworker.org/2010/11/18/race-and-us-socialist-tradition
.
“The discovery of gold and silver in America”
:
Karl Marx,
Capital: A Critique of Political Economy,
Volume 1, Part 2 (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007), 823.
pleaded with Du Bois to reconsider
:
David Levering Lewis,
W.E.B. Du Bois, 1919–1963: The Fight for Equality and the American Century
(New York: Macmillan, 2000), 309–10.
what scholars now call racial capitalism
:
See Robin D. G. Kelley, “What Did Cedric Robinson Mean by Racial Capitalism,”
Boston Review,
January 12, 2017, available at
bostonreview.net/race/robin-d-g-kelley-what-did-cedric-robinson-mean-racial-capitalism
.
“The lowest and most fatal degree”
and
“working-class aristocracy”
:
Lewis,
W.E.B. Du Bois, 1919–1963,
308–9.
“Instead of a horizontal division of classes”
:
W.E.B. Du Bois,
Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept
(Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1984), 205.
called for a “Guiding One Hundredth”
:
See W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth: Memorial Address,” in ed. David Levering Lewis,
W.E.B. Du Bois: A Reader
(New York: Henry Holt, 1995), 347–53.
“inextricable link between racism and capitalism”
:
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, “Race, Class and Marxism,”
Socialist Worker,
January 4, 2011, available at
socialistworker.org/2011/01/04/race-class-and-marxism
.
The history of capitalism
:
For an honest history of capitalism and the United States, see Howard Zinn,
A People’s History of the United States, 1492–Present
(New York: HarperCollins, 1982).
“capitalist to the bone”
:
“Elizabeth Warren’s Theory of Capitalism,”
The Atlantic,
August 28, 2018, available at
www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/08/elizabeth-warrens-theory-of-capitalism/568573/
.
The top 1 percent now own around half
:
“Richest 1% Own Half the World’s Wealth, Study Finds,”
The Guardian,
November 14, 2017, available at
www.theguardian.com/inequality/2017/nov/14/worlds-richest-wealth-credit-suisse
.
“I made this film for the black aesthetic,”
:
Lerone Bennet Jr., “The Emancipation Orgasm: Sweetback in Wonderland,”
Ebony,
September 1971.
Bennett blasted Van Peebles
:
Ibid.
E. Franklin Frazier’s
Black Bourgeoisie
:
E. Franklin Frazier,
Black Bourgeoisie: The Rise of a New Middle Class
(New York: Free Press, 1957).
“the Negro middle class contributes very little”
:
Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan,
Beyond the Melting Pot,
51–52.
Martin Luther King Jr. and a generation of elite Black youngsters
:
Lewis,
W.E.B. Du Bois, 1919–1963,
558.
seminal work
Afrocentricity
:
Molefi Kete Asante,
Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change
(Buffalo, NY: Amulefi, 1980)
.
“The rejection of European particularism”
:
See Molefi Kete Asante,
Afrocentricity
(Trenton, NJ: African World Press, 1988), 104.
she enjoyed bolting the States to speak on her research
:
Ama Mazama and Garvey Musumunu,
African Americans and Homeschooling: Motivations, Opportunities, and Challenges
(New York: Routledge, 2015); Molefi Kete Asante and Ama Mazama, eds.,
Encyclopedia of African Religion
(Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 2009); and Ama Mazama, ed.,
The Afrocentric Paradigm
(Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2003).
“creeping blight”
:
Kenneth B. Clark,
Dark Ghetto: Dilemmas of Social Power
(2nd edition) (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1989), 25, 87, 109.
“banksters,” as Thom Hartmann calls them
:
Thom Hartmann, “How to Take on the Banksters,”
The Hartmann Report,
September 21, 2016, available at
www.thomhartmann.com/blog/2016/09/how-take-banksters
.
Americans lost trillions during the Great Recession
:
“America Lost $10.2 Trillion in 2008,”
Business Insider,
February 3, 2009, available at www.businessinsider.com/2009/2/america-lost-102-trillion-of-wealth-in-2008 [inactive].
Estimated losses from white-collar crimes
:
“White-Collar Crimes—Motivations and Triggers,”
Forbes,
February 22, 2018, available at
www.forbes.com/sites/roomykhan/2018/02/22/white-collar-crimes-motivations-and-triggers/#258d26351219
.
the combined costs of burglary and robbery
:
Patrick Colm Hogan,
The Culture of Conformism: Understanding Social Consent
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 15.
3,380 more Americans died from alcohol-related traffic deaths
:
Ibram X. Kendi,
Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America
(New York: Nation Books, 2016), 437.
“are living in hell”
:
“Trump at Debate: Minorities in Cities ‘Are Living in Hell,’ ”
Politico,
September 26, 2016, available at
www.politico.com/story/2016/09/trump-minorities-living-in-hell-228726
.
“from shithole countries”
:
“Trump Derides Protections for Immigrants from ‘Shithole’ Countries,”
The Washington Post,
January 12, 2018.
HBCUs do not represent “the real world”
:
“Hold Up: Aisha Tyler Thinks HBCUs Are Bad for Black Students?,” BET, April 28, 2016, available at
www.bet.com/celebrities/news/2016/04/28/aisha-tyler-slams-hbcus.html
.
“Even the best black colleges and universities do not”
:
Thomas Sowell, “The Plight of Black Students in America,”
Daedalus
103 (Spring 1974), 189.
Sowell’s “description remains accurate”
:
Jason L. Riley, “Black Colleges Need a New Mission,”
The Wall Street Journal,
September 28, 2010, available at
www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748704654004575517822124077834
.
The endowment of the richest HBCU, Howard
:
See “HBCUs Struggle to Close the Endowment Gap,”
Philanthropy News Digest,
July 19, 2017, available at
philanthropynewsdigest.org/news/hbcus-struggle-to-close-the-endowment-gap
.
produces a giving gap
:
Ibid.
like the current “performance based” state models
:
“Black Colleges Are the Biggest Victims of States’ Invasive New Funding Rules,”
The Washington Post,
December 16, 2014, available at
www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/12/16/black-colleges-are-the-biggest-victims-of-states-invasive-new-funding-rules/
.
HBCUs tend to have higher Black graduation rates
:
“How Are Black Colleges Doing? Better Than You Think, Study Finds,”
The Chronicle of Higher Education,
April 13, 2018, available at
www.chronicle.com/article/How-Are-Black-Colleges-Doing-/243119
.
HBCU graduates are, on average, more likely
:
“Grades of Historically Black Colleges Have Well-Being Edge,” Gallup, October 27, 2015, available at
news.gallup.com/poll/186362/grads-historically-black-colleges-edge.aspx
.
Banks remain twice as likely to offer loans to White entrepreneurs
:
“Study Documents Discrimination Against Black Entrepreneurs,” NCRC, November 17, 2017, available at
ncrc.org/study-documents-discrimination-black-entrepreneurs/
; Sterling A. Bone et al., “Shaping Small Business Lending Policy Through Matched-Paired Mystery Shopping,” September 12, 2017, available at SSRN at
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3035972
.
Customers avoid Black businesses
:
For example, see “Jennifer L. Doleac and Luke C. D. Stein, “The Visible Hand: Race and Online Market Outcomes,” May 1, 2010, available at SSRN at
papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1615149
.
“does that inequitable treatment excuse bad service?”
:
“Should Black Owned Businesses Get a Hall Pass for Bad Service?”,
Blavity,
2017, available at
blavity.com/black-owned-businesses-get-pass-for-bad-service
.
“carry back to the country of their origin the seeds of civilization”
:
Thomas Jefferson, “To Lynch, Monticello, January 21, 1811,” in
The Writings of Thomas Jefferson,
Volume 9, 1807–1815, ed. Paul Leicester Ford (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1898), 303.
“savage wilds of Africa”
:
Claude Andrew Clegg III,
The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia
(Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 35.
A writer for the South’s
De Bow’s Review
searched
:
“Free Negro Rule,”
DeBow’s Review
3:4 (April 1860), 440.
Sherman and U.S. secretary of war Edwin M. Stanton met
:
See
The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies
(Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1895), 37–41.
“will be left to the freed people themselves”
:
“Sherman’s Special Field Orders, No. 15,” in
The Empire State of the South: Georgia History in Documents and Essays
, ed. Christopher C. Meyers (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2008), 174.
Sherman’s order deprived the Negroes
:
Horace Greeley, “Gen. Sherman and the Negroes,”
New York Daily Tribune,
January 30, 1865.
“on the platform of equal accommodations”
:
Henry W. Grady, “In Plain Black and White: A Reply to Mr. Cable,”
Century Magazine
29 (1885), 911.
diverted resources toward exclusively White spaces
:
“Jim Crow’s Schools,”
American Educator,
Summer 2004, available at
www.aft.org/periodical/american-educator/summer-2004/jim-crows-schools
.
“assumption that the enforced separation of the two races”
:
“Plessy v. Ferguson 163 U.S. 537 (1896),” in Abraham L. Davis and Barbara Luck Graham,
The Supreme Court, Race, and Civil Rights
(Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE, 1995), 51.
the majority of Black children preferred White dolls
:
For essays on their doll experiments, see Kenneth B. Clark and Mamie P. Clark, “The Development of Consciousness of Self and the Emergence of Racial Identification in Negro Preschool Children,”
Journal of Social Psychology
10:4 (1939), 591–99; and Kenneth B. Clark and Mamie P. Clark, “Racial Identification and Preference among Negro Children,” in
Readings in Social Psychology,
ed. E. L. Hartley (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1947); Kenneth B. Clark,
Prejudice and Your Child
(Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1988).
“To separate [colored children] from others”
:
“Brown v. Board of Education,” LII Collection: U.S. Supreme Court Decisions, Cornell University Law School, available at
www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/347/483
.
San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez
:
See Paul A. Sracic,
San Antonio v. Rodriguez and the Pursuit of Equal Education: The Debate Over Discrimination and School Funding
(Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2006).
“there are adequate Negro schools and prepared instructors”
:
Zora Neale Hurston, “Court Order Can’t Make Races Mix,”
Orlando Sentinel,
August 11, 1955.
“I think integration in our public schools is different”
:
“Deacon Robert Williams,” in
Reflections on Our Pastor: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, 1954–1960,
eds. Wally G. Vaughn and Richard W. Wills (Dover, MA: The Majority Press, 1999), 129.
an 80 percent White teaching force
:
“The Nation’s Teaching Force Is Still Mostly White and Female,”
Education Week,
August 15, 2017, available at
www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2017/08/15/the-nations-teaching-force-is-still-mostly.html
.
40 percent less likely to believe the student will finish high school
:
Seth Gershenson, Stephen B. Holt, and Nicholas W. Papageorge, “Who Believes in Me? The Effect of Student-Teacher Demographic Match on Teacher Expectations,”
Economics of Education Review
52 (June 2016), 209–24.
Low-income Black students who have at least one Black teacher
:
“IZA DP No. 10630: The Long-Run Impacts of Same-Race Teachers,” Institute of Labor Economics, March 2017, available at
www.iza.org/publications/dp/10630
.
Integration had turned into “a one-way street”
:
Barack Obama,
Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
(New York: Crown, 2007), 99–100.
“The experience of an integrated education”
:
David L. Kirp, “Making Schools Work,”
The New York Times,
May 19, 2012, available at
www.nytimes.com/2012/05/20/opinion/sunday/integration-worked-why-have-we-rejected-it.html
.
The percentage of Southern Black students attending integrated White schools
:
“The Data Proves That School Segregation Is Getting Worse,”
Vox,
March 5, 2018, available at
www.vox.com/2018/3/5/17080218/school-segregation-getting-worse-data
.
“I had always thought the ultimate goal of better race relations was integration”
:
Tamar Jacoby, “What Became of Integration,”
The Washington Post,
June 28, 1998.
“using Negro workmen, Negro architects, Negro attorneys, and Negro financial institutions”
:
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
.
“only white men” with different “skins”
:
Kenneth M. Stampp,
The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-bellum South
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), vii.