Let’s revisit a 2018 post, in which Dr. Ibram X. Kendi appeared in a segment of On the Media.
Here are choice excerpts from the show’s transcript.
… the assumption about where racism thrives, namely among the uneducated, the hateful, the poor. […] this prevailing narrative is centuries old and completely wrong.
Those who were producing racist ideas were doing so to justify existing policies that typically benefitted them. So, in other words, instead of ignorance and hate leading to racist ideas and racist ideas leading to racist policies, racist policies have been leading to racist ideas and racist ideas have been leading to ignorance and hate.
In Western European slave markets at the time, sub-Sahara Africans were typically more valuable, primarily because their skin color made it more difficult for them to run away, in contrast to the more plentiful slaves in the slave market of Eastern European Slavs. And so, then they had to create a justification that defended why they were exclusively slave trading in African people.
When you make it [the argument that racism being fundamentally] about ignorance, you’re not making it about power and policy and structures and systems, that the problem centrally is not America’s institutions, is not the American story, is not American capitalism, that the problem is ignorant individuals. So it allows people to deny how fundamental racism has historically been to America.
It also allows people to believe that I as an activist can go out and educate people. I know the path in which that can be done. It’s a lot harder though as an activist to say, okay, you know what, the fundamental problem is power and policy. So it allows for some people to go the easier route as it relates to anti-racist reform.
There’s actually more violence occurring in impoverished black neighborhoods than there are richer black neighborhoods. It’s the same among all the other racial groups. [LAUGHS] In other words, there’s an actual correlation between violence and unemployment rates. The problem is not people, the problem is actually unemployment. And then it changes the calculus of how we, of course, fight violent crime.
His books, Stamped from the Beginning, 2016, How to Be an Antiracist, 2019, and Antiracist Baby, 2020.
Further readings : Antiracist reading list, The Atlantic, Center for Antiracist Research.