How to Be an Antiracist

Ibram X. Kendi is the author of How to Be an Antiracist as well as other award-winning works including The Black Campus Movement—which won the W.E.B. Du Bois Book Prize—and Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America—a National Book Award winner. As a scholar and researcher of Black History, Kendi also founded and serves as the director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at Boston University, which gathers the efforts of researchers and practitioners “to figure out novel and practical ways to understand, explain, and solve seemingly intractable problems of racial inequity and injustice” (from the center’s Mission Statement). The work of the center focuses on viewing race and racism through antiracist questions, narratives, methods, policies, and advocacy campaigns in the effort to answer the question, “What is wrong with policies?”

Kendi’s personal narratives throughout How to Be an Antiracist detail his journey to becoming an antiracist advocate. His parents, Carol and Larry, were Christians who became politicized through the Black Power movement, instilling a strong sense of Black identity in Kendi from an early age. His awareness of his Blackness and the unfairness of White dominant spaces made him an outspoken student against injustice from childhood—before he even possessed the necessary language to define the issue.