How to Be an Antiracist Major Figures

Ibram X. Kendi

Ibram X. Kendi is the author of the book, which includes memoir-like passages that show the development of his thinking about racism, as well as commentary both related to these experiences and resulting from his extensive study of the topic. He uses his childhood, high school, and college experiences to show how he himself displayed racist behaviors and attitudes, how he began to discover these within himself, and how this process of discovery prompted further study of racism and how to combat it. His inclusion of his own experiences not only shows the development of his thinking but also supports his credibility. And by admitting to his own racism, he underscores one of his main points: that being a racist depends not on your own race but on whether you uphold racist policies and ideas either actively or passively.

Larry

Larry, Ibram X. Kendi’s father, came of age in the 1960s and 1970s, when he became involved in the Black liberation theology movement (he met his wife-to-be in church). He was also somewhat involved in the Black Power movement, though he never actually joined the movement. In later decades, he came to believe that assimilation was the best way to improve the lives of African Americans, a view Kendi later rejected. Kendi’s dad had a good job with a corporation, so his son was raised in a middle-class household. Kendi reveals his father to be a kind and wise man who was determined to help create a racially equitable American society.  

Carol

Carol, Ibram X. Kendi’s mother (generally referred to as Ma), was active in the Black Power and Black liberation theology movements of the 1960s and 1970s. Like her husband, she later espoused assimilationist ideas as the best approach for African Americans to eliminate or overcome racial inequities in their lives. Ma is a sympathetic and understanding mother who wants only the best for her son. Because she has internalized some negative stereotypes about Black people, she’s concerned when teenage Kendi spends a lot of time playing basketball and hanging out with friends in the “ghetto,” whose culture he adopts. Ma is a committed feminist who is forthright and outspoken in defending her values.

W.E.B. Du Bois

W.E.B Du Bois (1868–1963) was a trained sociologist and leading thinker on racial issues. In 1909, he helped found the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). His most famous book is the classic The Souls of Black Folks (1903), in which he describes the deleterious effects of the “double consciousness,” or “dueling consciousness,” that African Americans live with every day. Du Bois describes this double consciousness as “always looking at oneself through the eyes of others,” especially white people. He analyzes the negative effect this view has on Black people who cannot simply be who they really are. Although at first Du Bois believed that better education would uplift Black people, he later concluded that it was power that bolstered racism in America. Ibram X. Kendi generally agrees with Du Bois on this and to some extent with Du Bois’s certainty that racism will not cease until it is in white peoples’ self-interest to do away with it.  

Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin Luther King Jr. (1929–1968) is a revered civil rights leader and activist who fought peacefully for racial equity from the 1950s until his assassination in 1968. Ibram X. Kendi is particularly supportive of King’s belief that racism is intimately connected to capitalism, that racial capitalism sustains the self-interest of white people who embrace capitalism. Kendi also shares King’s idea that racism will never be eliminated by changing the minds of racists. Like W.E.B Du Bois and others, King came to recognize that racial inequity is founded on power, although he also believed in the power of nonviolent protest to undermine and eventually overturn racist power.

Smurf

Smurf is a violent bully who attends the same high school in Queens, New York, as Ibram X. Kendi. He sometimes hangs out with a group of boys who gleefully beat and intimidate other teenagers. Smurf once pulled a gun on Kendi, and he viciously beats up an Indian boy on a bus. Kendi states that racists, both white and Black, view kids like Smurf as emblematic of fearsome and dangerously violent young Black boys and men. Smurf is therefore a stereotype that is used to justify others’ hostility toward and fear of Black boys and men in general. Internalizing this hostility and fear is racist because it prevents Black people as well as white people from seeing through the stereotype to the powers that create racist policies that exploit this fear of the Black male, including the social and economic conditions that may have contributed to Smurf’s violent behavior. 

Kwame

Kwame is a Ghanaian American who is in Ibram X. Kendi’s eighth-grade class. Although Kwame is “popular, funny, good-looking, athletic, and cool,” he is almost constantly taunted by other kids’ cruel, racist jokes. Kwame is called a “barbaric and animalistic African.” Kendi calls this behavior “ethnic racism,” which demeans and devalues Americans, primarily immigrants, who come from another country. Some white people may want to keep America white, but even Black people engage in a type of racist discrimination and abuse of Black people with different ethnicities. Kendi asserts that all ethnic groups who are noticed by the powerful “race makers” are inevitably “racialized.” Antiracists must recognize and fight against this view.

Kaila

Kaila attends grad school at Temple University with Ibram X. Kendi. She is an openly proud Black lesbian feminist who speaks her mind unambiguously and is “entirely herself.” As Kendi gets to know her, she reveals to him his “racist, sexist, homophobic” attitudes. Kendi was not a misogynist, as he’d absorbed some of his mother’s feminism, but he’d internalized the accepted worldview of Black patriarchy. Kaila and Kendi argue their positions, with the outcome almost always being a transformative, antiracist education for Kendi. She helps Kendi recognize how his learned homophobia exacerbates his racism, and she helps him free his mind of the homophobic ideas that prop up racial inequity. She reveals to him that anything that lumps people together in identities that can then be discriminated against is a form of racism. She shows Kendi that categories are constructs of the powers that seek to divide and weaken all types of people who seek and deserve respect and equitable treatment.

Yaba

Yaba is a Black feminist lesbian grad student at Temple University who hails from Ghana in Africa. Along with Kaila, Yaba expands Ibram X. Kendi’s understanding of gender racism when she engages with him in highly informative and challenging discussions of race and gender. She’s quick to laugh and is extremely well versed in every topic related to Blackness. Kendi both fears and respect her, and since she commands his respect, she helps Kendi understand many aspects of intersectionality. She also helps him understand gender expression as an “authentic performance,” not something inherent in biology; that is, that some people authentically defy gender stereotypes or gender expectations tied to culture.