The One You Feed - Ibram X. Kendi on Being an Antiracist

Episode Date: August 29, 2020

Ibram X. Kendi is an American author, historian, and scholar of race and discriminatory policy in America. He is the Director for the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University and he received the National Book Award for Non-Fiction for his book, Stamped From The Beginning: The Definitive History Of Racist Ideas In America. In this episode, Ibram X. Kendi and Eric talk about his recent book, How To Be An Antiracist.But wait – there’s more! The episode is not quite over!! We continue the conversation and you can access this exclusive content right in your podcast player feed. Head over to our Patreon page and pledge to donate just $10 a month. It’s that simple and we’ll give you good stuff as a thank you!In This Interview, Ibram X. Kendi and I Discuss Being an Antiracist and…His book, How To Be An AntiracistHow he defines the word “racist”The problem at the core of racismHow to determine if a policy is racist or antiracistRacial discriminationDifferentiating between people and policiesThe importance of viewing individual behaviorsHow mistakes impact people of different racesIbram X. Kendi Links:ibramxkendi.comTwitterInstagramIf you enjoyed this conversation with Ibram X. Kendi on Being an Antiracist, you might also enjoy these other episodes:Jamia WilsonAustin Channing BrownRuth KingSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Now you're taking food off his plate, just like you took food off the other person's plate, and both things are equally bad. But no, that's actually not what's happening. You have to understand the history and the context. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.

But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Ibram X. Kendi, an American author, historian, and scholar of race and discriminatory policy in America. Ibram is the director of the Center for Anti-Racist Research at Boston University and received the National Book Award and National Book Award for Nonfiction for Stamped from the Beginning, The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. Today, Eric and Ibram discuss his new book, How to Be an Anti-Racist. Hi, Ibram. Welcome to the show. Hey, great to be on the show. It's a real pleasure to have you on. How to Be an Anti-Racist. that one yet. I'm a little bit behind on that one. Well, it's my most recent adult book. So I think,

yeah. Boy, this is one of those where I feel like I could talk with you for about four hours about all the ideas in this book, but we're going to be on a slightly shorter timeframe than that. So I'd like to start off though. We always start our shows off with the parable of the two wolves in the parable of the two wolves. There the parable of the two wolves, there's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, we all have two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One's a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second. He looks up at his grandfather. He says,

and the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second. He looks up at his grandfather. He says, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to ask you to start off what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. For me, what it means is that we should be focused on feeding an anti-racist world

and we should be focused on feeding an anti-racist world, and we should be focused on feeding our system with anti-racist policies, meaning policies that are leading to equity and justice. We should be focused on feeding our minds with anti-racist ideas, meaning ideas that say that there's nothing wrong or right with any racial group, that despite the differences in which people look, despite different cultures and ethnic groups, we're all on the same level, we're all equal. I mean, and if there are disparities, they must be the result of racist policies, because there's nothing wrong with groups of people. Yep. I love your book in that you spend a lot of time defining what things mean, which I think is a really important thing. And I want to go through what a couple of those definitions are. But the first one I want to start with that I thought was really important is to define what a racist is, because you use that term very differently than most of us use that term.

We'll say that person is a racist or, you know, I'm not a racist. But you describe being a racist or not a racist more around actions and behaviors and ideas than identity. Yeah, so most people think of a racist or even a a racist policy with their action or inaction. So what's critical in that definition is someone who is, in other words, in the moments that we are expressing a racist idea that something is wrong with Latinx immigrants or Black people or, you know, Asian Americans, the times in which we're expressing those ideas, we're being racist. And if in the very next moment, we are making the case that there is nothing wrong with any racial group of people, in that very next moment, we're being anti-racist. If in one moment we are doing nothing in the face of

racist policy, in the next moment we're challenging racist policy, we're going from racist to anti-racist. These are descriptive terms. And I don't think Americans and other people around the world realize that when they use the term racist and even not racist as identities, when they think of racist as an attack word, as a pejorative term, almost like the R word, they are trafficking in really white nationalist ideology. White nationalists have long advocated that racist is a term wielded at white people to hurt them and to attack them. And I don't think people realize that they hold so much white nationalist thought. Yeah. Yeah. You say that racist and anti-racist are like peelable name tags that are placed and replaced based on what someone is doing

or not doing, supporting or expressing in each moment. And I really think that's an important idea. And as you said, if we use it as a insultive term, and if we think it's a permanent identity, it's very hard for us to ever say, oh, wait, I just expressed a racist viewpoint. Yeah, people are not going to want to say that because then they're going to believe they admit the times they expressed a racist viewpoint. They admit the times in which they were being racist, that the society's going to tattoo racist on their forehead. Right. That's right. That's right. You talk about a couple other ideas that I thought were really interesting. And one of the ideas that was hard for me to wrap my head around

was that the problem of race has always had at its core a problem of power. We tend to think, or at least I tended to think, and I think a lot of people tend to think, that people are racist or racist policies are created out of ignorance or misunderstanding or perhaps in the worst case, hate. But you really make the point that in the research you've done over and over, that racist policies start out of a desire for power or for gain or for wealth. The policy starts and then the ideas come along to justify the policy. Let me take a contemporary example in which you've had some GOP politicians who recognize that more and more Americans are becoming more centrist or even more liberal, that you also have a growing percentage of people of color. And since, because they

probably were looking at those trends, particularly during the first term of the Obama administration, and seeing that those trends were not amicable, you know, to their political prospects. And so what happens is some of these folks weren't like, well, we're in a democracy, so there's nearly not much I can do. You know, majority sort of wins and rules. No, they said, well, when you don't have enough votes, you start figuring out a way to suppress votes. And so then out of political self-interest, they started or continued to advocate for voter suppression policies like voter ID laws. And, you know, those policies have been found to target African American voters with, quote, surgical precision, to quote a North Carolina court. But then they had to justify

those policies. They had to explain to their voters and other Americans why they were instituting voter ID policies, why they were purging so many voters from voter rolls, why they were cutting early voting programs. And the case that they made was voter fraud. So, in other words, they created this idea that all these people were voting fraudulently, which the data proved to be an almost non-existent problem. But it really harkened back to this idea that Black and brown voters are essentially corrupting the system. And that was the dominant idea during the Reconstruction era that Ku Klux Klansmen and other neo-Confederates used to undermine these interracial Southern governments. And so then that was the racist idea. So you had the self-interest,

the power leading to the racist policies. Then out of the racist policies and the need to justify them, project them, campaign for them were racist ideas. And then you had everyday Americans who were believing these ideas, who went on to believe, yes, you know, these black and brown people are voting fraudulently, they're ruining this country. And then some of them were obviously ignorant about who was actually corrupting the voting process. And then some of them were even hateful. And so then you had the racist policies leading to the racist ideas. And that's how historically it has been. You say that you don't prefer terms like systematic racism, institutional racism. You find that they are often confusing and you prefer the

simpler term racist policy because it's easier to describe what we're talking about. So, yes. So when we talk about racism with an M, so R-A-C-I-S-M, did I spell it right? Racism. When we think about racism, racism is essentially structural. It's essentially systematic. It is essentially institutional. And I think it's critical for us to distinguish between racism with an M, with racist with a T. So racist is individual. Racist is an individual person or an idea or a policy. And so I think first I wanted to convey that when we say racism, we should be thinking about something systemic. So to me, systemic racism or institutional or structural racism, we don't need to add that extra sort of

term. All racism is systemic. If we're thinking about an individual, we use racist with a T. Secondly, I think for everyday people, you know, when you go into a barbershop or, you know, you go to a bus stop, you know, you go into a church basement around people who may not have ever read a book on racism, attended a lecture, and you say, oh, yes, you know, America is experiencing systemic racism. And you ask them, well, what does that mean? Many people may not even be able to say that. Even college students, even some people who study it cannot coherently describe what that actually means. Right. And so whenever we have terms that everyday people cannot understand, you know, we should think about different ways to explain. So that's why I use the term racist policies, because a racist policy, okay, people understand what a policy is, and then you're qualifying with a racist policy. And then people can then start thinking about their lives and seeing those racist policies. And then they begin to see, okay, those policies are making up the structure. And so I want people to focus on not the structure. I want them to focus on really the veins that really make up the structure so that they can begin the process of undermining. And so you say that no policy is racially neutral. It's either racist or anti-racist.

And as I thought about that, I sort of found myself wandering into lots of policies that I was like, well, I don't know if I can tell the difference. Like I just for fun, I opened up I live in the state of Ohio, I looked up some of the recent bills in the state of Ohio. And I was like this one. And again, it was exempt veterans disability severance pay from income tax. And I was like, well, I can't tell. And I know you don't know anything about that bill necessarily. And I know the devil is always in the details. But in general saying, okay, the severance pay that we paid veterans is not going to be taxed. We're going to exempt it from income tax. Does that seem to be an anti-racist policy or a racist policy? Because to me, I look at it and I go, well, it seems neutral.

But I wanted to get your sense of that because you've obviously looked at it much more closely than I have. Sure. Not that policy, but these ideas. So severance, so when we're thinking about severance pay, we're thinking about something, pay that can ultimately contribute to the wealth of a particular person or even one's family, let's say, or even their just annual income, right? And so I think one way to assess whether that policy is indeed racist or anti-racist is we currently have a growing racial wealth gap in the state of Ohio or even an income

gap. So then the question becomes, is that bill, is that new measure growing that wealth gap or closing it? Is it growing the income gap between, on average, Black people and white people in the state of Ohio, or is it closing it? What's the impact of it? And I think that's how we can sort of determine the answer as to whether that policy is indeed racist or anti-racist. Let me give another example. The tax bill that was passed, I believe, in 2017 had no racial language in it. There was not a discussion about race. There wasn't a statement of, oh, let's pass this bill to suppress the wealth of black people or increase the wealth of white people. has been an even greater concentration of wealth among those who are super rich, because obviously they're getting taxed less, and people who are super rich are disproportionately

white. And so ultimately, what's happened as a result of that bill, it's grown the racial wealth gap. And so thereby, it's a racist bill. NAMASTE I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal?

The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you. And the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us tonight. How are you, too?

Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really.

Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallyn, really. Yeah. No, really. Go to really, no, really.com and register to win $500 a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called really no, really. And you can find it on the I heart radio app on Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. So with the bill I brought up, if we wanted to know, we'd probably want to say, well, would we look at what percentage are people of color or would we just say if it's helping people of color put more money in their pocket based on this bill, it's an anti-racist bill? And again, I know we're going deep in the weeds here, which is not really where I meant to go in a 30 minute conversation, but here we are. but here we are. So I think with veterans, so to give an example, I think that, again,

it's not something that I'm knowledgeable of, but from my understanding, the military is one of the most desegregated sectors in our society. In other words, with some militaries, I believe the army, you know, black people are higher than their national population. So typically, you know, in national sectors, we're underrepresented or in prisons we'll be overrepresented. But from my understanding in certain units of the armed forces, we are overrepresented. And so what that then means is if, for instance, in a sector where white people are overrepresented, the tax policy is allowing such that more people could keep their income. But in among veterans where, let's say, if it is the case that black people are overrepresented, the tax policies are making it such that people can keep less of their income, right? And so then a bill is sort of easing that, then it may be an anti-racist bill. Again, I'm not really sure, but I'm just sort of thinking out loud. Right, right. Yep. I'm not looking for your opinion on that bill so much as your thought

process. And you formed a center, which the whole goal was to bring together policy people to really look at what policies are racist, what policies are not, and to try and change the sort of policy that gets enacted. Well, certainly, I mean, you know, we've founded the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research. And certainly, you know, one of our goals will be to allow research to bear on sort of policies that are indeed maintaining or growing racial inequity and justice. So we then can see what policies need to be eliminated from our body politic. There's a term that generally I would have thought was a term that would be a positive term in the fight for racial equality, but you've described is not.

And it's the term racial discrimination. You've said racist power has basically commandeered that term since the 60s. So talk to making the case that one of the things that's happening as a result of racism is people of color are being discriminated against. pre-60s, though certainly not all of them, but many, within the actual law, there were language that specified the ways in which, let's say, Black people should or could be discriminated against. And so by the 1960s, when some of those laws were deemed unconstitutional or were disallowed from use, the proposed solution to that was for laws to not have any racial language in them, right? The conception was that laws that have racial language in them discriminate, and then laws that don't apparently are neutral or race neutral. And so that's then what allowed people who oppose affirmative action to make the case that affirmative action policies were a form of discrimination against white people, and thereby they were racist,

and thereby they were not allowing America to achieve its goals of equality, and thereby they should be eliminated. And what I sort of tried to make a case for in How to Be an Antiracist, in a small section that probably could have been the whole book, was that I think, like with everything else, we should be focused on the outcome of discrimination. In other words, there is a very different thing in which if you have a room that is 100 percent white and it's 100 percent white because for 100 years you've been discriminating against every non-white person that have tried to come in. You said, no, you can't come in this room. And that's one thing. It's another thing when that room is 100% white and you're trying to equalize that room. You're trying to create more representative numbers of people in that room and you're being

barred from making the room larger. So then how do you go about creating racial parity in that room if you're not allowed from making the room larger, you can only have 100 seats. How do you do that? Really, the only way to do that, again, if you're committed to racial parity and equity, is to essentially discriminate. But it's a different outcome. One is the goal is equity. The other is the goal to maintain inequity. One is a temporary solution till equity is reached. The other is a permanent scenario, which are permanently barring people who are not white until forever. I was just really playing with the term, right, racist and anti-racist discrimination. I think we should, again, be focused on outcomes. And I think that

this is something that we do every single day with our children, to give an example. Those of us who have multiple children, if one of our children goes and, you know, we've already served them dinner and one of them has taken off the plate of the other child, and so the other child has only a little bit, right? And we don't have any more food. How do we go about ensuring that those two children have an equitable amount of food? The only way we can do that is to take the food off the plate from the child who took the food. And so it's easy to call that discrimination. Now you're discriminating against that child because you're taking food off his plate. And it's the same thing. And now you're taking food off his plate, just like you

took food off the other person's plate. And both things are equally bad. But no, that's actually not what's happening. You have to understand the history and the context. Yeah. In that section, you quoted U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun and saying that in order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way saying that in order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race. There is no other way. And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently. And it's just like, for instance, you have an under-resourced school, and that school has far and away less resources than, let's say, and it's majority Black than a majority white school down the road. And you want to go about ensuring that the two

schools have a relatively equal amount of resources, you know, and one school is getting, I'm just throwing the numbers out there, you know, has a $5 million annual budget, and the other has a $2 million annual budget, you can then, okay, let's up that $2 million annual budget to $5 million. But then folks at that white school would be like, you're discriminating against us because you're not giving us money too. And that's essentially the call of reverse discrimination. you say that a racist is somebody who sees problems in groups of people. They locate the problem in a group of people. And an anti-racist is someone who sees problems in policies.

You say Americans have long been trained to see the deficiencies of people rather than policy. It's a pretty easy mistake to make. People are in our faces. Policies are different. Yeah, it is easy. For instance, you have many Americans who it's easy for them, for instance, to blame those individual people who are engaged in violent crime in a neighborhood that's perceived as dangerous and violent, it's a little bit harder. And, you know, you see those people and it's easy to blame those people and it's easy to say those people are violent and it's easy to say then community is violent. It's much harder to take a step back and start to think about, okay, what potential policies are affecting that community

that could be leading to those higher levels of violent crime than what's happening in another community? And it's, again, you know, for instance, when it comes to violent crime, we know, for instance, that typically neighborhoods with higher levels of violent crime tend to have higher levels of poverty and unemployment. And so, but we can't see those macro issues of poverty and unemployment, for whatever reason, as the cause of that violent crime, because we're only looking at those individual people, right? And we're only focused and outraged about the acts of those individual people. And certainly, you know, anytime anyone harms another person, we should be outraged.

But we should also realize that these aren't actually dangerous Black neighborhoods, because if somehow it was the Blackness of the people that was behind the violent crimes in all Black neighborhoods, no matter the levels of poverty and unemployment, would have the same levels of violent crime. But it just so happens that higher income Black neighborhoods tend to have lower levels, far lower levels of violent crime than extremely impoverished Black neighborhoods. And so what that means is we actually do have dangerous unemployed neighborhoods. We have dangerous impoverished neighborhoods. But then that changes the calculations in terms of what is the deficiency. We have dangerous, impoverished neighborhoods, but then that changes the calculations in terms of what is the deficiency. Yeah, you make a case in that part of the book that there's much more correlation between

high crime and high unemployment than there is between, say, high crime and a black neighborhood. And you look and you see where the real challenge is. And you persistently throughout the book encourage us to treat individual behavior as individual behavior, not racial, not ethnic, not cultural. You sort of dismantle all of that one thing after the other through the book. And it gets back to sort of this idea of we treat an individual's behavior as an individual's, which makes a lot of sense. But I think there's another version of that to be careful of because that is also a tool of saying every individual is responsible only for themselves and that each person should

be able to succeed regardless of the circumstances. If all we're doing is looking at individuals, then shouldn't all individuals be able to succeed equally? Well, I think I could see sort of see how that transfers into that. And I think that it is critically important for us to do two things simultaneously. One, when we see an individual person acting negatively, we're seeing an individual person act negatively, right? Or if we see an individual person who is being lazy, we can put them in a group. We can put them in a group of lazy people. And it just so happens that there are people of all races in that group, right? It's not just black and brown people. And so if we're going to group people, we should group in based specifically on that characteristic. And also we should probably group it if we want to be really precise in that time. In other words, in this moment, the lazy people right now, because that person just could be having a lazy day and every other day they work hard. Right. So I think there's that. Then simultaneously, if there are disparities between groups, we know thereby that there are all of these positive and negative characteristics among the individuals that make up any racial group. And all of those negativities and positivities make these two groups human imperfect groups and thereby equal.

So thereby, if there's disparities between them, it can't be because there's something wrong with black people because there are things wrong with black individuals, but there are things wrong with white individuals, too. So it must be something else. And that's something else is policy. too. So it must be something else. And that something else is policy. You've got a sentence I'll just read here before we wrap up, which I think really sums this up a lot for me, which you said, one of racism's harms is the way it falls on the unexceptional black person who is asked to be extraordinary just to survive. And even worse, the black screw up who faces the abyss after one error while the white screw up is handed second chances and empathy. Yeah, because I mean, the black screw-up who faces the abyss after one error, while the white screw-up is handed second chances and empathy. Yeah, because, I mean, for black people who struggle, who make mistakes, many people do not see them as a human being making a mistake, thereby a human being who

can correct the mistake, thereby a human being who has the potential to be something great. What many people see is a black person and they see that person's mistake as due to their blackness. And then they say that person can't change their blackness. So thereby they're always going to make those mistakes. So therefore, let me not give them another chance. While with a white individual, going to make those mistakes. So therefore, let me not give them another chance. While with a white individual, they're more likely to understand and see the individuality and the humanity. And to be human is to make mistakes. And to be empathetic is to give people second chances. Yep. And I've said on this show to listeners before, I'm one of those white people that got a second chance. When I was 24 years old, addicted to heroin. And when I was arrested, I was given chances that I doubt I would have been given had I been black,

you know, I, I benefited from, from that, that sort of thing. And so I kind of lived it, you know, myself firsthand. And I think it's important for all of us and certainly white people to recognize that. And it doesn't diminish how hard it was for you to follow through on your second chance and how much work was needed. But it does acknowledge that second chance. And it does acknowledge that other people, because of the color of the skin, they may not have had the opportunity to work as hard as you did. Because part of it is many people think if they just admit the opportunities that they've given, that they're going to diminish all of the work that they've put in. No, it doesn't diminish the work at all. What it says is other people haven't been given this and you want other people to be

given the same opportunities that you did because you believe other people could succeed and recover in the way you did. Yep. Yep. Exactly right. Well, thank you so much for your time coming on the show and spending some time with us. Your books are excellent and highly recommended for people who are looking to learn more about ways to be anti-racist in their own life. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. You take care. You too. Bye-bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get lots of exclusive members-only benefits. It's our way of saying thank you for your support.

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