Becoming Anti-Racist

Earlier this year, I had the privilege of attending the Bishop Arts Theatre Center’s Banned Books festival, an annual event that explores the themes of a provocative book through short, one-act plays. For 2025, the book was Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which inspired powerful performances from the stage that night and sparked conversations that lasted long after. I was left wanting to know more about this bestselling book and its author, so I dove into the audio version of Kendi’s deep and compelling narrative about the history of racism in the United States.

Like many Americans, I was lulled into believing that we were living in a post-racial society following the 2008 election of Barack Obama, the country’s first Black president. It’s not that I thought racism no longer existed. It’s just that I thought it would dare not be bold enough to show its face again in the light of day, despite still existing in broken systems, unconscious bias and an underground white supremacy ideology.

Through stories of significant figures and their influences, Kendi recounts our nation’s racist roots and the insistence that we idolize the superiority of white men. He explains just how persistent racism is, how we all play a part in it and how being anti-racist benefits all of us. His book made me realize that being anti-racist is more than an outlook. It is a deliberate action that requires our vigilance.

When I was in college in the late 1990s, one of my political science professors expressed the idea that all white people should feel shame about our country’s history of slavery. At the time, I was very offended by this assertion. I argued that I shouldn’t be held accountable for something I didn’t participate in and would never condone. But now, after listening to Stamped from the Beginning, I realize what that professor was trying to do. Like Kendi, he was asking us to see the real-time legacy and consequences of building a country on racist ideas and practices.

Even knowing what is right, most of us, at times, can show traces of deep-rooted racist attitudes or perspectives. This is because we are products of racist systems and ideologies. While sharing what I’d learned from Kendi’s book, I expressed to a colleague my hope that if I were alive during some of the most despicable times in our country’s racist history, that I would have spoken up. Her response was, “You are living in those times.”

She’s right.

It's hard to consume the overwhelming evidence of relentless racism in our country. Kendi helped me see that if racism were a bullet train, it has been barreling down the tracks since our nation’s beginning. It hasn’t slowed. For those of us who feel shocked at the prejudice displayed by emboldened individuals or groups, we need to see that it was always there. We choose to be blind to it to assuage our own conscience. It is easier and more comfortable to believe we have made more progress than we have.

For me, the writing of this essay is a deliberate act in becoming anti-racist. I want to share some of my takeaways from the book and do my part in elevating its ideas. My hope is that you learn something new that makes you think differently. In a time when censorship is just an executive order away, information is our power.

FEEDING RACIST SYSTEMS AND IDEAS

Scientific Racism

While I was listening to Kendi’s book, I got into an argument on social media (where such things are likely pointless) with a self-proclaimed scientist, and therefore “expert,” on gender-based biological imperatives. He was pushing the idea that women are genetically predisposed to be caregivers and will always default to that role. He used post-pandemic employment data to prove his point. When I explained that such employment data couldn’t be used as causal evidence that women don’t want to work and asked for additional evidence to support his assertion, he declined. In his words, I wouldn’t understand it anyway, so why should he waste his energy?

Despite his condescension, I marveled at the beautiful way that life can bring a point home by calling your attention to it in multiple ways and contexts. While I argued with this self-important “scientific expert,” Kendi was explaining the racist idea of climate theory to me. Used by scientists and scholars for centuries to show that populations from areas that were neither too hot nor too cold were healthier and more advanced (i.e. Greece and Italy), climate theory, or climate determinism, was used as “empirical evidence” that Black and Brown people from other climates were lacking and inherently inferior. In addition to climate theory, Kendi describes other forms of scientific racism used throughout our nation’s history, like eugenics and social Darwinism, to justify perceived superiority and the dehumanizing practices of slavery and segregation.

Claiming that science supports racist (or misogynist) ideas is an effort to assign objectivity to them in a way that is not true or real. I am fascinated by some people’s grotesque desire to want so badly be superior to those who are different that they use pseudoscience as evidence. It’s the idea that “we are different and only one of us can be special, and it has to be me.” I can now see more clearly how one could distrust science and math when they are used as weapons of domination and control.

Standardized intelligence tests, an institution well-known –– and dreaded –– by schoolchildren across the U.S., have also been weaponized in the same way science has. Kendi had already known that standardized tests were a problem when he spoke out in October 2020 to students being required to take them even amid the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic: “We still think there’s something wrong with the kids rather than recognizing there is something wrong with the tests. Standardized tests have become the most effective racist weapon ever devised to objectively degrade Black and Brown minds and legally exclude their bodies from prestigious schools.” To recognize the racist agenda of these tests, we must understand why they were invented.

In his 1923 book, A Study of American Intelligence, psychologist and eugenicist Carl Brigham wrote that Black people were “on the low end of the racial, ethnic and cultural spectrum,” and he believed that standardized testing could prove it. Eugenics is the study of and belief in superior heritable genetic characteristics, including morality and intelligence. It is behind the social and political efforts to purge countries of “impure” racial and ethnic peoples, including forced sterilizations, immigration laws that limit or expel specific races or ethnicities, and genocide. In the U.S., notable supporters of eugenics included President Theodore Roosevelt, Supreme Court Associate Justice John Marshall Harlan, multimillionaire philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr., Stanford University President David Starr Jordan, and the Carnegie Institution of Washington.

Birthed from the eugenics movement was the idea of predictability of desirable or deviant characteristics through mechanisms like intelligence testing. Hailed as a neutral method of measuring merit, tests like the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) have been used to support the ideal that those who work the hardest will be able to demonstrate their superior efforts and abilities with higher scores. The idea that you can measure general intelligence has never been proven. Perhaps a 2018 Teen Vogue article, “The history of the SAT is mired in racism and elitism,” said it best with this: “Studies have proven, time and again, that standardized tests are much better at revealing things like household income, race and level of parental education than they are at predicting the success of students in college classrooms.”

Instead of demonstrating ability, standardized tests have been used to reinforce systems of inequality. They are designed to affirm whiteness as a marker of neutrality and the idea that white identity is the default, and superior, American identity. In the article “How the SAT Creates Built-in-Headwinds,” co-author Jay Rosner, a national admissions-test expert, explains a process that was used by SAT designers to decide which questions would be included on the test: “Compare two 1998 SAT verbal [section] sentence-completion items with similar themes: The item correctly answered by more blacks than whites was discarded by [the Educational Testing Service] (ETS), whereas the item that has a higher disparate impact against blacks became part of the actual SAT.”

Kendi also examines weaponized science that is taken a step further in medical racism, specifically experiments on Black people. An example of this is the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, in which doctors from the U.S. Public Health Service recruited and studied 399 Black men over 40 years to research the progression of syphilis. During that time, the men were not told of their diagnosis and proper medical care was withheld from them even when a cure, penicillin, was widely available. The unethical and inhumane experiment was only shut down after the story was leaked to a journalist, creating public outrage. With stories like this and others described by Kendi, it’s easy to see why Black communities may not trust scientific and government systems.

Systemic Racism

The different ways in which white men in authority used the results of oppressive systems to justify continued oppression is shown in Kendi’s chapter “Ready for Freedom.” In it, he describes how these men believed that individuals kept in brutal conditions for so long could not be expected to assimilate into a white-centered civilized culture. The greatest debates among white leaders after the Civil War involved the Black man’s capacity for freedom, independence and civilization. Noticeably, discussions between segregationists and assimilationists did not include the topic of equality.

What resulted was decades of federally endorsed racist systems of oppression, including Jim Crow Laws (legalized racial segregation) and redlining, the government-recommended practice of denying loans, mortgages and other services often based on a neighborhood’s race or ethnicity, primarily within urban communities. This practice gets its name from the red outlines drawn around “high-risk” neighborhoods in maps created by the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, a government agency formed to refinance mortgages during the Great Depression. Redlining reduced community resources, infrastructure and future development, diminished the potential for higher incomes, and negatively impacted human capital, defined as the skills, knowledge and value individuals add to society. The results of structural racism and disenfranchisement is worse health outcomes, lower incomes and higher rates of incarceration for predominately Black communities across the country.

In a country that prides itself on “the American dream” and concept of “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps,” many people want to ignore laying blame, and therefore, the responsibility for repair, on the rightful entity: the federal government. Instead, Kendi says, policy makers want to blame the people who were oppressed for the results of their oppression and call attention to crime and welfare rates, while lifting up the “exceptional Black man” who defied the odds and made something of himself. This idea of the exceptional Black man is racist, as it unfairly implies that an accomplished Black person is a rarity and he must be exceptional to succeed.

Progressive Racism

Even efforts considered “progressive” were based on racist ideas, Kendi posits. This was a perspective I had never considered. One example he uses is school desegregation, which centered on busing Black students to white schools to diversify student populations. At that time in the 1950s, busing white students to Black schools was never considered because white schools were thought of as inherently superior. Subsequently, Black students were forced to accept that it was a privilege to be integrated into schools that were not designed for or friendly toward them. This one-way expectation of assimilation was inherently racist, putting a question mark on efforts originally defined as progress.

Kendi also exposes the whitewashing in many of the stories of our past anti-racist victories. Let’s examine the man known as “The Great Emancipator,” for example. During his term, President Abraham Lincoln blamed the presence of Blacks for the Civil War, and along with Congress, pushed the idea that colonization could address slavery and racial conflict by deporting Black people, most of whom were born in the U.S., to countries like Haiti and Liberia. On August 14, 1862, Lincoln invited five influential Black leaders to the White House, seeking their support of colonization. He explained that in the United States, the Black race could never be equal to the white race. “Whether this is right or wrong, I need not discuss,” Lincoln said. He asked the leaders to encourage all Black people to sacrifice their present comforts and agree to leave the country; to refuse would be selfish. He made it clear that his goal was to save the Union –– not to destroy slavery. In a public statement, he declared, “If I could save the Union without freeing any slave, I would do it. If I could save it by freeing all the slaves, I would do that.”    

Paternalistic Racism

Kendi put a word to something I have been thinking about for a long time: paternalism. It is the idea that someone knows what is best for another or has authority on what is best in general. It shows up as saviorism, a well-intentioned yet misguided version of control and demonstration of moral superiority. It also shows up as mansplaining –– the performance of declarative wisdom on a subject that the “splainer” assumes another person knows less about. As Kendi explains, it even shows up when someone believes they get to decide what someone else can handle or how that person should show up in group spaces.  

Paternalism is a theme throughout Stamped from the Beginning. Kendi brings attention to examples of this, including the confederacy’s Civil War-era propaganda, which pushed the outrageous message that enslavement was for the good of the enslaved, and how both segregationist and assimilationist policy makers, believing they had the right to set the timing of another man’s freedom, discussed Black people’s readiness for emancipation.

Kendi likewise calls out the paternalistic racism of white people who agree with the sentiments of Black civil rights activists such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X but also criticize and try to assert influence over their methods. This example reminds me of a date I was on with a man about a year ago. When the conversation rolled around to feminism, he argued that Dolly Parton was a better and more effective feminist than Alanis Morissette because she made her message about the value of women more palatable for men to hear and digest and didn’t come across as angry. Even now, this comment –– from a man who considers himself a proponent for the personal agency of all people –– still bothers me. Why is it a woman’s job to minimize her rage and adapt her voice to be heard and understood by a man? It’s not. He was asserting his perceived authority to determine the value of another person’s experience and how they vocalize it. That is paternalism: “I get to decide how you show up and what is tolerable.”

Another inherently paternalistic idea is embedded in much of the well-intentioned charity work of white people. Through decades of experience working in nonprofits, I have seen the misguided motivation behind white saviorism, the racist idea that Black people are victims who need to be saved by white people. I think most people who position themselves as saviors of others have good intentions and truly believe they are being helpful. Even so, the inherent message in saviorism is, “You are not capable of discerning or living a meaningful life. Therefore, you need me.” It reinforces self-proclaimed ideas of moral superiority and supports systems of oppression.

Rugged Individualism

Another theme Kendi calls attention to is the lie of rugged individualism. If popular narratives of the founding and expansion of our country are to be believed, brave white men were responsible for it all. Rugged individualism is based on the idea of inherent potential (you either have it or you don’t) and single-handed, hard-earned success. This idea is a lie, Kendi says, because it denies the fact that no man is an island fully formed on his own without the help or support of others. Furthermore, it’s a falsehood because it excludes and ignores the contributions of groups who were not white men to the founding of our country.

This lie feels especially salient in our current political landscape. I am blown away by what feels like persistent and noisy “winner-take-all” messaging coming from the Trump administration and its supporters. Its ideologies imply a level playing field in our society that doesn’t exist.

I especially appreciate how Kendi brings this point home. Being anti-racist is imperative because to deny one person’s agency, opportunity, humanity, rights and contributions is to deny those things for all of us. We exist in community with each other whether we like it or not. There is nothing admirable about shutting out certain people of that community. We are better individually if we all succeed. Being anti-racist also means being anti-misogynist, anti-bigoted and so on. To see equal humanity in one is to see it in all.  

BECOMING ANTI-RACIST          

Dismantling Trusted Beliefs

One of the ways we can become anti-racist is to dismantle our trusted belief systems. Constantly question the narratives and stories you tell yourself about other people. Do you have all the facts? Have you listened to other perspectives? Or are you consuming only the information that reinforces your assumptions and experiences?

If you are basing your trusted beliefs on your singular experience, your authority on a subject is limited to your experience. Do not generalize that to other situations or people. If your goal is to prove yourself right, you will always find evidence to do that. But what if you get curious and ask questions? You just might prove yourself wrong and learn something. 

Education helps us dismantle the lies that centuries of manipulated history, religion and science have embedded into society’s trusted belief systems to reinforce a false narrative of white specialness and justify self-righteousness and ignorance. In his autobiography, Malcolm X describes it as the white man’s “elaborate neurotic necessity to hide the Black man’s true role in history.”

In this effort, I have committed to consuming books written by Black authors. I am particularly drawn to autobiographies. They are a vulnerable invitation by the author for a reader to understand their experience in a way that feels relatable. Some of the great autobiographies I have enjoyed and recommend are A Promised Land by Barack Obama, Becoming by Michelle Obama, Finding Me by Viola Davis, The Autobiography of Malcolm X as told to Alex Haley and Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body by Roxane Gay. Reach out and let me know of other books I should add to my reading list.

Recognize Your Privilege

There are so many great thought leaders, including Kendi, who can speak to this topic better than I can. In this regard, I appreciate those who carry Malcolm X’s mission forward today: To tell white people who they are to their faces. I encourage you to follow groups like Race Equality Matters for thought provoking suggestions on recognizing privilege and becoming anti-racist.

If you are white, my goal is to encourage you to recognize that you are the beneficiary of society’s deeply embedded systems that were purposely designed to disenfranchise others. Use that privilege to effect reparations, influence societal equity and engage with social impact. In other words, be intentional in using the power of your privilege to promote anti-racist structural change. Thinking back on my college professor’s call to action, I realize that if I do not take deliberate action to be anti-racist, I am bringing shame onto myself as a white woman.

In seeking to understand your privilege, I believe it will give you a different perspective on helping others. Until you recognize your privilege and see others as fellow equals in humanity and dignity, it can be easy to see others as needing to be saved by you. As the founder and CEO of a nonprofit consultancy, I will tell you that once you see saviorism for what it is – a self-glorifying judgmental desire to determine what is best for another person and assert authority over how that person should live up to that ideal – you cannot unsee its offensive paternalism.

Take Action

Refer to my essay about ways to speak out against injustice. As my friend and colleague reminded me, we are living in a pivotal time in our nation’s history. It isn’t happening TO us. This is our moment to rise up and fight for what we believe is right. Use your voice.

Do the efforts of one person really matter? Yes, they do. When you don’t stand up for what you believe in, you give away your power. Let me repeat that: You. Give. It. Away. You may not be able to singlehandedly change the world, but you can have a significant impact on the part of the world you can influence.

Do your part in helping our country become anti-racist. It will require deliberate action and constant motion toward greater self-awareness and actualization. Join me and let’s do this together.