Ibram X. Kendi

Ibram X. Kendi is an American author and historian whose How to Be an Antiracist reframes the question of racism from individual attitude to policy and power, arguing that there is no neutral position — only racist and antiracist.

Ibram X. Kendi is a professor of history and the founding director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research. Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (2016) won the National Book Award for Nonfiction and established him as a major voice in the history of American racism. That book traced the history of racist ideas from the colonial period to the present, demonstrating that racist ideas have historically been produced in justification of racist policies rather than as their cause.

How to Be an Antiracist (2019) made a related argument in a more personal and accessible form, interweaving autobiography with political theory. The book’s central argument is that antiracism is not a matter of personal attitude but of commitment to antiracist policies: since policies are either racist (producing racial inequity) or antiracist (producing racial equity), and since being “not racist” is an incoherent position that functions as cover for existing inequity, the choice is binary. Kendi applies this framework to specific domains — economics, biology, culture, behavior, gender, and sexuality — showing how racist ideas in each domain have functioned to justify racial hierarchy.

The book became a bestseller in 2020 in the wake of George Floyd’s murder and has been widely read in educational and corporate diversity contexts. Antiracist Baby (2020) and Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You (2020, co-written with Jason Reynolds) extended his ideas to younger audiences. His work has generated significant debate, which is partly a reflection of how directly it engages with contested questions of power and policy.