NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The book that every parent, caregiver, and teacher needs to raise the next generation of antiracist thinkers, from the author of How to Be an Antiracist and recipient of the MacArthur “Genius” Grant.

“Kendi’s latest . . . combines his personal experience as a parent with his scholarly expertise in showing how racism affects every step of a child’s life. . . . Like all his books, this one is accessible to everyone regardless of race or class.”—Los Angeles Times (Book Club Pick)

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: PopSugar

The tragedies and reckonings around racism that are rocking the country have created a specific crisis for parents, educators, and other caregivers: How do we talk to our children about racism? How do we teach children to be antiracist? How are kids at different ages experiencing race? How are racist structures impacting children? How can we inspire our children to avoid our mistakes, to be better, to make the world better? 

These are the questions Ibram X. Kendi found himself avoiding as he anticipated the birth of his first child. Like most parents or parents-to-be, he felt the reflex to not talk to his child about racism, which he feared would stain her innocence and steal away her joy. But research and experience changed his mind, and he realized that raising his child to be antiracist would actually protect his child, and preserve her innocence and joy. He realized that teaching students about the reality of racism and the myth of race provides a protective education in our diverse and unequal world. He realized that building antiracist societies safeguards all children from the harms of racism. 

Following the accessible genre of his internationally bestselling How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi combines a century of scientific research with a vulnerable and compelling personal narrative of his own journey as a parent and as a child in school. The chapters follow the stages of child development from pregnancy to toddler to schoolkid to teenager. It is never too early or late to start raising young people to be antiracist.
Chapter 1

Birth of Denial


The gravity of the emergency hit Sadiqa when she arrived at the hospital. She entered the labor and delivery unit, where days earlier a nurse told her nothing was wrong. Multiple nurses now surrounded her knowing something was very wrong. Doctors rushed into the room almost as soon as she was wheeled in. As a pediatric ER doctor, Sadiqa knew that when a mass of nurses and doctors hurry into your room, it’s a problem.

She got scared.

When my mother—Ma—came into the room, Sadiqa let her tears go. “I’m really, really scared, you know,” she said.

My mother was at the beauty parlor when I called. Ma put on a slumber cap and darted to the hospital. You know the situation is grave when an elderly Black woman shows herself in public with a slumber cap.

Ma cradled Sadiqa’s tears and fears in prayer. She offered a fervent prayer at the bedside—overtaking the clamor of footsteps and voices and machines—enjoining the Lord Almighty to intervene. To stop the delivery.

“In the name of Jeee-sus-uh!” she closed as she always does. “Amen! Amen! Amen.”

Meaning I believe! I believe! I believe.

Ma did.

“We’ll get through it,” Ma said, holding Sadiqa’s hand. “We’ll get through this okay.” Sadiqa heard the conviction in Ma’s voice.

Sadiqa’s parents lived three hours away. I called and asked them to come. But I wasn’t there yet myself! When Sadiqa and I had spoken before the ambulance arrived at the clinic, she expressed worry about the dilation, about our baby. But mostly she went on and on about her car.

“What’s going to happen to it?” she asked me on the phone. “We can’t leave it here. They won’t let me drive it!”

She was upset. The car, her immobility—an allegory. Mostly, Sadiqa was in disbelief. She saved babies for a living. How could she entertain the thought of losing her baby? Who could?

Perhaps thoughts of the car allowed her to maintain a deeper denial as she rode to the hospital. She worried aloud about the car and kept on joking with the EMTs, laughing with them to hold off from crying.

I did not want Sadiqa worrying about the car. I called Dad and asked him to pick me up from my home. We’d get Sadiqa’s car and speed to the hospital. The retrieval gave me something to do for my partner. Maybe I was in denial, too.

Picking up the car bought me time. Before I could hold her up, I needed to stop beating myself down for not accompanying her to the appointment in the first place. When we went through past medical emergencies, we were yoked, physically and emotionally. When she faltered, I faltered. When I faltered, she faltered.

Months after we wed in 2013, Sadiqa was diagnosed with invasive breast cancer. Surgery and chemotherapy cured her. We did not expect to conceive after her chemotherapy. Now we didn’t know if our baby would survive. Still reeling from the terrifying scare of her cancer diagnosis, I silently battled thoughts of the worst throughout the pregnancy. Convinced myself all was good when she first noted her discharge, when it wasn’t. A feigned optimism concealed a suppressed fear, and all the while kept me from a measured realism.

The tension between outward optimistic denial and inward fear is probably familiar to any caregiver. This tension applies to how we approach teaching our children about racism. Caregivers want to believe, optimistically, that their children don’t need to learn about it. But that belief is often driven by a fear—the fear of having to confront the troubling truth. We convince ourselves that it is better for our children if we don’t teach them about racism.

Or is it better for us? How often do we put off these hard conversations and claim it is about protecting our children when it is really about protecting ourselves? When our babies are born, is our denial born with them? The sound of that denial: Racism is not around my child. Or: My child will be unaffected by the racism around them. No matter what is in fact around our child, no matter what we don’t do, no matter how the child is affected—the sound of our denial remains.

We deny the harmful structure of racism as surely as we don’t want to be identified as racist. That’s not who we are. But racist and antiracist don’t describe who a person is in an absolute sense; they describe us from moment to moment, based on what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. Racist and antiracist are descriptive terms, not fixed categories, not identities, not reflections of what’s in anyone’s bones or heart.

The popular perception that racist and antiracist define a person rather than describe a person in any given moment doesn’t account for human complexity, for individuals living in contradiction, for individuals holding both racist and antiracist ideas. If there’s anything I’ve learned while researching the history of racism, it’s that individuals constructing or deconstructing it are deeply complex. Countless individuals advocate for both racist and antiracist policies at different times. And so how can they be identified as essentially racist or antiracist? Humans can change, moment to moment, or grow, even after being raised to be racist, as so many of us are, without our even realizing it. The way to account for this human complexity is to say that what we are doing or not doing in each moment determines whether we are being racist or being antiracist in that moment. When one is saying that Black people are not more dangerous than White people, one is being antiracist. If in the next moment, one is supporting a policy that maintains the racial wealth gap, one is then being racist.

Racist and antiracist describe individuality—an individual idea or policy or institution or nation or person—while racism and antiracism describe connectivity or what’s systematic, structural, and institutional. When an individual cop pulls me over because he suspects wrongdoing because I’m Black, this cop is being racist. If I try to hold him accountable for racially profiling me, I must face the power and policy structure that empowers and protects cops like him as they keep racially profiling, arresting, brutalizing, and killing Black people like me at the highest rates. Racism manifests itself as a powerful collection of policies that lead to racial inequity and injustice and are justified by ideas of racial hierarchy. Meanwhile, antiracism is the very opposite: a powerful collection of policies that lead to racial equity and justice and are justified by ideas of racial equality.

To construct antiracism, to be antiracist, we must admit the times we are being racist. To raise an antiracist, caretakers must first overcome that inner voice of denial. They must acknowledge the gravity of the emergency—our society is dangerously racist—and the gravity of their power—I can still raise a child to be antiracist.

How we raise a child depends, at least in part, on how we racially socialize the child. What does it mean to “racially socialize” a child? It refers to the ways that we talk about race and racial groups in verbal and nonverbal ways with our kids—often unwittingly. Caregivers commonly and perhaps unknowingly socialize their children in the way they were socialized. But the way we talk about race and racial groups with our kids matters deeply.

Caretakers deploy four predominant forms of racial socialization. Two of these forms are antiracist; two are racist. They are: promotion of mistrust, cultural socialization, preparation for bias, and color blindness. I suspect caregivers engage in different forms at different ages and times, slipping in and out of racist and antiracist modes.

The most well-known racist form of socialization is promotion of mistrust, which “may be communicated in parents’ cautions or warnings to children about other racial groups.” When decades ago caregivers might have used explicit racial language, now promoting mistrust for people of color might take a euphemistic form but still have profound effects on our kids. It appears in phrases like “be careful around those kids,” or “stay away from that girl,” or “no, you can’t sleep over there,” or “they are ghetto,” or “their parents don’t care,” or “that’s a bad school,” or “they’re taking over,” or “she looks grown,” or “he looks dangerous.” The subjects in these lines are typically people of color, and their institutions and neighborhoods. This degradation can happen to White people and their institutions and neighborhoods. But despite what some people believe, it is rare for Black parents to promote mistrust of White people with their kids.

It is racist to promote mistrust of any racial group of people. On the other hand, it is antiracist to promote mistrust of racist ideas, practices, policies, and behaviors. To be antiracist is to promote distrust of racism and dehumanization, while promoting trust of antiracism and humanity.
“Both memoir and call to action, Ibram X. Kendi’s insightful book rightly encourages the critical thinking that all adults need to engage the children they love in the most essential conversations about racism. Don’t fool yourself—silence is not a helpful strategy! If you want to raise empowered, antiracist children, read this book, take a deep breath, and start talking.”—Beverly Daniel Tatum, Ph.D., author of Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? and Other Conversations About Race

“With the fierce devotion of a parent who demands a safer world for his child, our most trusted voice on antiracism reveals the critical role of parents, caregivers, and teachers in fostering either racist or antiracist attitudes in all children. Rendered intimate with stories from his own childhood and his parenting journey, this book is as compassionate as it is cogent and timely. Ibram X. Kendi once again lights the way.”—Julie Lythcott-Haims, New York Times bestselling author of How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kids for Success

“The littlest human being can learn to be an antiracist. Antiracist parenting is imperative as white supremacists recruit on the internet daily; parents need to be proactive by developing the skills and language to understand the parenting journey of antiracism. With love, vulnerability, and the remarkable brilliance we have now come to expect in his books, Kendi walks us through this journey. No matter where you are as an antiracist parent or the age of your child, this book is for you.”—Bettina Love, author of We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom

“A readable and approachable guide . . . Because of its scope, nearly all readers will come away from Kendi's message more aware and having found a point of resonance in their own lives. Best-selling Kendi is an antiracism trailblazer and parents, educators, and everyone else who cares for children will seek his guidance.”Booklist (starred review)
© Stephen Voss
Dr. Ibram X. Kendi is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University and the founding director of the BU Center for Antiracist Research. He is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a CBS News racial justice contributor. He is the host of the new action podcast Be Antiracist. Dr. Kendi is the author of many highly acclaimed books including Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, making him the youngest-ever winner of that award. He has also produced five straight #1 New York Times bestsellers, including How to Be an Antiracist, Antiracist Baby, and Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, co-authored by Jason Reynolds. In 2020, Time magazine named Dr. Kendi one of the 100 most influential people in the world. He was awarded a 2021 MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as the Genius Grant. View titles by Ibram X. Kendi

About

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The book that every parent, caregiver, and teacher needs to raise the next generation of antiracist thinkers, from the author of How to Be an Antiracist and recipient of the MacArthur “Genius” Grant.

“Kendi’s latest . . . combines his personal experience as a parent with his scholarly expertise in showing how racism affects every step of a child’s life. . . . Like all his books, this one is accessible to everyone regardless of race or class.”—Los Angeles Times (Book Club Pick)

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: PopSugar

The tragedies and reckonings around racism that are rocking the country have created a specific crisis for parents, educators, and other caregivers: How do we talk to our children about racism? How do we teach children to be antiracist? How are kids at different ages experiencing race? How are racist structures impacting children? How can we inspire our children to avoid our mistakes, to be better, to make the world better? 

These are the questions Ibram X. Kendi found himself avoiding as he anticipated the birth of his first child. Like most parents or parents-to-be, he felt the reflex to not talk to his child about racism, which he feared would stain her innocence and steal away her joy. But research and experience changed his mind, and he realized that raising his child to be antiracist would actually protect his child, and preserve her innocence and joy. He realized that teaching students about the reality of racism and the myth of race provides a protective education in our diverse and unequal world. He realized that building antiracist societies safeguards all children from the harms of racism. 

Following the accessible genre of his internationally bestselling How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi combines a century of scientific research with a vulnerable and compelling personal narrative of his own journey as a parent and as a child in school. The chapters follow the stages of child development from pregnancy to toddler to schoolkid to teenager. It is never too early or late to start raising young people to be antiracist.

Excerpt

Chapter 1

Birth of Denial


The gravity of the emergency hit Sadiqa when she arrived at the hospital. She entered the labor and delivery unit, where days earlier a nurse told her nothing was wrong. Multiple nurses now surrounded her knowing something was very wrong. Doctors rushed into the room almost as soon as she was wheeled in. As a pediatric ER doctor, Sadiqa knew that when a mass of nurses and doctors hurry into your room, it’s a problem.

She got scared.

When my mother—Ma—came into the room, Sadiqa let her tears go. “I’m really, really scared, you know,” she said.

My mother was at the beauty parlor when I called. Ma put on a slumber cap and darted to the hospital. You know the situation is grave when an elderly Black woman shows herself in public with a slumber cap.

Ma cradled Sadiqa’s tears and fears in prayer. She offered a fervent prayer at the bedside—overtaking the clamor of footsteps and voices and machines—enjoining the Lord Almighty to intervene. To stop the delivery.

“In the name of Jeee-sus-uh!” she closed as she always does. “Amen! Amen! Amen.”

Meaning I believe! I believe! I believe.

Ma did.

“We’ll get through it,” Ma said, holding Sadiqa’s hand. “We’ll get through this okay.” Sadiqa heard the conviction in Ma’s voice.

Sadiqa’s parents lived three hours away. I called and asked them to come. But I wasn’t there yet myself! When Sadiqa and I had spoken before the ambulance arrived at the clinic, she expressed worry about the dilation, about our baby. But mostly she went on and on about her car.

“What’s going to happen to it?” she asked me on the phone. “We can’t leave it here. They won’t let me drive it!”

She was upset. The car, her immobility—an allegory. Mostly, Sadiqa was in disbelief. She saved babies for a living. How could she entertain the thought of losing her baby? Who could?

Perhaps thoughts of the car allowed her to maintain a deeper denial as she rode to the hospital. She worried aloud about the car and kept on joking with the EMTs, laughing with them to hold off from crying.

I did not want Sadiqa worrying about the car. I called Dad and asked him to pick me up from my home. We’d get Sadiqa’s car and speed to the hospital. The retrieval gave me something to do for my partner. Maybe I was in denial, too.

Picking up the car bought me time. Before I could hold her up, I needed to stop beating myself down for not accompanying her to the appointment in the first place. When we went through past medical emergencies, we were yoked, physically and emotionally. When she faltered, I faltered. When I faltered, she faltered.

Months after we wed in 2013, Sadiqa was diagnosed with invasive breast cancer. Surgery and chemotherapy cured her. We did not expect to conceive after her chemotherapy. Now we didn’t know if our baby would survive. Still reeling from the terrifying scare of her cancer diagnosis, I silently battled thoughts of the worst throughout the pregnancy. Convinced myself all was good when she first noted her discharge, when it wasn’t. A feigned optimism concealed a suppressed fear, and all the while kept me from a measured realism.

The tension between outward optimistic denial and inward fear is probably familiar to any caregiver. This tension applies to how we approach teaching our children about racism. Caregivers want to believe, optimistically, that their children don’t need to learn about it. But that belief is often driven by a fear—the fear of having to confront the troubling truth. We convince ourselves that it is better for our children if we don’t teach them about racism.

Or is it better for us? How often do we put off these hard conversations and claim it is about protecting our children when it is really about protecting ourselves? When our babies are born, is our denial born with them? The sound of that denial: Racism is not around my child. Or: My child will be unaffected by the racism around them. No matter what is in fact around our child, no matter what we don’t do, no matter how the child is affected—the sound of our denial remains.

We deny the harmful structure of racism as surely as we don’t want to be identified as racist. That’s not who we are. But racist and antiracist don’t describe who a person is in an absolute sense; they describe us from moment to moment, based on what we’re doing and why we’re doing it. Racist and antiracist are descriptive terms, not fixed categories, not identities, not reflections of what’s in anyone’s bones or heart.

The popular perception that racist and antiracist define a person rather than describe a person in any given moment doesn’t account for human complexity, for individuals living in contradiction, for individuals holding both racist and antiracist ideas. If there’s anything I’ve learned while researching the history of racism, it’s that individuals constructing or deconstructing it are deeply complex. Countless individuals advocate for both racist and antiracist policies at different times. And so how can they be identified as essentially racist or antiracist? Humans can change, moment to moment, or grow, even after being raised to be racist, as so many of us are, without our even realizing it. The way to account for this human complexity is to say that what we are doing or not doing in each moment determines whether we are being racist or being antiracist in that moment. When one is saying that Black people are not more dangerous than White people, one is being antiracist. If in the next moment, one is supporting a policy that maintains the racial wealth gap, one is then being racist.

Racist and antiracist describe individuality—an individual idea or policy or institution or nation or person—while racism and antiracism describe connectivity or what’s systematic, structural, and institutional. When an individual cop pulls me over because he suspects wrongdoing because I’m Black, this cop is being racist. If I try to hold him accountable for racially profiling me, I must face the power and policy structure that empowers and protects cops like him as they keep racially profiling, arresting, brutalizing, and killing Black people like me at the highest rates. Racism manifests itself as a powerful collection of policies that lead to racial inequity and injustice and are justified by ideas of racial hierarchy. Meanwhile, antiracism is the very opposite: a powerful collection of policies that lead to racial equity and justice and are justified by ideas of racial equality.

To construct antiracism, to be antiracist, we must admit the times we are being racist. To raise an antiracist, caretakers must first overcome that inner voice of denial. They must acknowledge the gravity of the emergency—our society is dangerously racist—and the gravity of their power—I can still raise a child to be antiracist.

How we raise a child depends, at least in part, on how we racially socialize the child. What does it mean to “racially socialize” a child? It refers to the ways that we talk about race and racial groups in verbal and nonverbal ways with our kids—often unwittingly. Caregivers commonly and perhaps unknowingly socialize their children in the way they were socialized. But the way we talk about race and racial groups with our kids matters deeply.

Caretakers deploy four predominant forms of racial socialization. Two of these forms are antiracist; two are racist. They are: promotion of mistrust, cultural socialization, preparation for bias, and color blindness. I suspect caregivers engage in different forms at different ages and times, slipping in and out of racist and antiracist modes.

The most well-known racist form of socialization is promotion of mistrust, which “may be communicated in parents’ cautions or warnings to children about other racial groups.” When decades ago caregivers might have used explicit racial language, now promoting mistrust for people of color might take a euphemistic form but still have profound effects on our kids. It appears in phrases like “be careful around those kids,” or “stay away from that girl,” or “no, you can’t sleep over there,” or “they are ghetto,” or “their parents don’t care,” or “that’s a bad school,” or “they’re taking over,” or “she looks grown,” or “he looks dangerous.” The subjects in these lines are typically people of color, and their institutions and neighborhoods. This degradation can happen to White people and their institutions and neighborhoods. But despite what some people believe, it is rare for Black parents to promote mistrust of White people with their kids.

It is racist to promote mistrust of any racial group of people. On the other hand, it is antiracist to promote mistrust of racist ideas, practices, policies, and behaviors. To be antiracist is to promote distrust of racism and dehumanization, while promoting trust of antiracism and humanity.

Praise

“Both memoir and call to action, Ibram X. Kendi’s insightful book rightly encourages the critical thinking that all adults need to engage the children they love in the most essential conversations about racism. Don’t fool yourself—silence is not a helpful strategy! If you want to raise empowered, antiracist children, read this book, take a deep breath, and start talking.”—Beverly Daniel Tatum, Ph.D., author of Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? and Other Conversations About Race

“With the fierce devotion of a parent who demands a safer world for his child, our most trusted voice on antiracism reveals the critical role of parents, caregivers, and teachers in fostering either racist or antiracist attitudes in all children. Rendered intimate with stories from his own childhood and his parenting journey, this book is as compassionate as it is cogent and timely. Ibram X. Kendi once again lights the way.”—Julie Lythcott-Haims, New York Times bestselling author of How to Raise an Adult: Break Free of the Overparenting Trap and Prepare Your Kids for Success

“The littlest human being can learn to be an antiracist. Antiracist parenting is imperative as white supremacists recruit on the internet daily; parents need to be proactive by developing the skills and language to understand the parenting journey of antiracism. With love, vulnerability, and the remarkable brilliance we have now come to expect in his books, Kendi walks us through this journey. No matter where you are as an antiracist parent or the age of your child, this book is for you.”—Bettina Love, author of We Want to Do More Than Survive: Abolitionist Teaching and the Pursuit of Educational Freedom

“A readable and approachable guide . . . Because of its scope, nearly all readers will come away from Kendi's message more aware and having found a point of resonance in their own lives. Best-selling Kendi is an antiracism trailblazer and parents, educators, and everyone else who cares for children will seek his guidance.”Booklist (starred review)

Author

© Stephen Voss
Dr. Ibram X. Kendi is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at Boston University and the founding director of the BU Center for Antiracist Research. He is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a CBS News racial justice contributor. He is the host of the new action podcast Be Antiracist. Dr. Kendi is the author of many highly acclaimed books including Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, making him the youngest-ever winner of that award. He has also produced five straight #1 New York Times bestsellers, including How to Be an Antiracist, Antiracist Baby, and Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, co-authored by Jason Reynolds. In 2020, Time magazine named Dr. Kendi one of the 100 most influential people in the world. He was awarded a 2021 MacArthur Fellowship, popularly known as the Genius Grant. View titles by Ibram X. Kendi

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