Cloe Shasha: So welcome, Ibram,
and thank you so much for joining us.
Ibram X. Kendi: Well thank you, Cloe, and thank you Whitney,
and thank you everyone for joining this conversation.
And so, a few weeks ago,
on the same day we learned about the brutal murder of George Floyd,
we also learned that a white woman in Central Park
who chose not to leash her dog
and was told by a black man nearby that she needed to leash her dog,
instead decided to threaten this black male,
instead decided to call the police
and claim that her life was being threatened.
And of course, when we learned about that through a video,
many Americans were outraged,
and this woman, Amy Cooper,
ended up going on national TV
and saying,
like countless other Americans have said right after they engaged in a racist act,
"I am not racist."
And I say countless Americans
because when you really think about the history of Americans
expressing racist ideas,
supporting racist policies,
you're really talking about a history of people
who have claimed they're not racist,
because everyone claims that they're not racist,
whether we're talking about the Amy Coopers of the world,
whether we're talking about Donald Trump,
who, right after he said that majority-black Baltimore
is a rat and rodent-infested mess that no human being would want to live in,
and he was challenged as being racist,
he said, actually, I'm the least racist person anywhere in the world.
And so really the heartbeat of racism itself
has always been denial,
and the sound of that heartbeat
has always been, "I'm not racist."
And so what I'm trying to do with my work
is to really get Americans to eliminate the concept of "not racist"
from their vocabulary,
and realize we're either being racist
or anti-racist.
We're either expressing ideas that suggest certain racial groups
are better or worse than others,
superior or inferior than others.
We're either being racist,
or we're being anti-racist.
We're expressing notions that the racial groups are equals,
despite any cultural or even ethnic differences.
We're either supporting policies that are leading
to racial inequities and injustice,
like we saw in Louisville, where Breonna Taylor was murdered,
or we're supporting policies and pushing policies
that are leading to justice and equity for all.
And so I think we should be very clear
about whether we're expressing racist ideas,
about whether we're supporting racist policies,
and admit when we are,
because to be anti-racist
is to admit when we expressed a racist idea,
is to say, you know what?
When I was doing that in Central Park,
I was indeed being racist.
But I'm going to change.
I'm going to strive to be anti-racist.
And to be racist
is to constantly deny
the racial inequities that pervade American society,
to constantly deny the racist ideas that pervade American minds.
And so I want to built a just and equitable society,
and the only way we're going to even begin that process
is if we admit our racism
and start building an anti-racist world.
Thank you.
CS: Thank you so much for that.
You know, your book, "How To Be An Anti-Racist,"
has become a bestseller in light of what's been happening,
and you've been speaking a bit
to the ways in which anti-racism and racism
are the only two polar opposite ways to hold a view on races.
I'm curious if you could talk a little bit more
about what the basic tenets of anti-racism are,
for people who aren't as familiar with it in terms of how they can be anti-racist.
IXK: Sure. And so I mentioned in my talk
that the heartbeat of racism is denial,
and really the heartbeat of anti-racism is confession,
is the recognition
that to grow up in this society
is to literally at some point in our lives
probably internalize ideas that are racist,
ideas that suggest certain racial groups are better or worse than others,
and because we believe in racial hierarchy,
because Americans have been systematically taught
that black people are more dangerous,
that black people are more criminal-like,
when we live in a society where black people
are 40 percent of the national incarcerated population,
that's going to seem normal to people.
When we live in a society
in a city like Minneapolis
where black people are 20 percent of the population
but more than 60 percent of the people being subjected to police shootings,
it's going to seem normal.
And so to be anti-racist
is to believe that there's nothing wrong
or inferior about black people or any other racial group.
There's nothing dangerous
about black people or any other racial group.
And so when we see these racial disparities all around us,
we see them as abnormal,
and then we start to figure out, OK, what policies are behind
so many black people being killed by police.
What policies are behind so many Latinx people
being disproportionately infected with COVID?
How can I be a part of the struggle
to upend those policies and replace them with more anti-racist policies?
Whitney Pennington Rodgers: And so it sounds like
you do make that distinction, then, between not racist and anti-racist.
I guess, could you talk a little bit more about that and break that down?
What is the difference between the two?
IXK: