How to raise an antiracist

Ibram X. Kendi

Book - 2022

"The tragedies and reckonings around racism that have rocked the country have created a specific crisis for parents and other caregivers: how do we talk to our children about it? How do we guide our children to avoid repeating our racist history? While we work to dismantle racist behaviors in ourselves and the world around us, how do we raise our children to be antiracists? After he wrote the National Book Award-winning Stamped from the Beginning, readers asked Ibram Kendi, "How can I be antiracist?" After the bestsellers How to Be an Antiracist and Antiracist Baby, readers began asking: "How do I raise an antiracist child?" Dr. Kendi had been pondering the same ever since he became a teacher--but the question becam...e more personal and urgent when he found out his partner, Sadiqa, was pregnant. Like many parents, he didn't know how to answer the question--and wasn't sure he wanted to. He didn't want to educate his child on antiracism; he wanted to shield her from the toxicity of racism altogether. But research and experience helped him realize that antiracism has to be taught and modeled as early as possible--not just to armor our children against the racism still indoctrinated and normalized in their world, but to remind adults to build a more just future for us all. Following the model of his bestselling How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi combines vital scholarship with a compelling personal narrative of his own journey as a parent to create a work whose advice is grounded in research and relatable real-world experience. The chapters follow the stages of child development and don't just help parents to raise antiracists, but also to create an antiracist world for them to grow and thrive in"--

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Subjects
Genres
Informational works
Biographies
Published
New York : One World, an imprint of Random House [2022]
Language
English
Main Author
Ibram X. Kendi (author)
Edition
First edition
Physical Description
xxiii, 259 pages ; 22 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 187-244) and index.
ISBN
9780593242537
  • Birth of denial
  • Newborn nature
  • Baby nurture
  • The infant's doll
  • The empathetic toddler
  • Preschooler's race
  • Critical kindergartener
  • Aware kid
  • Pre-teen disability
  • Feared middle schooler
  • Confined high schooler
  • Afterword: Leaving the nest.
Review by Booklist Review

No child is born racist, but in the U.S. racism is ingrained into multitudinous elements of childhood, from growth charts and maternal care to doll preference and academic expectations. Kendi--professor, MacArthur fellow, and National Book Award--winning author of Stamped From The Beginning (2016) and coeditor of Four Hundred Souls (2020)--continues to offer antiracism education here by addressing parents, teachers, family members, and mentors, anyone involved in raising children. By turns conversational and scholarly, relating personal anecdotes that range from heartwarming to anger-inducing, shifting tone between self-deprecating and impassioned, and covering a child's life from pregnancy to adolescence, Kendi's work spans quite a range. Throughout, he is primarily focused on naming the problem of racism as it relates to children and child-rearing, then on encouraging personal reflection and offering avenues for self-improvement. There is no one answer and no magic wand, just continual awareness and hard work. Kendi talks at length about his own parenting journey, noting his own errors, false assumptions, lessons learned, and intentions for the future. His humility in modeling continual self-improvement helps make this 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.HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: Best-selling Kendi is an antiracism trailblazer and parents, educators, and everyone else who cares for children will seek his guidance.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Historian Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist) lays out an antiracism plan for caregivers in this knockout combination of memoir and parenting guide. Kendi challenges the notion that not talking about race protects children; colorblindness, he writes, leads to "denial," not combating the problem. To that end, he suggests, parents should have discussions about race early and often; train critical thinkers by asking such questions as "Why do you think there aren't more picture books with dark people on the covers?"; and cultivate empathy by making sure not to "dismiss feelings, judge their feelings, or hostile to their feelings." Teachers, meanwhile, need to be trained with antiracist courses and be given better financial support. Throughout, Kendi ties his research and advice to his own experience, as when he recalls his daughter's attachment to a white doll at her daycare to advocate for exposing babies and young children to the "human rainbow" through multicultural books and toys. Kendi succeeds marvelously in connecting the personal to the systemic, showing how structural inequalities have personal costs--"Who knows how much potential racism has buried?" This will be an invaluable resource for any parent or teacher who want to set kids on the path to antiracism early. Agent: Ayesha Pande, Ayesha Pande Literary. (June)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

After winning the National Book Award forStamped from the Beginning, among five straight No. 1 New York Times best sellers that also include How To Be an Antiracist, Kendi was repeatedly asked "How do I raise an antiracist child?" The question became crucial when he learned that his partner, Sadiqa, was pregnant. While initially he wanted to offer his child not instruction but protection from racism, he soon realized that antiracism must be taught early and proactively. Here he combines scholarship and personal experience to show how this can be done.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

The National Book Award--winning author uses his own life to illustrate the need for anti-racist policy and practices in American schools and homes. Kendi, professor of humanities at Boston University and one of our foremost scholars on race in America, begins with his wife's experience as a Black doctor with a medical degree from Yale whose prenatal concerns were ignored by multiple health care workers--an unfortunately common problem that Black women often face in pregnancy and beyond. The author continues by explaining how his daughter's preschool years motivated him to think through "childproofing" the "racial environment" of his home. He then transitions to his own childhood experiences transferring among eight different schools in order to escape various types of racism, beginning with his kindergarten in Queens, where his teacher labeled him as a behavioral problem despite the fact that he wasn't acting any differently than his White peers. In a chapter about his brother, Kendi explains the connections between ableism and racism, and he ends with a chapter summarizing the current debates about anti-racist education in school and presenting a clear, impassioned case for why all children benefit from anti-racist instruction. "The most critical part of raising a child is not what we do with our child," he writes. "It's what we do with our society. We must keep our individual children safe in this racist soci-ety, while building an antiracist society that can protect all our children." Rather than illustrating specific parenting techniques, the author uses personal stories to argue for sweeping changes to health care and education. The author's vulnerability about his own parenting mistakes and schooling mishaps clarify racist structures with empathy, clarity, and hope for change. While Kendi's overuse of rhetorical questions and tendency to self-flagellate sometimes feel grating, the book is an excellent introduction to how racism impacts children across the life span. A useful anti-racist memoir about how anti-racism can make the world safer for all children. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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. Excerpted from How to Raise an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.