This book was adapted from a book that theoretically was geared to adults, How To Be An Antiracist. What was the genesis of How To Be a (Young) Antiracist? The following conversation has been edited for clarity and length. And that is where my conversation went when I sat down with Kendi last month. It’s a time for introspection, for interrogation of the self and society, for kicking the brain into high gear. It’s 2023 now, a time where simplistic, fantastical, self-deceptive thinking on race in America will not explain much of anything at all. Then it calls on them to decide if, where, and how they will revolt against that system.
I found a book that seems to want to equip young people living now, in the midst of surround-sound injustice, open and almost gleeful bigotry – in public and in private – with the language and the skills to recognize they too have been drafted. In reality, many of those systems drive and sustain vast inequality along with pervasive belief in group inferiority or superiority. I found a book that illuminated how each of us are gradually drafted into the thinking, the lies and distorted truths which can render a person unable or at least unwilling to challenge the systems and practices which masquerade as normal, as functional and fair. What I found in How to Be A (Young) Antiracist was a kind of meditation on the ways that the personal is, as they say, political. I went back to the original, then opened the new book and found something that rather deftly asks and even guides the individual to explore where and how and why they have been socialized to accept certain ideas about race and ethnicity. 1, How to Be a (Young) Antiracist, co-authored by the young adult fiction writer Nic Stone. That’s something I discovered when I was asked to talk with Kendi about his latest book, a sort of companion piece published Feb.
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