And so when i would speak about that book i would encourage people to be antiracist. I would encourage them to move away from the racist ideas that had been ingrained in them and so the more i spoke about being in antiracist the more people were like, tell me a little bit more. Okay. Antiracism stuff because as you know, people are taught in this country to be not racist. So this construct of being antiracist was new. The more people ask how to be antiracist, the more i realize that this was a book and i felt like i could potentially answer it. Thats really interesting because its almost as though you had it necessarily plan to write this book. I was thinking, its in a extraordinary book you are historian through and through and there is a kind of risk associated with writing a book that has like really immediate implications. But he felt called to do this and talk about the distinction though that you draw because you draw it in a very clear and cogent fashion. One of the things i noticed is that so many of the authors of light concurrent books on race that are considered really critical have all written this extraordinary praise of this book which is an indication of how important it is that the people who have thought deeply about race, yes we need this book. What is that distinction . Whats the distinction between being not racist and antiracist and why is it so important . First and foremost, lets think about how this term not racist is emerging currently and how is it emerged historically. People typically say im not racist when they are charged with being racist. A defensive gesture. I dont think even wellmeaning people, even people who are trying to be part of the movement against race racism recognized the history of this term. When you genitivea now today even white nationalists are saying, im not racist. No matter whether they are in the white house or planning the next mass shooting. I dont think people realize how much fundamentally this is been a term of denial that it has really, all ive been able to uncover of its meaning has been this sort of way to deny and ones own racism while antiracist has a clear philosophy, it has a Clear History just like racist has a clear philosophy and Clear History. I think its really interesting, powerful about that move, is that it gives the reader and potential person operating and community shaped by this book out of the question of sort of guilt. So the point is it really whether or not you personally are a racist. The point is what are you doing about how racism pervades every possible aspect of life in this nation. Precisely. I think many people say they are not racist because they think racist is like a tattoo if they say they are racist somebody puts a racist on their forehead theyll never be able to escape it. They think it is a fixed category. They believe is little fundamentally a bad person. They believe a racist is a person who is hooded, white nationalists. Who is a segregationist. They are like, im not any of those things. Im a good person, im against the clan. Im not racist. But its a descriptive term. It describes what a person is doing in the moment. When a person is saying that a particular racial group is inferior, when a person is doing nothing in the face of racial inequity, they are being racist. When a person is literally supporting persons and policies and power that is creating and reproducing racial inequity and injustice they are being racist. Thats important too. You are getting the category racist out of this question of sort of kind of the personal indictment and making this claim. You say that beautifully in the book that this is a descriptive, offering an account of pavers that are part of the process of inequality. So stop being so emotionally invested in this term essentially. Precisely. I think that emotional investment in people feeling like they are being attacked also i think people dont realize the origins of that. The origins of the idea that racist is like the r word. Right. Its the worst insult. Its a racial slur. That is a pejorative. In fact, actually white nationalists particular have been parroting that idea for decades. Because what they wanted to do was they wanted particularly to get white people do not recognize their racism and if they dont recognize their own racist ideas than white nationalists would be able to easily organize them. To give an example, Richard Spencer two years ago who organized the night the right rally in Charlottesville Virginia which led to of course violence in the death of heather higher, he wants said, as a talk about in the book, that racist is it a descriptive term. Its a pejorative term. Its the equivalent of someone saying, i dont like you. Wow. Right. This is an important thing to confront. Just shifting gears and want to come back to that question and actually to think about if you can offer account of what it means to be antiracist in detail but also one of the things that i think you do quite powerfully in this book, there are a number of elements but is that the title is, it gives an indication of a kind of instruction you are offering that has personal implications. How do you discern how you operate in the world in a way whether or not you are actually sort of participating in this structural logic and the processes of racism or actually working to dismantle them. At the same time, this is personal element but at the same time, you talk about structural issues. You talk about gender you talk about sexuality you talk about capitalism, all these sorts of things. I think its really powerful and important and i want to ask you why. This is also in light of stance. In the midst of you having the sort of deep account of the structure and history of white supremacist thought and power that you decided to talk to people at their imperial level. Yes. I didnt want to write this book this way. Because when i say this way, i did not want to speak to people through my own personal story. Because as a historian and a scholar this is not the way we are trained. Right to communicate scholarship or even communicate ideas. So i was deeply hesitant and deeply personal and private. So to really put some of the most shameful moments of my life on the page for all the world to see was obviously very difficult for me to do but at the same time, these ideas and structures and policies and powers at its core impacting people. Or impacting individuals. And individuals are either part of the forces that are challenging racist power or unknowingly supporting it. So fundamentally because of the impact and because each of us are supporting or opposing racism, ultimately i wanted to sort of show that and how that operates on a daytoday basis step how that operates conceptually and even all the complexities within that. In my case, for most of my life i was actually supporting and opposing. Without even knowing it. I feel the best way to do that was to through my personal story. I want to talk more about that because maybe its good to start with, i want to talk about your personal journey but to start with what i think will probably be the source of most of the pushback you get about the book, which i think is really important argument that you make. Which is that black people can be racist and you talk about it in several different ways. As one way you talk about it is actually the ways in which black people can adopt white supremacist ideologies and also the other people of color and also the relationship to sort of white racism as a sort of largescale phenomenon and the encounter with the individual who might be antiracist. Can you talk about both why you thought that was important to include and just what it means. Hi obviously for very long time thought black people could not be racist. And i wouldve argued cuba down to anyone who made that case. I dont think i believe that until i started researching for stanford from the beginning. Until i conceptualized, first defined racist idea and i defined it as any idea that identifies a racial group is superior to another in any way and that book was about antiblack. I went in search and ultimately one of the things i tried to do with that book was take prevalent and prominent and popular ideas today and really sort of figure out its intellectual genealogy. What was unavoidably the case was that black intellectuals were a part of the intellectual genealogy. I couldnt even though i wanted to exclude them or go around them, i just couldnt. We take the case of one of the most dominant and harmful antiblack racist ideas of the 20th century was the idea of the broken back family and the patriarchal black woman. I should say matriarchal was farming the black family. In the black community and so on and so forth. That idea of course was popularized by the daniel patch monahan. In his report in 1965 he repeatedly cited a black scholar frazier, who wrote the famous book on the negro family in 1939 who also praised dubois who said a similar thing is one of his black family studies. I could not wrap my head around the fact that this idea about the broken black family was largely coined by a black scholar. I think everybody now recognizes how harmful that idea is, how it justified the assault on welfare ab justified so many assaults in the letters part of the 20th century. Ultimately im saying that i think that was the first recognition of it. That i could not separate the intellectual genealogy of some of these ideas but i think what was critical was realizing ab no matter the racial group, when a person was antiblack, when a person thought there was something wrong with black people, they spent their time intellectually and even in terms of organizations trying to civilize black people, attacked black people, attacked everything but the real problem, which was racism, which was white supremacy. Thats how it literally function and thats on the ideologicals perspective. And then obviously when it came to power and policy i think it is absolutely the case that black people have limited amounts of power. These are the way people particularly within white to premises society. To say that no black people have no power. To also say that even 100 years ago when we did not have all these black elected officials. When we did not have a black person on Supreme Court would do you not have so many black professors. We all had the power to resist. Some of us use that power and some of us did not. Typically those who did not, did not because they thought the problem was black people. It was sort of working through all of that that ultimately caused me to realize that black people can be racist too particularly to black people. And that ultimately internalized racism was the real black on black crime. You tell a story about a speech he gave as an adolescent. You deconstructed for precisely that, the kind of internalization of the narrative of locked efficiency. I think its all powerful in part because the rhetorical devices that you describe are actually quite common you call into question that practice which is a longstanding widespread practice. And i wonder its kind of a question thats a little bit off to the edge but i think its interesting is why do you think that has such persistence, even as i think a amost of us black people think that we are antiracist in some form or another. That we listen and not do and apply to these lectures where theyther they come from chris rock or our pastors. I think first and foremost, the speech that i gave when i was when i was a senior in high school it was among the king oratorical contest. I was one of the finalists ive won my School Competition and i was 1 of three finalists across the country. Basically my speech was a litany of antiblack ideas statistically about black jews and it is said things like black youth of the most feared in society as it was his fault. I said things like black youth dont value education, which was very prominent idea. It still athat. Black youth keep climbing the high tree of pregnancy. All these ideas about what was wrong with black youths and ironically as you know if there was ever a decade in which seemingly everyone was coming down on the heads of black youth it was 1990s. Thats the decade in which i came of age and i consumed those ideas and reproduce them. To your question, if it is a combination of data across the ideological board it is acceptable to say those ideas. I thought i was radical. Obviously black conservatives will say that i think they stated a different type of way but and i also realized in some other work that not only in terms of the ideological popularity but ultimately black people regularly see individual black negativity and what we have been led to believe is that we can generalize that. Right. Everything we say we know they are feared because you are feared. Because we know individuals like that, we just assume that that is part of the problem, not some sometimes realizing theres white youth who dont value education. There are white youth who are extremely violent. Not realizing, let me just say i think one of the things i tried to emphasize is what makes black people equal to other racial groups is not our sort of great black people and our great attribute, its our imperfection. Right. We are human. I think connected to what you are just saying, theres also the piece that you talk about with respect to class thats really important because all of those things that you describe abbut thats not an accounting you can give of working class black kids thats across the economic spectrum. Its also sort of challenging what many a regents is accepted as gospel. Stone traffic in these ideas of something being deficient. I think i was trying to really anchor the book in a way on this class perspective by making the case and by showing how i was largely raised in a a black home in the new black class of 1980s understood themselves as a distinct racial group that was distinct from black poor people in that my parents were taught to a certain extent believed that they were members of the black middle class because their own hard work and ingenuity which meant that people were still poor because they work working hard. When we think of racial groups and Racial Disparities and racial distinctions we dont think interracial distinctions. We dont think about how there such thing as white trash that white elites have created to substantiate their beliefs in their own white superiority because we have to say. They must be some other. I think that class is absolutely sort of critical in understanding the way race sort of operates and i think that when we speak about being antiracist its not just saying sort of black elites were equal to white elites is black elites recognizing that theres nothing aand all they need is resources and opportunities i also say that i think one of the most difficult things for people to realize, and it took me a while to accept this, is this idea that oppressive conditions literally are not just dehumanizing but actually make people into sub humans. That poverty literally depresses the behavioral and cultural attributes of black people that they are acting pay dearly deficient because they are poor. What we dont realize is that black elites like white people and other people are creating their own standard of how people should act assessing blacks from that standard and saying they are not reaching a standard because they are poor. When the fact sometimes behaviors seen as deficient are in fact logical and mechanisms for survival or resources accessing resources that are necessary when you have very limited resources. And that speaks to, i love the way that you tell the story of folks as a kind of social Movement History because one of the things that we miss in the Public Discourse is sort of what happens after civil rights and black power. And how its so easy to fall back into the groove of the racist society even hoop people who came to the movement because of the way the world is organized. I just think the vulnerability is so refreshing im turning the gaze on me and my world and not just externally. At the same time, you do this thing that i think is rare and elegant where you talk about moving through a series of ideas where you confront whether its isis papers or posttraumatic slave syndrome or moving through a series of ideas as you are trying to figure out, what is this race thing. You leave many of them aside but you dont do it in a form of attack of other thinkers. You just say that wasnt right. And i find that really refreshing in terms of intellectuals. We all have these convening ideas and we try to approximate approach the truth and you get the sense that those were useful for you to go through even if its not ultimately where you ended ultimately i was trying to figure out what was the problem. Right. Initially i think when i graduated high school i thought that the racial problems was largely black people. I thought also that it was racism but what was predominant was i thought it was black people. Then a few weeks into my college life at pham you in tallahassee like black folks across florida experienced the election of 2000 where pretty much the Voter Suppression was pretty much through the election to george w. Bush in the faces of black people. Those firsthand and secondhand stories of peoples votes being spoiled or people being turned away were flooding into pham you because pham you students were representing the whole state. I heard racism racism white racism is adequate. Its undeniable. And ultimately caused me, i didnt really see it actually is racism at the time, i thought it was white people. Because almost all of the people who were engaged in these acts were right. So then i went from, the problem is but people into a certain extent racism to the problem is black people and a certain extent racism and white people. And then i was like, whats wrong with white people . Thats when i went in search of all those books trying to figure out what is wrong with these people . Why are they engaged in these types of racist acts . And ultimately finally when i really started engaging in study particularly through taking courses in African American history did i begin to see that ultimately the problem was racism. And it took me a while to get to that point. I want to take that up in this question sort of of white people. There are some readers who will think you give space to white people to not be categorized as racist. The whole school of thought, all white people are racist because they are raised in a racist society. What is it that you are trying to alert white readers to in terms of the possibility like their potential in this vision of Antiracist Society and also what do you signal to black and other people of color readers about how to navigate white people in this struggle . I think as it relates to white people i think one of their anthems as it relates to races, im not racist. Obviously i wanted to confront that very head on. And say theres only two options here, theres no such thing as being not racist. Theres only being racist and antiracist. Also, there is such t