UBC’s School of Public Policy and Global Affairs is proud to host Ibram X. Kendi, National Book award-winning historian and author of Stamped From The Beginning and How to Be an Antiracist, as part of our 2020 Phil Lind Initiative series on “Thinking While Black.”
This event was moderated by El Jones, spoken word poet, an educator, journalist, and community activist.
A recording of the event was available for a short time and has now been removed.
Talk Title: “How to Be an Antiracist”
When the first Black president headed into the White House, Americans were imagining their nation as colorblind and went so far as to call it post-racial. With the arrival of Donald Trump many people are awakening and seeing racial reality for the first time. With opened minds, people are actively trying to understand racism. In this deeply personal and empowering lecture, Kendi shifts the discussion from how not to be racist, to how to be an antiracist. He shares his own racist ideas and how he overcame them. He provides direction to people and institutions who want more than just band-aid programs, but actual antiracist action that builds an antiracist America.
Learn more about the 2020 Thinking While Black series here.
Blackness as a form, concept and experience, has fundamentally shaped American iconographies, language, media, and cultural productions. This series invites us to consider Blackness as both a culture and a mode of thinking. This series will meditate on the structures of race in North America and will spotlight the seemingly disconnected forms of racial violence that hide in plain sight. How, despite shifts in rhetoric and political policy, have so many forms of racial violence persisted? How, we ask, can we rethink ourselves by understanding our relations to blackness?
Bio: Ibram X. Kendi is the National Book Award-winning author of Stamped From The Beginning: A Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America and How to Be an Antiracist. His relentless and passionate research puts into question the notion of a post-racial society and opens readers’ and audiences’ eyes to the reality of racism in America today. Kendi’s lectures are sharp, informative, and hopeful, serving as a strong platform for any institution’s discussions on racial discrimination.
When Dr. Ibram X. Kendi won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2016 for a book about the history of racist ideas in America, some people felt a disconnect. Emerging from eight years of leadership under an African-American president, a narrative was building in America about the emergence of a post-racial society, colorblind to race and valuing merit over skin color. Kendi challenges this notion in his New York Times-bestselling book Stamped from the Beginning, taking an expansive view on race and racist ideas that spans from 15th century Europe until modern day America. Kendi’s insight on racist structures are the focus of his latest book, How to Be an Antiracist, which empowers readers and audiences to not only recognize the pervasive influence of racism and racist ideas, but to actively participate in dismantling it.Kendi embarked on the research for his book under the assumption that the major producers of racist ideas were hateful and ignorant. And that borne from racist ideas were racist policies like slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration. But as Kendi dug deeper and contextualized motives, he began to gain a new understanding of the cause and effect actually at play. He soon discovered that political, economic, and cultural self-interest are behind the creation of racist policies and these policies in turn create the racist ideas that rationalize the deep inequities in everything from wealth to health.
Ibram X. Kendi is Professor of History and International Relations and the Founding Director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University. He is a frequent public speaker who speaks with great expertise and compassion about the findings of his book and how they can fit into the national conversation on racial and social justice.Kendi has received research fellowships, grants, and visiting appointments from a variety of universities, foundations, professional associations, and libraries, including the American Historical Association, Library of Congress, National Academy of Education, Spencer Foundation, Lyndon B. Johnson Library & Museum, Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, Brown University, Princeton University, Duke University, University of Chicago, and UCLA. Most recently, he was named a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow for his work.In addition to winning the National Book Award, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas was also named a finalist for the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and nominated for the 2016 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Nonfiction. The book was featured on many Best Books of 2016 lists, including in the Boston Globe, Kirkus, The Washington Post, The Root, Chicago Review of Books, and Buzzfeed.Kendi has published numerous academic essays as well as op-eds in publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, The Guardian, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. He is also the author of the award-winning book, The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965-1972. In 2018, he was named a columnist for a new vertical of The Atlantic focusing on ideas, opinion, and political and cultural commentary.
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Artwork Credit: Sandra Brewster
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