How to be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi focuses on defining racism and naming a variety of the different ways racism shows up in our society.
“Human-made environmental catastrophes disproportionately harming bodies of color are not unusual; for instance, nearly four thousand U.S. areas—mostly poor and non-White—have higher lead poisoning rates than Flint, Michigan.”
Jackson, MS has lead in the water and 82.2% of people in Jackson are Black.
“White people are more likely than Black and Latinx people to sell drugs, and the races consume drugs at similar rates.”
This, to me, is the center of where the racial injustice is in mass incarceration – that white people are selling drugs more than Black and Latinx people, but that Black and Latinx people are more likely to be incarcerated for selling drugs.
“President Richard Nixon announced his war on drugs in 1971 to devastate his harshest critics—Black and antiwar activists. “We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news,” Nixon’s domestic-policy chief, John Ehrlichman, told a Harper’s reporter years later. “Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.””
Right after election, I was in a conversation about the election with someone who was saying that poor Black people need to rely less on government assistance. However, in that type of discussion there’s never a mention of the way that white upper and middle class people have received all types of welfare – mortgage interest tax breaks, untaxed inheritances, capital gains being taxed at a lower rate than earned income, better funding for schools, the list goes on and on.
“Goldwater and his ideological descendants said little to nothing about rich White people who depended on the welfare of inheritances, tax cuts, government contracts, hookups, and bailouts. They said little to nothing about the White middle class depending on the welfare of the New Deal, the GI Bill, subsidized suburbs, and exclusive White networks. Welfare for middle- and upper-income people remained out of the discourse on “handouts,” as welfare for the Black poor became the true oppressor in the conservative version of the oppression-inferiority thesis.”
This next quote is a point that I had never seen defined in this way – that the crimes white men tend to commit don’t lead to the criminalization of white men as a whole, or white communities stigmatized as dangerous.
“The idea of the dangerous Black neighborhood is the most dangerous racist idea. And it is powerfully misleading. For instance, people steer away from and stigmatize Black neighborhoods as crime-ridden streets where you might have your wallet stolen. But they aspire to move into upscale White neighborhoods, home to white-collar criminals and “banksters,” as Thom Hartmann calls them, who might steal your life savings.”
“We become unconscious to racist policymakers and policies as we lash out angrily at the abstract bogeyman of “the system.””
This makes a lot of sense to me – it’s easier to say that the criminal justice system is racist and wrong, but if you asked me to point to the specific policymakers who made this system racist and wrong, I’m not sure – there’s a lot of them, and it happened over a long period of time. In terms of specific policies, I’m thinking of the war on drugs, but I also can’t name one specific year or one specific law.
“‘Respectable’ individuals can absolve themselves from individual blame: they would never plant a bomb in a church; they would never stone a black family,” Toure and Hamilton wrote. “But they continue to support political officials and institutions that would and do perpetuate institutionally racist policies.””
I see this a lot – I don’t know any white people who would actively go commit hate crimes, but I know white people who voted for Trump and who continue to be complicit with racist policies.