Ibram X. Kendi: Racism Isn't An Identity, It's What You're Doing In The Moment

His 2017 book, Stamped From the Beginning, is a history of racist ideas in America, and his new book is called How to Be an Antiracist. It starts with a moment in Kendi's own life: He was a high school senior taking part in an oratorical contest honoring Martin Luther King Jr., delivering a speech that ultimately won him first place.

"And in this speech, in which I thought I was being so progressive and so radical, in fact I was expressing a litany of anti-black ideas, particularly about black youth," he says. "I talked about 'black youth don't value education' and I talked about 'black youth keep climbing the high tree of pregnancy,' that 'black youth are not trained well by their parents,' and this majority-black crowd of 3,000 largely clapped. And really, that was the moment in which I recognized just how many racist ideas, anti-black racist ideas, I had consumed over the course of the '90s — a time that many of these ideas were mainstream."