Ibram X. Kendi

Singular-race makers push for the end of categorising and identifying by race. They wag their fingers at people like me identifying as Black - but the unfortunate truth is that their well-meaning post-racial world strategy makes no sense in our racist world. Race is a mirage but one that humanity has organised itself around in very real ways. Imagining away the existence of races in a racist world is as conserving and harmful as imagining away classes in a capitalistic world - it allows the ruling races and classes to keep on ruling.

Assimiliationists believe in the post-racial myth that talking about race constitutes racism, or that if we stop identifying by race, then racism will miraculously go away. They fail to realise that if we stop using racial categories, then we will not be able to identify racial inequity. If we cannot identify racial inequity, then we will not be able to identify racist policies. If we cannot identify racist policies, then we cannot challenge racist policies. If we cannot challenges racist policies, then racist power's final solution will be achieved: a world of inequity none of us can see, let alone resist. Terminating racial categories is potentially the last, not the first, step in the antiracist struggle.

How do we think about my young self, the C or D student, in antiracist terms? The truth is that I should be critiqued as a student - I was undermotivated and distracted and undisciplined. In other words, a bad student. But I shouldn't be critiqued as a bad Black student. I did not represent my race any more than my irresponsible White classmates represented their race. It makes racist sense to talk about personal irresponsibility as it applies to an entire racial group. Racial-group behaviour is a figment of racist's imagination. Individual behaviours can shape the success of individuals. But policies determine the success of groups. And it is racist power that creates the policies that cause racial inequalities.

Make individuals responsible for the perceived behaviour of racial groups and making whole racial groups responsible for the behaviour of individuals are the two ways that behavioural racism infects our perception of the world.

[Senator Elizabeth] Warren should be applauded for her efforts to establish and enforce rules that end the theft and level the playing field for, hopefully, all race-classes, not just the White middle class. But if Warren succeeds, then the new economic system will operate in a fundamentally different way than it has ever operated before in American history. Either the new economic system will not be capitalist or the old system it replaces was not capitalist. They cannot both be capitalist.

When Senator Warren and others define capitalism in this way - as markets and market rules and competition and benefits from winning - they are disentangling capitalism from theft and racism and sexism and imperialism. If that's their capitalism, I can see how they can remain capitalist to the bone. However, history does not affirm this definition of capitalism. Markets and market rules and competition and benefits from winning existed long before the rise of capitalism in the modern world. What capitalism introduced into this mix was global theft, racially uneven playing fields, unidirectional wealth that rushes upwards in unprecedented amounts. Since the dawn of racial capitalism, when were markets level playing fields? When could working people compete equally with capitalists? When could Black people compete equally with White people? When could African nations compete equally with European nations? When did the rules not generally benefit the wealthy and White nations? Humanity needs honest definitions of capitalism and racism based on the actual living history of the conjoined twins.

Race and racism are power constructs of the modern world. For roughly two hundred thousand years, before race and racism were constructed in the fifteenth century, humans saw colour but did not group the colours into continental races, did not commonly attach negative and positive characteristics to those colours and rank the races to justify racial inequity, to reinforce racist power and policy. Racism is not even six hundred years old. It's a cancer that we've caught early.

But racism is one of the fastest-spreading and most fatal cancers humanity has ever known. It is hard to find a place where its cancer cells are not dividing and multiplying. There is nothing I can see in our world today, in our history, giving me hope that one day antiracists will win the fight, that one day the flag of antiracism will fly over a world of equity. What gives me hope is a simple truism. Once we lose hope, we are guaranteed to lose. But if we ignore the odds and fight to create an antiracist world, then we give humanity a chance to one day survive, a chance to live in communion, a chance to be forever free.