Sarah’s Reviews > How to Be an Antiracist > Status Update

“The most effective protests create an environment whereby changing the racist policy becomes in the power’s self-interest, like desegregating businesses because the air-ins are driving away customers, like increasing wages to restart production, like giving teachers raises to resume schooling, like passing a law to attract a well-organized force of donors or voters.”

“Self-critique allows change. Changing shows flexibility.”

“An activist produces power and policy change, not mental change. If a person has no record of power or policy change, then that person is not an activist.”

“To be antiracist is to reject not only the hierarchy of races but of race-genders. To be feminist is to reject not only the hierarchy of genders but of race-genders.”

“Antiracist policies cannot eliminate class racism without anti-capitalist policies”

“Powerless defense: the illusory, concealing, disempowering, and racist idea that Black people cant be racist because Black people don’t have power”

“Immigrant self-selection”: exceptional internal drive for material success and/or possess exceptional external resources

“In genetic terms, all human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9% the same”

W.E.B. Du Bois “The Souls of Black Folks” in 1903: “double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others”
- “wish to be both a Negro and an American”
- “two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (29)

- “secular strivings to be an anti-racist” (17)
- “definitions anchor us in principles” (17)
- “racism is a marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities” (18)
- “racial inequity: when 2+ racial groups are not standing on approximately equal footing” (18)
-“anti racist policy: measure that produces or sustains racial equity”