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Event Calendar

Anti-Racism Book Club

Tuesday, January 12 at 7:30pm

The Smith’s current Anti-Racism Book Club pick is How To Be Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi.

From Executive Director Susie Monagan: Maybe you’re like me and are feeling the call to further educate yourself along the path to anti-racism. Maybe, also like me, you do better with some extrinsic motivation (yes, peer pressure) to organize your time and reading materials. Please join me in reading and discussing books over the next six months as part of The Smith’s Anti-Racism Book Club.

Anti-Racism Book Club

Thank you to everyone participated in our discussion of Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow! The Anti-Racism Book Club’s next book is How To Be Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi. Our virtual book club discussion will be held on Tuesday, January 12, 2021 @ 7:30pm.

How To Be Antiracist

Ibram X. Kendi’s concept of antiracism reenergizes and reshapes the conversation about racial justice in America–but even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. Instead of working with the policies and system we have in place, Kendi asks us to think about what an antiracist society might look like, and how we can play an active role in building it.

In his memoir, Kendi weaves together an electrifying combination of ethics, history, law, and science–including the story of his own awakening to antiracism–bringing it all together in a cogent, accessible form. He begins by helping us rethink our most deeply held, if implicit, beliefs and our most intimate personal relationships (including beliefs about race and IQ and interracial social relations) and reexamines the policies and larger social arrangements we support. How to Be an Antiracist promises to become an essential book for anyone who wants to go beyond an awareness of racism to the next step of contributing to the formation of a truly just and equitable society.

Ibram X. Kendi

Ibram X Kendai poses in a grey suit jacket and blue plaid collared shirt.

Ibram X. Kendi is one of America’s foremost historians and leading antiracist scholars. He is a National Book Award-winning and #1 New York Times bestselling author. Kendi is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and the Founding Director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research. Kendi is a contributor writer at The Atlantic and a CBS News Racial Justice Contributor. He is also the 2020-2021 Frances B. Cashin Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for the Advanced Study at Harvard University. In 2020, Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Kendi is the author of THE BLACK CAMPUS MOVEMENT, which won the W.E.B. Du Bois Book Prize, and STAMPED FROM THE BEGINNING: THE DEFINITIVE HISTORY OF RACIST IDEAS IN AMERICA, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2016. At 34 years old, Kendi was the youngest ever winner of the NBA for Nonfiction. He grew up dreaming about playing in the NBA (National Basketball Association), and ironically he ended up joining the other NBA.

Kendi is also the author of three #1 New York Times bestsellers, HOW TO BE AN ANTIRACIST, an international bestseller that has been translated in several languages; STAMPED: RACISM, ANTIRACISM, AND YOU, co-authored with Jason Reynolds and a Kirkus Prize Finalist; and ANTIRACIST BABY, illustrated by Ashley Lukashevsky. HOW TO BE AN ANTIRACIST also made several Best Books of 2019 lists and was described in the New York Times as “the most courageous book to date on the problem of race in the Western mind.”

 

Book cover for How To Be an Antiracist by Ibram X Kendi