How To Be An Antiracist: A Conversation with Dr. Ibram X. Kendi
Ibram X. Kendi is one of America’s foremost historians and leading antiracist voices. An award winning author, Kendi is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and the founding director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research. He is a contributor writer at The Atlantic and a CBS News correspondent. In 2020-2021, he is the Frances B. Cashin Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for the Advanced Study at Harvard University.
Kendi’s book The Black Campus Movement, won the W.E.B. Du Bois Book Prize, and Stamped From The Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2016. At 34 years old, Kendi was the youngest ever winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction.
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 Antiracist Baby, a picture book for children and care-givers, illustrated by Ashley Lukashevsky. How to be An Antiracist made several best books of 2019 lists and was described by the New York Times as “the most courageous book to date on the problem of race in the Western mind.”
Kendi has published fourteen academic essays in books and academic journals, including The Journal of African American History, Journal of Social History, Journal of Black Studies, Journal of African American Studies, and The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture. He has published op-eds in numerous periodicals, including The New York Times, The Guardian, Washington Post, London Review, Time, Salon, Diverse: Issues in Higher Education, Paris Review, Black Perspectives, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. He comments on multiple international, national, and local media outlets, such as CNN, MSNBC, NPR, Al Jazeerah, PBS, BBC, Democracy Now, OWN, and Sirius XM. A sought-after public speaker, Kendi has delivered hundreds of addresses over the years at colleges and universities, bookstores, festivals, conferences, libraries, churches, and other institutions in the United States and abroad.
Recipient of many national awards and international accolades, Kendi has taught at universities around the country. Kendi majored in journalism and African American Studies at Florida A & M University; he earned his Ph.D. in African American Studies from Temple University.
Professor Kendi’s Athenaeum presentation is co-sponsored by the President’s Leadership Fund.
Photo credit: Stephen Voss
Text adapted from https://www.ibramxkendi.com/about