Judging the Book

The bad-faith campaign against "antiracism".

Update 5/1: The South Carolina ACLU has filed suit over the Pickens County banning of Stamped, on behalf of three families and their children who are students in the Pickens County School District. Read more about the suit here and here.

This is Part IV of a series of pieces on the current and continued use of an old racist playbook. Part I is here. Part II is here. Part III is here.

This book is ultimately about the basic struggle we’re all in, the struggle to be fully human and to see that others are fully human.

-Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, bre…