You're listening to TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hume. You're probably hearing a lot these days about what it means to be anti-racist. Today, we have Ibram X. Kendi, the author and historian behind the best-selling book, How to Be an Anti-Racist. He spoke with TED curators Whitney Pennington Rogers and Chloe Shasha about

that big idea, how to recognize and challenge our own internalized racist notions so we can do the

work to be anti-racist in our daily lives. Neutrality is not enough, and this TED 2020 talk gets it why.

So welcome, Ibrahim, and thank you so much for joining us.

Well, thank you, Chloe and Whitney. And thank you everyone for joining this conversation.

And so a few weeks ago, on the same day we learned about the brutal murder of George Floyd,

we also learned that a white woman in Central Park who chose not to leash her dog

and was told by a black man nearby that she needed to leash her dog,

instead decided to threaten this black male, instead decided to call the police and claim that

her life was being threatened. And of course, when we learned about that through a video, many Americans

were outraged. And this woman and Amy Cooper ended up going on national TV and saying, like, countless

other Americans have said right after they engaged in a racist act, I am not racist. And I say countless Americans,

because when you really think about the history of Americans expressing racist ideas, supporting

racist policies, you're really talking about a history of people who have claimed they're not racist because everyone

claims that they're not racist, whether we're talking about the Amy Cooper's of the world,

whether we're talking about Donald Trump, who right after he said that majority black Baltimore

is a rat and rodent infested mess that no human being would want to live in.

And he was challenged as being racist. He said, actually, I'm the least racist person anywhere

in the world. And so really, the heartbeat of racism itself has always been denial.

And the sound of that heartbeat has always been, I'm not racist.

And so what I'm trying to do with my work is to really get Americans to eliminate the concept of not racist from their vocabulary and realize we're either being racist or anti-racist.

We're either expressing ideas that suggest certain racial groups are better or worse than others,

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