Hello and welcome to the Americano podcast. My name is Freddie Gray. I'm the deputy editor of The Spectator and the editor of its US edition. We thought that 2020 was going to be all about the presidential election, but now it will forever be the year of the pandemic.

So instead, Americano is going to look at how COVID-19 is transforming the United States and its

politics. There's a lot to talk about, perhaps even more so than before. So please keep tuning in.

I'm joined today by the writer Coleman Hughes, and're going to be asking what is racism in America.

Now Coleman, I ask this question because I think Miriam Webster, the American Dictionary, is now going to

update its definition of racism after a student complained to the dictionary to include systemic racism. And I think

a lot of white people, particularly white people in America, are confused about what racism really

means now because I think a lot of us knew what we thought it meant. It meant not hating people

because of their colour of their skin or not being prejudiced against people because of their ethnicity. But now it seems to mean something very

different and it's something we're all guilty of, it seems. What's going on? Well, it's going on

is in 1967, a term, a concept was invented called institutional racism didn't exist before that year,

and it was invented by the founders of the Black Power Movement, Stokely Carmichael,

who was later named Kwame Tore and Charles Hamilton.

The civil rights movement managed to fight racism and achieve landmark reforms without ever invoking this

concept of institutional or systemic or structural racism. In the past, let's see, 53 years,

that concept has gone from a little known concept only used by a handful of activists and

scholars to a completely mainstream, and in fact, probably the mainstream definition of racism.

And the problem with it is that it's always been vague.

I was interested to find that a book last year by Ibram X. Kendi, who is a very popular

bestselling anti-racist author who also writes for the Atlantic and is written for the New York

Times and elsewhere, wrote a book called How to Be an Anti-Racist, which was part memoir, part

part sort of how to, the basics of anti-racism 101.

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