Ibram X. Kendi.Photo: Stephen Voss
On the first anniversary ofGeorge Floyd’s murder, Ibram X. Kendi is reflecting on all that has happened over the past year, and where he hopes the country will go.
Floyd’s death quickly sparked outrage and led to protests across the country that called for an end to police brutality and systemic racism.
As people looked for ways to help in the fight against racism, many turned to Kendi’s 2019 book,How to Be an Antiracist, which takes readers through his own experiences and invites them to think about racism in different ways.
Kendi, a professor at Boston University, says he’s glad readers sought out the book following Floyd’s death but wishes it didn’t take such an incident for some to finally see the many problems Black Americans and other minorities face in America.
“I think on the one hand, it is devastating personally that someone had to be sort of viciously murdered for people to recognize that there was a serious problem of state violence, a problem of structural racism,” Kendi says on today’s episode ofthePEOPLE Everydaypodcast.
“I wish that George Floyd’s murder and the murder of Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, and the disparities and the number of people of color who were more likely to die from COVID-19, and even the former president weren’t sort of driving people to my work,” he adds. “I wish that people were just looking in the mirror and seeing that they could grow and be better people and that we could transform this country.”
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Kendi also says he became emotional on Tuesday when thinking about Floyd’s daughter,Gianna, and his own daughter.
“What she most loved about her father was the way in which he would put her on his back and sort of walk her around and she would be flying like an airplane,” he says. “And I have a daughter and we would do the same thing. And so the thought of her losing me because someone didn’t value my life, I mean, it just broke me all the way down. And so I just remembered that and when I see my daughter, like many people, when they see that their kids today, I’m going to hug her that much tighter.”
On June 9, Kendi will be premiering a new podcast,Be an Antiracist with Ibram X. Kendi, which will be available on iHeartMedia. He says launching the series is important to him because it brings together different experts and prominent Americans to discuss different forms of racism.
“Whether that’s anti-native racism, whether that’s the intersection of racism and ableism,” he says. “And the reason for this was because I wanted people to have a very clear sense of how they should be fighting for the rights of native people, or how they should be fighting for a different type of more anti-racist immigration system.”
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In April, Chauvin was foundguiltyof second-degree murder, third-degree murder and manslaughter in the killing of Floyd. But Kendi says there is much more work to be done.
“I think that the family of George Floyd wanted this form of accountability. And indeed it is so rare for a police officer to be convicted of murder, even though police officers kill on average a thousand Americans every year,” he says. “And so the fact that an officer was held accountable was certainly something that I think many people appreciated, but I think for me it’s how do we… There are countries in which officers haven’t fired a shot in years, let alone killed people, right? How do we create that type of nation?”
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source: people.com
