You don’t decide only once to be an antiracist.

Instead, it’s a decision that circumstances, including your own character, will demand of you repeatedly. “The mind is complex, and when we think of any personality trait that we’re striving to get away from” — like racism — “it’s an everyday process,” author and historian Ibram Kendi told a �ֲ���ý audience on Oct. 23.

Author and historian Ibram Kendi, at right, greets �ֲ���ý President Clayton Spencer and Christopher Petrella ’06 of the Office of Equity and Diversity on Oct. 23. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“We have to be conscious of it on a regular basis in order to not be that way anymore,” he said.

Kendi was at �ֲ���ý to give a talk titled “How to Be an Antiracist.” It’s a prescription he’s abundantly qualified to offer. at American University, he’s also the founding director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American.

Moreover, Kendi wrote Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which was awarded the 2016 National Book Award for Nonfiction, making Kendi the youngest scholar in 30 years to receive that honor.

�ֲ���ý President Clayton Spencer, who described as a “gut renovation of our collective thinking about race,” welcomed a large audience to Gomes Chapel for Kendi, who offered a 50-minute talk as well as subsequent Q&A and booksigning sessions.

Introducing Kendi was Christopher Petrella ’06, associate director of programs for �ֲ���ý’ Office of Equity and Diversity. Petrella’s generous preface concluded with an apt quotation from the abolitionist Frederick Douglass (who, he noted, spoke in Lewiston at �ֲ���ý’ invitation in 1874): “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

Historian and author Ibram Kendi, left, chats with Kingdell Valdez ’19 of North Andover, Mass. Valdez met Kendi during a session of the course “Introduction to African American Studies” on Oct, 23, prior to Kendi’s evening talk. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Once at the pulpit, Kendi responded with his own Douglass quote, one from 1874 that, he said, sums up the entire sorry history of racist thought: “When men oppress their fellow men, the oppressor ever finds in the character of the oppressed, a full justification.”

Kendi was pitch-perfect for the �ֲ���ý audience. While steps to becoming an antiracist constituted the heart of his speech, he framed that checklist with arguments about American racism that were occasionally surprising and always thought-provoking.

“How and why did racist ideas become, literally, our common sense — in which racist ideas make sense to us, and antiracist ideas seem radical, extreme, and completely nonsensical and illogical?” Kendi wondered.

“How and why did racist ideas become, literally, our common sense?”

He said that writing Stamped from the Beginning, which chronicles that ideological evolution over more than five centuries to the present, led him to a concept he calls the “dual racial history of America” — a dynamic process, like something from Newtonian physics but a lot harder on people. In this duality, every evidence-based effort to undo racism provokes a new and more sophisticated defense of racism.

Take, for example, the Jim Crow laws that followed the defeat of the South in the Civil War. And the proclamation of a “post-racial era” following the election of the nation’s first black president. Post-racism, Kendi said, is “possibly the most sophisticated racist idea ever constructed….It is a representation of every racist idea in history.”

Following Kendi’s talk in the Gomes Chapel, Ella Fenderson, age 11, asks Ibram how elementary school students can talk about race in school, as her mother, Grace Kendall, director of design services for the �ֲ���ý Communications Office, looks on. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

He argued that ultimately there are only two causes of racial tension, or only two exits from any discussion of racism. Either the inferiority of some races to others is a true fact, or the existence of discrimination is. You can’t have it both ways, or neither way.

So if you accept the premise of post-racism — that discrimination doesn’t exist — then all that’s left is the inferiority of one group or another. And away you go, down the road to growing your own personal racist beliefs, which are all the more convincing because you thought of them yourself.

In Stamped, Kendi distinguishes between producers and consumers of racist ideas, and focuses on the producers. What motivates them? That led him to another key element in the talk, and one that stands conventional wisdom on its head.

It’s commonly believed that ignorance and hate fuel racist ideas and ideologies, and those in turn are codified in racist policies. But just the opposite is true, Kendi said.

He argued that people implement racist policies to protect their own political, cultural, and economic interests and then, perhaps on the principle that the best defense is a good offense, deploy racist ideas to advance those policies.

Rakiya Mohamed ’18 of Auburn, Maine, poses a question to historian Ibram Kendi during a session that followed Kendi’s Oct. 23 talk at �ֲ���ý. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“It shocked me to find that,” he said, “because of course I had been taught that historically, the main cradle of racism had been ignorance and hate.”

Kendi noted that no group of people he studied for Stamped considered their ideas racist. (And still today it’s generally the racists who cry, “I’m not a racist.”) “People believed that black people were literally a different species of being that was closer to animal kind — ‘That’s not a racist idea, that’s science.’”

Getting to the heart of his address, Kendi structured his rules for being an antiracist in a logical historical order:

Reject what “segregationist” ideas, ideas based on perceived functional biological distinctions between races. Kendi cited research from 2000, based on the genomic mapping of people representing five races, that showed that 99 percent of their genetic makeups were the same — and the remaining 1 percent was just scientists’ reluctance to pronounce an absolute. “There’s no such thing as biological races,” he said.

Bolstering his case with more medical facts, Kendi took on the widespread belief that sickle-cell anemia is a “black disease.” Instead, he explained, the disorder collaterally confers some resistance to malaria, and so is found more often among populations well-established in malarial regions —  not just in Africa. (A discussion about sickle-cell that Kendi had with his wife, a doctor, convinced her that a white child in her emergency room actually did have sickle-cell, despite the “black disease” label.

Recognize that different races are equal culturally as well as biologically. “A dominant strain within abolitionist thought,” Kendi said, “was this idea that slavery, of course, was wrong — but one of the reasons it was so bad is because it was preventing black people from receiving the fruits of superior New England culture.

In his talk “How to Be an Antiracist,” Kendi combined logic, humor, and moral suasion to powerful effect. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

“Following the Civil War, there were many well-meaning former abolitionists who were like, ‘We finally now have the ability to go down into the South and civilize some of these people.’ Probably some of your well-meaning ancestors went down there and did that” — albeit with antiracist motivations, as they rejected the racist notion that former slaves couldn’t be civilized because they were biologically inferior.

But in fact, Kendi said, slaves brought culture from Africa and developed culture in slavery (and elements from those cultures, obviously, remain vital in contemporary U.S. culture). If you want to be an antiracist, don’t judge other cultures by the standards of your own culture — that only creates a hierarchy in which other cultures can’t prevail.

Recognize behavioral equality. We’ve been trained to see blacks as dangerous, a stereotype supposedly supported by statistics that correlate high rates of violent crime, arrests, and incarceration with African Americans. But, as Kendi explained, rates of arrest and incarceration don’t correspond to rates of actual crime (thanks in part to prejudicial policies like racial profiling or sentencing guidelines that are effectively race-based).

As for violent crime, he pointed out that crime rates in middle- and upper-class black neighborhoods parallel their white equivalents: rates are much lower than in low-income areas. What high crime rates really correspond to, regardless of race, is poverty. To reduce violent crime, invest in job creation.

Practice an intersectional analysis of racism. “It’s nearly impossible to be an antiracist and not also be a feminist. It’s very difficult to be an antiracist and simultaneously be an elitist. It’s pretty much impossible to be an antiracist and also be homophobic,” Kendi says. In other words, racist thinking doesn’t have to apply to race — it can be racialized thinking that justifies prejudice against all manner of identities.

“What I’m saying ultimately is that when you think about antiracism, you should think not just about equality between racial groups — you should also think about equality between all of the racialized groups within your race and without.”

Kendi’s conclusion wasn’t surprising, but was certainly uplifting. “What becomes the activity of the antiracist?” he asked. “I would encourage each of you, when you look out at racial disparities, to see not what’s wrong with people, but what’s wrong with policies.”

The audience listens to author Ibram Kendi in �ֲ���ý’ Peter J. Gomes Chapel on Oct. 23. (Phyllis Graber Jensen/�ֲ���ý College)

Paul D. Miller, the musician, essayist and media artist also known as DJ Spooky, presents a live performance of his internationally renowned multimedia project Rebirth of a Nation at 8 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 2, at Lewiston Middle School, 75 Central Ave.

Co-sponsored by departments and programs at �ֲ���ý College including the �ֲ���ý College Museum of Art and the Multicultural Center, the performance will be followed by a panel discussion featuring the artist with Mark Bessire, director of the art museum; Dale Chapman, assistant professor of music at �ֲ���ý; and Charles Nero, associate professor of rhetoric.

Admission to the �ֲ���ý event is $10 for general seating. For tickets, please . For more information contact 207-786-6135 or olinarts@bates.edu.

The performance takes place just days before the 93rd anniversary of the release of Birth of a Nation, the silent film by D.W. Griffith whose racist interpretations of American history during and after the Civil War have been a source of outrage for nearly a century. Miller, of New York, adapted Griffith’s film for Rebirth of A Nation.

“With the news dominated by broken treaties, ethnic oppression, raw power grabs and security threats, the time seems just right for revisiting” the film, Miller writes in his program notes. “There are so many resonances with contemporary culture’s indefatigable sense of shock and surprise.”

His piece, Miller writes, “posits no answers, only more questions.”

Starting with a newly restored print of Griffith’s film, Miller edited, manipulated and remixed it. Combining this footage with his original score, as recorded by the Kronos Quartet, Miller now performs a live mix, creating a unique version of Rebirth of a Nation at each show.

The piece was commissioned by and performed at the Lincoln Center Festival, New York; the Festival d’Automne à Paris; the Vienna Festival; and the Spoleto Festival USA. It has been presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; the Romaeuropa Festival in Italy; Harvard University; the Herod Atticus amphitheater in Athens; and many other venues.

Miller is best-known by his “constructed persona,” “DJ Spooky That Subliminal Kid.” He has recorded a huge volume of music, solo and in collaboration with artists as diverse as Iannis Xenakis, Kool Keith a.k.a. Doctor Octagon, Pierre Boulez, Killa Priest from Wu-Tang Clan, Steve Reich, Yoko Ono and Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore.

He scored the 1998 film Slam, which starred critically acclaimed poet Saul Williams and received awards from the Cannes and Sundance festivals. In 2006, Miller received access to the vaults of the classic reggae label Trojan Records, resulting in his landmark Sanctuary Records compilation In Fine Style, DJ Spooky Presents 50,000 Volts of Trojan Records!!!

Among his other recordings are Optometry (Thirsty Ear, 2002), a jazz project featuring Matthew Shipp, William Parker, Joe McPhee, Carl Hancock Rux, Daniel Bernard Roumain and High Priest from Anti-Pop Consortium; Dubtometry (Thirsty Ear, 2003), a dub remix of the same, featuring Lee “Scratch” Perry and Mad Professor; and Riddim Clash (Play, 2004), a collaboration with Twilight Dub Sound System.

Miller took part in the 2007 Venice Bienniale with the video installation New York is Now, which originally appeared at the Luanda Triennial in Angola in 2006.

Miller has written for The Village Voice, The Source, Artforum, Raygun, Rap Pages, Paper Magazine and other periodicals. With noted African American poet Steve Cannon, he is co-publisher of A Gathering of Tribes, a magazine dedicated to new works by writers from a multicultural context. Miller was the first editor-at-large of the cutting-edge digital media magazine, Artbyte: The Magazine of Digital Culture.

His first collection of essays, Rhythm Science (MIT Press, 2004), was included in several “best books of 2004” lists, including those of the Guardian (UK) and Publishers Weekly. Sound Unbound, an anthology of writings on sound art and multi-media edited by Miller, will be published in paperback by MIT Press in May.

Along with the Museum of Art and Multicultural Center, sponsoring Miller’s �ֲ���ý engagement are the college’s departments of theater and rhetoric, and of music; the program in environmental studies; the offices of the dean of the faculty, student activities and admissions; the �ֲ���ý Dance Festival and the Harward Center for Community Partnerships.

Rhodes’ talk, “Freedom or Destruction,” is open to the public free of charge. It is sponsored by the �ֲ���ý African-American student organization, Amandla.

Lauded as a gifted and powerful speaker, Rhodes is the host of the syndicated TV discussion program “Face the Truth.” He has appeared on network news programs, and he has lectured at universities, conferences and churches around the country.