Free How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi Page A

desks, shouting, hugging each other, wanting to call our friends and parents to celebrate. (Too bad we didn’t have cellphones.)
    Over in Manhattan, my father assembled with his accounting co-workers in a stuffed, stiff, and silent conference room to watch the verdict on television. After the not-guilty verdict was read, my father and his Black co-workers migrated out of the room with grins under their frowns, leaving their baffled White co-workers behind.
    Back in my classroom, amid the hugging happiness, I glanced over at my White eighth-grade teacher. Her red face shook as she held back tears, maybe feeling that same overwhelming sensation of hopelessness and discouragement that Black people feel all too many times. I smiled at her—I didn’t really care. I wanted O.J. to run free. I had been listening to what the Black adults around me had been lecturing about for months in 1995. They did not think O.J. was innocent of murder any more than they thought he was innocent of selling out his people. But they knew the criminal-justice system was guilty, too. Guilty for freeing the White cops who beat Rodney King in 1991 and theKorean storekeeper who killed fifteen-year-old Latasha Harlins that same year after falsely accusing her of stealing orange juice. But the O.J. verdict didn’t stop justice from miscarrying when it came to Black bodies—all kinds of Black bodies. New Yorkers saw it two years later, when NYPD officers inside a Brooklyn police station rammed a wooden stick up the rectum of a thirty-year-oldHaitian immigrant named Abner Louima, after viciously beating him on the ride to the station. And two years after that, the justice system freed another group of NYPD officers who’d blastedforty-one bullets at the body of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed twenty-three-year-old immigrant from Guinea. It did not matter if Black people breathed first in the United States or abroad. In the end, racist violence did not differentiate.
    But back in my eighth-grade class, my fellow African Americans did differentiate. Kwame probably bore the nastiest beating of jokes. He was popular, funny, good-looking, athletic, and cool—yet his Ghanaian ethnicity trumped all. We relentlessly joked on Kwame like he was Akeem, from the kingdom of Zamunda, and we were Darryl, Lisa’s obnoxious boyfriend, in the 1988 romantic comedy Coming to America . After all, we lived in Queens, where Akeem came in search of a wife and fell for Lisa in the movie.
    In Coming to America, Darryl, Lisa, Akeem, and Patrice (Lisa’s sister) are sitting in the stands, watching a basketball game. “Wearing clothes must be a new experience for you,” Darryl quips with a glance at Akeem. An annoyed Lisa, sitting between the two men, changes the subject. Darryl brings it back. “What kind of games do y’all play in Africa? Chase the monkey?” Darryl grins. African Americans in the audience were expected to grin with Darryl and laugh at Akeem. Back in our classrooms, we paraphrased Darryl’s jokes about barbaric and animalistic Africans to the Kwames in our midst.
    These were racist jokes whose point of origin—the slave trade—was no laughing matter. When Black people make jokes that dehumanize other branches of the African diaspora, we allow that horror story to live again in our laughs. Ethnic racism is the resurrected script of the slave trader.
    The origins of ethnic racism can be found in the slave trade’s supply-and-demand market for human products. Different enslavers preferred different ethnic groups in Africa, believing they made better slaves. And the better slaves were considered the better Africans. Some French planters thought of theCongolese as “magnificent blacks” since they were “born to serve.” Other French planters joined with Spanish planters and considered captivesfrom Senegambia “the best slaves.” But most planters in the Americas considered the ethnic groups from the Gold Coast—modern-day Ghana—to be “the best and most