Author of the week

Ibram X. Kendi

Ibram Kendi is taking the battle against racism to the stroller set, said Elizabeth Harris in The New York Times. The 38-year-old history professor who has become the leading proponent of a concept he’s labeled “anti-racism” didn’t even need to put out his latest work to land three books on best-seller lists in June. His 2016 National

Book Award winner, Stamped From the Beginning, resurfaced because readers were suddenly hungry again for a 500-page history of antiblack racism. His How to Be an Antiracist in turn mapped a course of action. And Stamped, written by youngadult novelist Jason Reynolds, distilled Kendi’s big book into a punchy primer. But even Stamped didn’t go as far as Antiracist Baby, Kendi’s new best-selling board book. Baby is aimed at children ages 0 to 3, because “children as young as 2,” says Kendi, “start believing in racist ideas.”

Antiracist Baby exhorts families to recognize, not ignore, racial difference, said Erin Aubry Kaplan in the Los Angeles Times. “If you claim to be color-blind,” it reads, “you deny what’s right in front of you.” A few lines later, the lesson turns more abstract: “Point at policies as the problem, not people.” For Kendi, who has a 4-year-old, the book’s purpose is to begin a dialogue about race early so that silence doesn’t let damaging ideas take hold. To him, racial differences in life outcomes never owe to anything that’s “wrong” about any one group, but to policy. Changes, he believes, can come swiftly. “I don’t know whether every single person can be antiracist by 2030,” he says. “But I do have hope that every racist policy could be eliminated by then. That would be great.”