Antiracist thought holds that racial groups are equal, so disparities reflect discrimination, not inferiority.

Evidence

I am saying that there is nothing wrong with Black people as a group, or with any other racial group. That is what it truly means to think as an antiracist: to think there is nothing wrong with Black people, to think that racial groups are equal. There are lazy and unwise and harmful individuals of African ancestry. There are lazy and unwise and harmful individuals of European ancestry. There are industrious and wise and harmless individuals of European ancestry. There are industrious and wise and harmless individuals of African ancestry. But no racial group has ever had a monopoly on any type of human trait or gene—not now, not ever. Under our different-looking hair and skin, doctors cannot tell the difference between our bodies, our brains, or the blood that runs in our veins. All cultures, in all their behavioral differences, are on the same level. Black Americans’ history of oppression has made Black opportunities—not Black people—inferior. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 29

When you truly believe that the racial groups are equal, then you also believe that racial disparities must be the result of racial discrimination. … I know that readers truly committed to racial equality will join me on this journey of interrogating and shedding our racist ideas. But if there is anything I have learned during my research, it’s that the principal producers and defenders of racist ideas will not join us. And no logic or fact or history book can change them, because logic and facts and scholarship have little to do with why they are expressing racist ideas in the first place. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 30

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines antiracism by what it asserts about group equality — a core distinction for the reader’s three-way scheme.
• XREF: Directly relevant to testing the reader’s stated discomfort: the claim that ‘no racial group has ever had a monopoly on any type of human trait’ is the load-bearing premise of antiracism.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The…, 29; Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The…, 30