National Domestic Violence Awareness Project

profeminist:

“I’m not a racist.”

That’s what Amy Cooper, a white woman, said when she publicly apologized for calling the police on a black man bird-watching in Central Park.

The words rang especially hollow coming from Cooper. After all, the previous day she had used her position as a white woman to summon police — and the potential for police violence — against editor and birder Christian Cooper after he asked her to put her dog on a leash. “I’m going to tell them there’s an African American man threatening my life,” she says in a video that quickly went viral.

Not everyone acquires the overnight infamy of Amy Cooper. But her claim of non-racism was a familiar one. If asked, most people would probably say they are not racist. And they’re especially likely to say it after they’ve already done something racist. As Ibram X. Kendi, director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University, notes in his book How to Be an Antiracist, “When racist ideas resound, denials that those ideas are racist typically follow.”

But as Kendi also notes, it’s not enough to simply be “not racist.” “The opposite of ‘racist’ isn’t ‘not racist,’” he writes. “It is ‘antiracist.’”

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