The Trump administration is trying to put everyone on patrol – serving and protecting racism. Americans are being ordered to report on their neighbors’ antiracist activities.

This takes a page out of an old racist playbook. From the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 to intelligence agencies infiltrating antiracist movements in the 1960s and recently, the U.S. government has long turned everyday Americans into informants to conserve racism.

Ibram X. Kendi breaks it down in this exclusive, new video commentary from The Emancipator.

He is the Carter G. Woodson Endowed Chair in History, and the director of the Howard University Institute for Advanced Study. Dr. Kendi is the #1 New York Times best-selling author of How to Be an Antiracist and Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which won the National Book Award. His newest book is Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age. Dr. Kendi earned his journalism degree at Florida A&M University and his doctorate at Temple University.