Fighting Racism Even, and Especially, Where We Don’t Realize It Exists

I'm moved to continue to recommend How To 

Become an Antiracist. Such a vital voice. 

May we listen, learn, act. — Molly

 By Jeffrey C. Stewart

HOW TO BE AN ANTIRACIST
By Ibram X. Kendi

What do you do after you have written “Stamped From the Beginning,” an award-winning history of racist ideas that examined some of America’s most seemingly progressive intellectuals — Frederick Douglass, Susan B. Anthony, W. E. B. Du Bois — to expose what one reviewer called the “unwitting racism of the well-meaning.” If you’re Ibram X. Kendi, you craft another stunner of a book that is in some ways your previous work’s natural counterpart: “How to Be an Antiracist,” a 21st-century manual of racial ethics.

Kendi is on a mission to push those of us who believe we are not racists to become something else: antiracists, who support ideas and policies affirming that “the racial groups are equals in all their apparent differences — that there is nothing right or wrong with any racial group.” For Kendi, the founding director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University, there are no nonracists; there are only racists — people who allow racist ideas to proliferate without opposition — and antiracists, those who expose and eradicate such ideas wherever they encounter them.

Instead of focusing on our racist ideas, Kendi offers up a wrenching examination of the evolution of his, beginning with a day in 2000 when he gave a prizewinning speech as a young student. “I remember the M.L.K. competition so fondly,” he writes. “But when I recall the racist speech I gave, I flush with shame.” What was racist about it? In his speech, Kendi asserted that black youth were the “most feared in our society” and that “they think it’s O.K. not to think!” Rather than attacking institutional and individual racism as some black intellectuals had done decades earlier, during the years of Bill Clinton’s presidency, for example, more recent black thinkers have often blamed black youth as the main source of the problems of the black community. “I didn’t realize that to say something is wrong about a racial group is to say something is inferior about that racial group,” Kendi writes. “I did not realize that to say something is inferior about a racial group is to say a racist idea. I thought I was serving my people, when in fact I was serving up racist ideas about my people to my people.”

Kendi continues with chapters on power, culture, behavior, color, space and ethnicity, the last drawn from his experience as a professor moderating a class discussion between a West African and a group of mainly African-American students who expressed racist ideas about one another — stereotypes they had absorbed from white racist speech about both groups.

Kendi rejects the now-hackneyed notion that blacks cannot be racist because they do not have power. He asks: Don’t elected black officials have power? Doesn’t Clarence Thomas have power? He shifts our attention away from people’s ethnic identities to the racist nature of their ideas and policies, and argues that these are the things on which we should judge a person. While acknowledging the reality of racism in contemporary life, Kendi wants to free us from using tainted ideas to stigmatize people and support policies that define others as inferior.  

Sometimes the logic of antiracism threatens to erase some of the nuances of African-American history. Kendi quotes the 19th-century African-American thinker Alexander Crummell, who declared that the genius of black people in America was their gift at assimilating American — read white American — culture. Kendi rightly notes that such statements can advance the dominant culture’s demand that black people mimic white people in order to be recognized as equally human. This assimilationist discourse, as wielded by such figures as W. E. B. Du Bois, who criticized both black working-class culture and the racism that deprived black communities of opportunities and respect, or C. Delores Tucker, an activist who denigrated rappers as threatening the moral foundation of black communities, implies we are not good enough on our own, but must constantly emulate white people in order to be accepted.

But, buried within a racialized assimilationist rhetoric, Crummell might have been voicing an important truth: that the African-American mastery and transformation of Anglo-American culture — its language, behaviors, values and arts — is one of the greatest accomplishments in world history. Spirituals arose because enslaved Africans assimilated English hymns and made them their own. Assimilating, in this sense, is a verb, a choice, not a bow to the superiority of another culture.

In the rush to ferret out all of the serpentine ways racism is embedded in policymaking that affects black people, we must take care not to conflate the subtleties of civilization-making in oppressed communities with the discourse of racial inferiority disseminated by others. Kendi’s book glosses over this complexity for a reason: his urgent desire to expose the ways racist thinking can hurt people and defeat the larger objective of creating a society without it. He demands that we be consistent in the logic of antiracist thinking wherever it may lead us — and it leads Kendi into some unusual but necessary observations, including that characterizing all white people as racist hurts black people. “Racist power thrives on antiwhite racist ideas — more hatred only makes their power greater,” he writes. “Going after white people instead of racist power prolongs the policies harming black life. In the end, antiwhite racist ideas, in taking some or all of the focus off racist power, become anti-black. In the end, hating white people becomes hating black people.”

What emerges from these insights is the most courageous book to date on the problem of race in the Western mind, a confessional of self-examination that may, in fact, be our best chance to free ourselves from our national nightmare.     

Please go here for the original review: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/20/books/review/how-to-be-an-antiracist-ibram-x-kendi.html