Race scholar Kendi turns spotlight on himself
IF Ibram X Kendi has been a lifelong racist — as he confesses in this book — then we all have been. This is the unsettling idea at the heart of “How to Be an Antiracist” (2019), in which one of the US’s most respected scholars of race and history steps away from documenting the racist sins of others, and turns the lens pointedly, uncomfortably, at himself.
Kendi’s argument is brilliantly simple. An idea, action or policy is either racist — that is, contributing to a history that regards and treats different races as inherently unequal — or it is antiracist, because it is trying to dismantle that history. There is nothing in between. There is no pure state of racism or anti-racism: people of all races and backgrounds can fall into either category depending on their ideas, actions or the policies they support.
One of the easiest things to relate to in Kendi’s hypothesis, which puts it in line with other contemporary books about racism and inequality, is his withering attack on the idea of being “not racist”. There is no scholarship required to realise intuitively that President (Donald) Trump declaring that he is not racist, while issuing multiple racist slurs, or some of the British press taking great offence at being called “racist” while promoting tropes about ethnic minority communities, reveals the meaninglessness of being “not racist”. Everyone says they are not racist. Few actively self-identity as “antiracist”.
Antiracism takes effort. Kendi has made clear in his previous work that he rejects the idea that racism is born out of ignorance. Racism, history shows, is born out of its profitability and utility. It is rooted in patriarchy and capitalism. To stand against it requires acknowledging what he calls “the metastatic cancer” that has seen “racism spread to nearly every part of the body politic”.
Kendi digs deep to justify these analogies. He charts not just his personal journey through the racist ideas he and his family embraced, but also the advanced-stage cancer that ravaged his body after he completed his last book, the award-winning “Stamped from the Beginning”.
“Racist ideas piled up before me like trash at a landfill,” he writes.
“Tens of thousands of pages of Black people being trashed as natural or nurtured beasts, devils, animals, rapists, slaves . . . More than five hundred years of toxic ideas on the Black body.”
At one point Kendi, whose wife also survived cancer shortly before he was diagnosed, apologises for his inability to separate cancer and racism. But there is no need. His honesty in linking his personal struggles to the work he has now undertaken is one of the most powerful elements in this compelling book.
In other ways Kendi raises more questions than he answers. Stories about his parents, who met in the black liberation theology movement, before his mother went off to work as a missionary in Liberia, feel unfinished. He hints that he ultimately rejected t he Christian beliefs with which he was raised, but steps away from narrating when and why. ◆ Read the full review on www. herald.co.zw