IBRAM X. KENDI ON ‘HOW TO BE AN ANTIRACIST’
When Ibram X. Kendi speaks or writes about race, his words are measured, clinical, precise. He does not shout to the rafters or bellow through a bullhorn. He is not so much a provocateur but more like a physician diagnosing a particularly invasive disease. This is not to say that his gaze is not penetrating or his critique is not biting.
In 2016, Mr. Kendi, director of the Antiracist Research & Policy Center at American University, rose to prominence as an authoritative voice on racial policy by winning the National Book Award for Nonfiction for “Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America.” In it, he chronicled the sordid racial history of America to show that the cradle of racism is not ignorance and hate, but the economic and political self-interest of the powers that be. He rankled some readers, however, by reassessing some of the words, actions and philosophies of revered abolitionist and civil rights heroes — including African American heroes.
In his most recent book, “How to Be an Antiracist,” Mr. Kendi continues in this vein, but instead of chronicling America’s history with racism, he chronicles his own. He gets real about the ways in which, as a younger man, he too drank from the racist ideology Kool-Aid.
He cringes at the memory of a speech he delivered at a MLK celebration in which he took his black audience to task for their criminality, their thuggish demeanor, their lackadaisical attitude toward education, and their predilection for promiscuity and pregnancy. Mr. Kendi reflects, “A racist culture had handed me the ammunition to shoot Black people, to shoot myself, and I took and used it.”
Mr. Kendi is fond of clear-eyed and rigid definitions regarding racism. In particular, he defines racism as “a marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities.” Indeed, the meat of this book is found in all the ways Mr. Kendi describes how racism affects every area of life, from our biology to our power and class structure to our culture to our biases around gender, body image and sexuality.
People entrenched in the day-in-and-day-out struggle for civil rights may quibble with the dispassionate limits of Mr. Kendi’s definitions, or the fact that they even need to be preached to about what racism is and isn’t. Those who suffer the daily aggressions and indignities because of the color of their skin may roll their eyes when Mr. Kendi suggests that people are not inherently racist, they simply have racist ideas or act in racist ways.
As a privileged white man, I have no right or ability to adjudicate that debate. I do, however, agree with Mr. Kendi’s charge that there is no neutrality when it comes to racism. Claiming to be “colorblind” is to turn your gaze away from the evil realities of racism around us and within us.
Where I question Mr. Kendi is with his assertion that antiracist policy drives antiracist opinion. It seems to me that the rapid policy changes in this country surrounding gay marriage were driven by a lot of hard conversations in families and workplaces around the country. In other words, I believe it was those slow changes in mind-set that eventually led to rapid changes in policy, not the other way around.
It’s a moot point anyway. The fight against racism in this country needs to happen in both legislatures and living rooms. It’s just that most of us have more access to one than the other. To that end, I find “How to Be Antiracist” helpful in having those hard conversations, in not writing off the racism skeptics in my life as lost causes, and in defining certain things that I don’t have to experience for myself every day. If change is going to come in this country, we all must throw off our neutrality regarding racism and do the hard work of being antiracist. Mr. Kendi sounds the charge: “We know how to be racist. We know how to pretend to be not racist. Now let’s know how to be an antiracist.”
At the end of the book, the 37-year-old scholar parallels the pervasive disease of racism with his own recent battle against stage-4 colon cancer. When faced with the grim odds of survival compared with the slim possibility of healing and remission — of becoming a truly antiracist society — the first thing a patient must do is believe that all is not lost. Mr. Kendi offers us some reassurance in that “racism is not even 600 years old. It’s a cancer we’ve caught early.” But we must believe in the possibility that we can transform our society. Mr. Kendi believes this, because to not believe is to lose hope. As he says, “Racism has always been terminal and curable.”