A few years back a colleague of mine asked me to write a piece for a special edition of the journal Sustainability. He suggested that I write an essay reviewing David Pellow’s academic text What is Environmental Justice? alongside White Fragility (Robin DiAngelo) and How to be an Antiracist (Ibram X Kendi). These latter two are more like handbooks pitched to advocates or want-to-be advocates for racial justice.
Unfortunately, my colleague was not able to get his co-editors to agree to publish my piece. They said it failed to sufficiently engage the academic literature on environmental justice. Oh well! I’m admittedly biased, but felt the piece was smokin’. What I’ve done here is to publish only an edited version of the section on Kendi’s book. Here I engage with Kendi over a number of critical issues including Black racial trauma, the race and class in the context of capitalism, anti-Blackness and the question of whether or not race is “real.”
If you would like to see the full review essay, please respond in the chat box. Here goes …
Revolution from Within: The Project of Ibram Kendi
X
Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an
Antiracist (2019) is flurry of haymakers delivered to almost anyone of any
race who reads it. Kendi weaves his maxims into successive chapters of his
personal journey as a Black man. Kendi’s parables range
from his parents’ courtship in college to threats with life-threatening diseases
for family members and himself. His
journey of self-understanding is a campaign for the most broadly gauged,
intersectional program of social justice imaginable.
He begins chapter one by defining racist
and antiracist, and chapter 2 by defining race itself. Then to begin chapters 3-16
he defines different aspects of racism/antiracism that those of us versed in
racial justice work recognize (assimilationist/segregationist, biological,
ethnic, etc.).
In the course of his narrative, he also redefines other
familiar terms, sometimes in groundbreaking ways, and other times not so much!
The
seminal theme animating Kendi’s project is that every human being is of value
and human groups, however we wish to construct them intellectually, are equal
in their humanity. Therefore, to say something is inferior or wrong with an
entire racial group, because we see unattractive behavior by some group members,
is racist. He believes that poor behaviors or material outcomes for certain
groups are a result of the way they are structured into society compared to
other groups. The structure of society (neighborhoods, school districts, job
opportunities, etc.) is the product of conscious policies.
When certain groups earn low wages,
are crowded into poor neighborhoods, receive second class educations, experience
high levels of unemployment, and engage in more crime, it is those factors
structuring their lives that cause them to fare poorly vis-à-vis other groups;
not who they are as a people. For Kendi therefore, it is bad policies that
cause bad aggregate outcomes for racial groups, not inferior human beings.
Thus, the quest to make society a better place for all its members is a
struggle to change policies, rather than engaging in moral suasion to change
the minds of people, even well-placed elites. The book is really about Kendi’s
odyssey from seeing people as the problem to seeing policies as the problem.
Perhaps the most important intervention
that Kendi offers for our understanding of racial dynamics is that all of us
(not just White people) are capable of being racist. He opens the book by
describing an award-winning speech that he made in his youth where he
disparaged the Black poor (just as Barack Obama often did when he addressed the
question of race). He was wildly applauded by the mixed-race audience, but said
his remarks, which made the racial group the problem rather than racist
policies, was racist toward poor Black people. So Black people, by blaming the
victims of systemic policies, can be racist toward their own in ways every bit
as damaging as White racists (Kendi 2019, 6-11).
This
cuts against a main thrust of racism discourse from some parts of the left,
which holds that people of color cannot be racist toward their own people, or
against White people. A crucial insight he extends is that individuals of all
races can be racist at one moment and anti-racist at another. He recounts
several instances in his own life when he was racist toward Black people, even
after he had taken on the project of anti-racism. He goes on to say that:
The good news is racist and anti-racist are not fixed
identities. We can be a racist one minute and
an anti-racist the
next. What we say about race, what we do about race, in each moment, deter-
mines what --- not
who --- we are (10).
and
Racist
and antiracist are like peelable name tags that are placed and replaced based on
what
Someone
is doing or not doing, supporting or expressing in each moment. These are not
permanent
tattoos (22-23).
Here he is suggesting
that White people, like everyone else, can be antiracist in their best moments,
even as racism continues to be part of their makeup. In a brilliant stroke
Kendi gets us out of the cul-de-sac that (practically) all White people are
racist unless they have dedicated their entire life to fighting racism.
White
people, like POC, can be racist at one moment, and antiracist at moments when
they actively stand up against racism. Condemning (practically) all White
people as racist shuts them down and ends the conversation, leaving the racial
status quo in place. This move helps those interested in pursuing racial
justice adopt a more nuanced understanding of our fellow humans and allows us
all to keep the conversation going. Kendi pushes the envelope further by positing
that POC can also be racist toward White people. He uses the thesis of the
Nation of Islam that Whites are a race of “devils” concocted in the laboratory
of a mad scientist as an example of racism toward White people (125-31). While
Kendi takes no prisoners in his relentless quest for racial justice, he also
provides some much-needed space to breathe, see our fellow humans as humanly
imperfect, but trying the best they can in a complex world. This kind of attitude is necessary if we are
to have a strategy for building the cross-racial understanding and trust
required to create a racially just society and world.
Another area in which Kendi goes
against the progressive grain is the notion that Black
people suffer from collective trauma after 400 years of racial oppression in
the United States. Challenging Joy DeGruy’s Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome
thesis, Kendi counters that many Black Americans who have had particularly
difficult lives may suffer from racialized trauma, but many others, while they
have experienced racism, cannot be described as traumatized. He argues
convincingly, citing the example of Black people freed from slavery, joining
the Union army, engaging in politics, and building community lives (96-98). His
perspective conforms with the experience of Professor Johnson. Millions of
African Americans can no doubt make the same case. However, millions of other
Black people and other POC have led horrific lives and faced racialized
barriers to success every step of the way (Wilson, 1987). Living in racially
segregated low-income neighborhoods, surrounded by people with similar life
experiences can produce something like collective trauma for those communities.
But even at those sites, other people get on with life, as tough as the
circumstances might be. Are they not traumatized, or are they just better at
suppressing their trauma?
Kendi
also stakes out a useful position on whether systemic racism or the
exploitation of the working classes under capitalism the fundamental thing is
to be dismantled in order to alleviate racial oppression. He enters a debate
which has a long and rich history here. He chooses not to point us to the work of people like Cedric Robinson who coined
the term “racial capitalism” long ago, teaching us that capitalism was born in
European imperialism and racism toward the brown masses being colonized (2020, 2-3).
Nevertheless, Kendi rightly declares that racism is so imbricated in the fabric
of the global capitalist system that we can’t eradicate one without eliminating
the other. He concludes that if we can erect a system devoid of racial and
economic exploitation it would not be capitalism (Kendi, 159-163).
Once we recognize that the development of
capitalism, both domestically and globally, has always been racist, then doing
the tedious work of rooting out racism everywhere could amount to the creation
of a fundamentally new social system. It
is difficult to imagine the arrangements of accumulation and inequality that we
live with today without their primary tool of race. Still, replacing
capitalism with something more humane does not mean that private ownership of
businesses or markets would have to disappear!
Despite
the discourse trotted out by corporations, free markets don’t exist. Markets
are politically organized by those with power. Democracies can make public
policies to incentivize businesses to engage in more humane enterprises. The
strides made toward green economies wherein businesses profit by producing
solar and wind energy are cases in point. Public-private partnerships of all
kinds might be envisioned that sell goods and services in the marketplace with
philosophies of empowerment of POC communities and racial equity in employment.
Cooperative
businesses are already a growing element in urban and rural places that are
struggling economically. Co-ops are collectively owned by those who work in
them and the workers share the profits in an equitable way. But they operate in
the larger marketplace and are confronted with the same constraints around
costs and quality that traditional capitalist businesses face (Van Gelder 2017,
71-75, 95-98). Ghanaian economist George Ayitteh has written about how
traditional African economies were organized through families. Because the
family is a private entity, they were privately owned and collectively owned at
the same time, yet they operated in the marketplace (1988, 111-112). So, what’s necessary is to discard Eurocentric
ideas about individual-private ownership, while holding on to the market as the
sphere of entrepreneurial creativity and consumer choice. Kendi seems to
understand that capitalism as we know it will no longer exist if racism is
eradicated. And he avoids a frontal assault on capitalism that might turn off
the average American reader.
A groundbreaking turn in debates about racism among progressives over
the last several years has been the growing consensus that anti-Blackness is
central to the organization of White supremacy. Kendi calls attention to the
ideological offensive directed at unfree Black labor from the time of colonial
Virginia to talk of Black youth “superpredators” surrounding the passage of the
infamous Violent Crime Act in 1994 (70-76). While Black people have become the
ultimate other on the racial ideological hierarchy, Black social movements have
also been the leading force for racial justice in successive generations in U.S.
history. After a brief hiatus at the turn of this century, as the Latinx
population surpassed the Black population in the U.S., and the immigrant rights
movement swelled, BLM emerged with surprising ferocity in 2014. The myriad of
Black activist and intellectual voices, the growth of Black political clout and
the centrality of their voice in the Democratic Party recently show that coming
to grips with Blackness in scholarly and activist circles will be a critical
factor in the pursuit of a humane society.
There are a
couple of places where we would like to take Kendi to task. In chapter two
entitled “Dueling Consciousness,” he discusses the three racial ideologies that
contest for public support and whose imprint can be seen in social movements
and public policy. Those ideologies are assimilationism, segregationism, and
antiracism. Assimilationists believe that some races are inferior and public
policy needs to develop them. Segregationists believe that some races are
inferior, cannot be developed, and therefore must be kept separate from the
superior races. Antiracists believe all races are equal, none need to be
developed, and public policy should pursue racial equity. Kendi thinks
assimilationism is racist, albeit of a softer form than segregationism (29).
The
racism of the assimilationist project in America is that it assumes the
propriety of the values, norms, and rules of White America. It urges POC to
adopt the values and lifestyles of middle-class White America. Kendi goes as
far as to criticize his parents for assimilating professionally into the White
world, even as they worked to improve the condition of their people (chapter 2).
For starters, Kendi is too hard on his parents. All the striving they did to
get ahead and make sure he got a good education positioned him to be who he is
today. Even his undergraduate education at historically Black Florida A&M
was drenched with Black Brahmin elitism, color-consciousness, and training
geared to prepare young African Americans for success in the White world. As an
adult Kendi has become a proud African American man who believes that all races
are equal and that we all learn and exchange culturally from one another.
Though he never explicitly states it, he is a multiracial democrat.
We want to challenge Kendi here by
offering another kind of assimilation. The classical sociological concept of
assimilation holds that a “weaker” group will adopt the cultural traits of the
dominant group over time. In that way two groups that were formerly different
become similar, if not alike (Barker, Jones, and Tate 1995, 7). We want to pose
here a process by which two, or multiple groups become similar by adopting the
cultural attributes of one another. This is a little more like a “Louisiana gumbo” theory
of American culture in which we are all thrown into the mix with each other
culturally. In the end we all become similar. This gumbo we call multiracial,
or multicultural assimilationism. Elsewhere, Johnson has written about
multiracial American nationalism as a social movement site where people of
different races do racial justice work together (Johnson and Benslimane 2017, 13-23).
It is analogous to Kendi’s antiracism consciousness. This social construction
of a multiracial American culture is already happening at certain social
movement sites and semi-consciously, in many of the country’s large
metropolitan areas. The killing of George Floyd and the massive pouring of
White youth into the streets and the fact Kendi’s book became a bestseller are
indicators of the kind of cultural movement we’re talking about here.
We also want to take issue with
Kendi’s discussion about race and science. He joins most other natural and
social scientists and activists in positing that racial categories cannot be
biologically substantiated, and therefore are not real. Kendi goes as far as to
say that “race is a mirage,” i.e., one sees it, but it does not really exist (37).
For most in the scholar-activist crowd, race and racial categories are socially
constructed. Kendi correctly, goes further in defining race as “a power
construct of collected or merged differences that lives socially” (35).
We
agree with his specification that race is a power construct, i.e., it is “politically”
constructed by elites to favor one group of people and subordinate another
group based on phenotype, or how they look. Kendi gets into trouble though when
he admits that race “lives socially.” So one contradiction for him is that race
is alive and it does exist. As Johnson has stated elsewhere (2015):
To be socially constructed merely means to be human-made. The
medium through which you’re
reading
this now, the mode of transportation you use in your travels, the clothes
you’re wearing,
were all constructed by humans, but they’re real, right? ... Ask
the families of Trayvon Martin,
Michael Brown and the victims of the Charleston massacre how well
race works in subordinating
and oppressing people of color.
Sociology and political science are “social” sciences. We use
scientific methods to examine the world of human animals of which we are a
part. The human communities, their institutions, values, and the rules by which
they interact daily are all socially constructed. Race is one of those social,
but particularly, political constructions that define the real ways we move in
this world. Of course, Kendi knows this. We just wish he and others would stop
saying things like “race is a mirage.”
Finally, we want
to question Kendi over the intellectual framework he arrives at for pursuing
social change. In chapter 16 entitled “Failure,” he shares his realization that
for years he thought that the key to end racist policies was to engage in moral
suasion to change the “hearts and minds” of fellow citizens, who would then press
for changes in government policies. Later his reading of the civil rights
movement is that activists pressured government, won desired policy changes,
and then over time society came to accept those changes (interracial marriage
and Obamacare, etc.). He concludes that for activists today the priority should
be to organize, hit the streets, and pressure policy-makers to change policies.
If those changes are just, mainstream America will support and gradually accept
them.
When Kendi says antiracists should be motivated
by “craving for power to shape policy,” not to change minds, we think he
glosses over how policies actually get changed. The first step to gaining
significant policy changes is always “street heat.” But over the years of
non-violent protests, with increasing news coverage, and conversations sparked
over meals and whenever people gathered, hearts and minds were also changed.
Kendi would have us believe that policy makers respond to pressure only from
movement forces, but they also respond to other powerful interests they are
connected to, who may have their minds changed over racist policies after
watching years of protests politics. Often it might be that those interests
actually knew policies were bad and were content remaining silent, but became
more vocal themselves when they saw the outrage expressed in the streets.
However, they still “changed their minds” about where their interest laid.
In institutional settings everywhere, White
people have aha moments and really change their minds about racist practices
and even the existence of systemic racism itself (Wieland 2018). When massive protests
like those after the murder of George Floyd took place, hordes of White people hit
the streets alongside their Black fellows, and millions more took note and
began to question what they thought they knew about race in America. And it
should be noted that many White youth were in the streets after Ferguson in
2014. The fact that many more protested in 2020 suggests that all kinds of
conversations that changed many minds had been occurring over the ensuing
years.
Ibram Kendi is
taking on the whole world in How to be an Antiracist. He distills his
considerable depth and breadth of knowledge about race into several pithy
observations about racism and some guidelines for how we can begin to dismantle
it. One doesn’t have to agree with every one of his dictums to conclude that
he’s mostly right. However, he’s impassioned and impatient, which may ruffle
some feathers, but that is the reader’s problem, not his.
References
Ayitteh, George. 1988. Africa in Chaos. New York: St.
Martin’s Press.
Johnson,
Vernon D. 2015. Whatcom View: Race. Racism are Realities with Very Real
Consequences. Bellingham Herald. June 24..
Johnson Vernon.
D. and Kelsie Benslimane. 2017. “Practical Representation and the Multiracial
Social Movement.” Journal of Educational Controversy 12 (1): Article 5.
Accessed April 17 2016. http://www.cedar.wwu.edu/jec/vol12/iss1/5
Kendi, Ibram X. How to be an
Antiracist. New York: One World, a division of Penguin
Random
House, 2019.
Van Gelder, Sarah. 2017. The
Revolution Where You Live. Oakland, California: Berrett-Koehler
Publishers.
Wieland.
Jason. 2018. “It’s Time for White Males to be Honest about Racism.” Medium. November
10. https://jasonjamesweiland.medium.com/its-time-for-white-males-to-be-honest-about-racism-616d71d4eec2
Wilson,
William .Julius. 1987. The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the
Underclass and Public Policy. 2nd edition. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
