The Academic Study of Environmental Justice

This is a sequel to my earlier post critiquing Ibram X Kendi's How to be an Antiracist. You'll recall that it was a section from a review essay of books by Kendi, David Pellow and Robin DiAngelo. This piece is a revision of the concluding section of that essay. Again, if you wish to read the complete review essay, shoot me a message.

                                        The Academic Study of Environmental Justice

David Naguib Pellow is Dehlsen Chair and Professor of Environmental Studies and Director of the Global Environmental Justice Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He began his career doing dissertation research on the environmental racism faced by African American sanitation workers in Chicago in the 1990s.  Since then, he has examined the race and class dimensions of environmental justice and even animal rights in a number of single and coauthored books.[1] Across that time he has served on the boards of several community-based, national, and international environmental organizations.[2] Interest in the environmental social sciences is often accompanied by some level of activism, and Pellow has marked himself as a W.E.B. Duboisian-like scholar activist in the field of environmental justice. In What is Environmental Justice? he has delivered an assessment of the state of scholarship in the field as issues of systemic racism have gained unprecedented visibility across American society.[3]

            Pellow reviews the first two waves of environmental justice (EJ) studies and calls for the establishment of a third wave thrust he labels as “Critical Environmental Justice Studies.” As the framing suggests, Critical EJ Studies draws upon the approach pioneered by critical legal studies in the 1970s and quickly expanded upon by critical race and feminist studies. Established by scholars influenced by the civil rights and identity politics of the 1960s, critical legal studies is grounded in a variety of leftist tendencies including Marxism and post-structuralism. 

Intersectionality, the convergence of more than one type of oppression, or marginalization in the human actor, or at a site of social interaction, was brought to critical legal and race studies by theorists of race and feminism. EJ studies has always been intersectional. It grappled with the race/class nexus in addressing toxic waste dumping from its inception, and second-generation scholars added gender and sexuality into the mix. In another vein, first generation EJ scholarship was preoccupied with distributive justice as it related to which communities suffered most from environmental pollution. In the second generation, attention began to center more on the lack of inclusion of community members in policy making processes, or procedural justice. Pellow is calling for a third generation of scholarship he names  Critical Environmental Justice (CEJ). The CEJ agenda deepens the intersectional commitments of EJ studies and moves beyond distributive and procedural justice in environmental politics, toward social justice and sustainability for the planet and all of its human and “more than human” inhabitants. In doing so he champions a new paradigm that incorporates not only critical race and feminist theory, but “Ethnic Studies, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Political Ecology, Anti-Statist/Anarchist Theory and Ecological Justice Studies” (Pellow 2018, 18).

 

The Centrality of Race in the Quest for Ecological Justice

            I think most Black people, in general, are really not interested in dialogue at this point from White

people ... I think most Black people think of the request of White people for dialogue as being basically analogous to stalling, stalling for time ... I think what most Black people would like from White people

is some kind of action ... Now you can do it while you talk to us ... I think what most Black people, what most people in the Seneca Nation, what most people in the Mohawk Nation would like is some activity, massive amounts of it!

                                                                                                 -The Fire Next Time (1991)

Because the health of the planet impacts us all the environmental movement has long suffered from an arrogance that says environmental protection and restoration is the most important political issue of our time. From the movement’s perspective the problems of patriarchy, homo and transphobia, classism, racism, war imperialism, etc., troubling as they may be, cannot be addressed, if we don’t get all hands-on deck to save the planet. Of course, environmentalists are right about that. The proliferation of extreme weather events and the impact of ecological change causing climate refugees, are not lost on anyone who doesn’t have their head in the sand.

There are two points to make here. First, environmentalism is the foremost of what Immanuel Wallerstein called the new anti-systemic movements (along with racial identity movements, feminism, and LGBTQI rights). He calls them anti-systemic, because bringing true equity to the aggrieved identity groups would require a drain on profits that is tantamount to a complete transformation of the global capitalist economy (1990). The other movements all certainly require greater levels of state intervention and taxation, and massive politically incentivized shifts in patterns of investment, especially where racial inequality is concerned. But reversing global warming and climate change necessitates that all major capitalist enterprises responsible for environmental degradation clean up their practices (which in some cases may be impossible) or go out of business.

The industrialization that we have known so far (capitalist and socialist) has been based upon the destruction of nature. Engaging in practices to protect the environment simply cost too much money and would undermine capitalism as we know it. Secondly, since the environmental movement, like the women’s and LGBTQI movements, has always been dominated by educated White people, it was unmindful of the bread and butter and racial issues affecting communities

of color. And when those communities raised environmental justice concerns, the White mainstream reacted defensively and slowly.

            So the ecological imperative is the most universal human problem, and it is simultaneously the most threatening to capitalism as we know it. A fully mobilized global environmental movement might be able to create the conditions for a new world socioeconomic order. But recalling the chant from the People’s Climate March in 2014, “to change everything we need everyone.” Educated and affluent White people might have first been in a position to sound the global alarm, but most of the people on the planet are POC, working class, and live under less than democratic regimes with dysfunctional economies. Many of them live in the places most vulnerable to climate change.

Pellow points us toward “including everyone” in his text, by focusing on movements where people are too busy trying to survive harsh material conditions and brutal state security practices to prioritize the rise of the global ocean or the growth of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Yet Pellow finds visionary leadership, especially in the BLM and mass incarceration movements that have already begun to connect the dots between their issues, and environmental and ecological justice. If the conditions for human existence can’t be sustained, over the long haul the species’ demise is certain. But if Black and Brown communities do not have decent life opportunities today, if dictatorships currently terrorize citizens who speak up against injustice now, then White environmentalists must add those “ecological issues” to their agenda to garner support amongst the POC majority of the world. If it takes everyone to change everything, it will take a CEJ agenda that sees all people and their issues as indispensable.

            In this historic enterprise, the on racial justice by Robin DiAngelo and Ibram Kendi are likewise, indispensable to sustainability progress. DiAngelo also talks about how White people tend to see their experiences as universal for humankind. They often become incredulous when POC report that they have different experiences and different issues because they live in different worlds. In this global system of White supremacy where White people most often live in segregation and with greater affluence, they must accept that they do not always know what is going on with most of humanity and they must learn how to take leadership from people of color. Letting go of White fragility is a critical first step along that journey.[4]

For his part, Kendi does not condemn the entire White race as irrevocably racist, nor does he see all POC as automatically not racist. He shares his own stories of how he was racist against Black people at some points, even as he fought against racism. In a similar vein he has witnessed many White people going along with racism in some instances yet calling out racism at other times. The challenge Kendi throws down to each of us is to do our level best to try to be antiracist all the time. Kendi is certainly an exemplar in this respect. He is interested in changing policy and gaining institutional power.[5] Toward those ends he founded the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University in 2017.[6].

            All three authors have walked their talk when it comes to taking action. DiAngelo and Kendi are much in demand as public speakers to the full gamut of corporate, university, religious, and nonprofit organizations, and DiAngelo is an antiracist trainer. Kendi has become a major institution builder. And at the outset we mentioned David Pellow’s participation on environmental justice nonprofit boards. All of them thus, have been around the world of collective action and community organizing. While Pellow does offer the charge for a community of scholars to usher in a third wave of environmental justice research, DiAngelo and Kendi mostly offer prescriptions for individual action; but they provide little in the way of counsel to community organizers.[7]

Models for doing multiracial community organizing have evolved over the decades. In my trainings I have used the “Anti-Racist Organizational Development” model first devised by the Exchange Project of the Peace Development Fund and adapted by the Western States Center in the 1990s. These are organizations long involved in multiracial community organizing. They offer some practical tools for assessing organizations on a continuum from “All White Club” to “Anti-Racist Organization.” The organization striving to become anti-racist helps whites learn the following (Johnson and Benslimane 2017, 26-29):

- to work together and challenge other Whites around issues of racism

- to share power with people of color - to take leadership from people of color

- to be accountable to people of color.

 

The same organization helps POC become more empowered by:

- taking leadership

- sharing power in the organization

- transforming the organizational culture by challenging Whites and other people of color

- healing the remnants of oppression through collective wellness

- prioritizing issues of concern for communities of color and following their lead in addressing

                those issues. 

 

In such a setting, organizations are being asked to take on these efforts collectively, but individuals also must be required to consciously pursue these objectives. Individuals must change for systems to change. We would go further and add that working on issues of racial justice and in communities of color around those issues is an indispensable way for White people to build understanding and trust. The model also includes ongoing anti-racist training; but training in the context of real work on the real issues confronting communities.

For years I taught Race and Public Policy and included an option for students to volunteer with organizations in communities of color.  I eventually added that ‘service-learning’ component to classes I taught in South Africa as well. In the US and in Africa I advised students not to come in “too White” (i.e. assuming they know the solution to the community’s problems, and can fix them), but to listen, watch, and ask questions with humility. This is the kind of interracial organizing that can build the basis for multiracial democracy. But the point is to undertake the substantive work of dismantling systemic racism, which itself begins healing, and continue that healing and personal growth while working together in multiracial settings. In multiracial America and in a world where most people of color are generally more vulnerable to environmental degradation, White environmental activists must acquire these antiracist organizing skills to the movement to be ‘sustainable’ for humanity at large. Taken together, the texts by Pellow, DiAngelo and Kendi provide a framework for sustainable development on a global scale. With the inclusion of the insights from Johnson’s model for practical representation, the critical environmental justice paradigm can become the framework for many movements seeking a more humane way of life on this planet.

---

[1] Here is a sampling of Pellow’s scholarship. 2011. The Slums of Aspen: Immigrants vs. the Environment in America’s Eden, with Lisa Sun-Hee Park. New York: New York University Press; 2008. with Kenneth Gould and Allan Schnaiberg, The Treadmill of Production: Injustice and Unsustainability in the Global Economy. Baltimore,  Paradigm Press; 2007.Resisting Global Toxics: Transnational Movements for Environmental Justice. Cambridge, Ma: MIT Press; 2000. with Adam Weinberg and Allan Schnaiberg, Urban Recycling and the Search for Sustainable Community Development. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; 2005. Editor, with Robert J. Brulle. Power, Justice, and the Environment: A Critical Appraisal of the Environmental Justice Movement. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

 [2] These include Global Action Research Center, the Center for Urban Transformation, the Santa Clara Center for Occupational Safety and Health, Global Response, Greenpeace USA, and International Rivers.

[3] David Naguib Pellow, What is Environmental Justice? Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2018.

 [4] Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism?

              Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2018.

[5] Ibram X. Kendi, How to be an Antiracist. New York: One World, a division of Penguin

              Random House, 2019.

[6] Kendi has had a volatile career lately. In 2020 he moved to Boston University to establish the Center for Antiracist Research. Allegations of his mismanagement of the Center in 2023 led to a university investigation, which cleared Kendi’s name. But the ensuing malaise surrounding the Center precipitated his resignation and appointment to head the newly established Howard University Institute for Advanced Study in early 2025.The BU Center closed it’s doors in June, 2025.

[7] DiAngelo does suggest ways to get involved in collective action in What it Means to be White, chapter 18.

Roll On Mississippi

                                                                  Roll on Mississippi!

Renee Cole Good and Alex Pretti

Volumes are being written and posted on all kinds of media about the Trump-induced crisis in the Twin Cities. As a left populist I generally support the courageous people in the streets demanding that Ice leave their communities. I also commend the stances of Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz and Attorney General Keith Ellison supporting the constitutional rights of citizens to peaceful protest (1st Amendment), the right against ‘unwarranted’ search and seizure (4^th Amendment), the right to due process (5^th Amendment) and even the rights to, with license, bear arms in the case of the murder of Alex Pretti (2^nd Amendment).

Border Czar Tom Homan was sent to Minnesota to change the optics and tone of the crackdown after public outrage over the killings of Renee Cole Good and Alex Pretti reached Republican constituencies and their elected representatives. But in his press briefing Thursday Homan referred to the ‘rotations’ of personnel in and out of the Minnesota ‘theater.’ That sparked alarm from keen observers who noted that the language of rotations in and out of theaters is military terminology normally used to describe wartime operations against a foreign enemy.[1]

Historian Timothy Snyder talks about how authoritarian regimes seek to narrow physical and psychological borders between those who belong (us) and those who don’t (them-foreigners). The MAGA movement has conducted a decade long campaign to separate Brown immigrants from the Americans via its mean-spirited rhetoric toward them. The rule of law is meant to govern relations between those of ‘us’ who belong. The rules of war are meant to be employed against ‘them,’ the enemies in our midst. And because they are everywhere amongst us, and because many of us accept their presence, we also become the enemy.

This allows the regime to engage in lawless activity (abridging constitutional rights) to enforce immigration law everywhere in the country. Thus, everyplace that condones the presence of undocumented immigrants is treated as enemy territory that can dealt with by an occupying army. In this way the border is tightened until no place is outside of it. This time around Trump has used the trifecta of agencies under the Department of Homeland Security to narrow the border so that no place is outside of it geographically.[2]

 It is instructive that the Minnesota campaign was initially headed up by Border Parol Commander Greogory Bovino; and equally noteworthy that the more highly ranked ‘Border Czar’ Tom Homan was assigned to put a better face on things. The Border Patrol’s legal jurisdiction is anywhere inside the US that’s within 100 miles of the border. The Twin Cities are well over 200 miles from the border. The Patrol’s reach has been extended ‘illegally’ as it engages wantonly in an ‘illegal’ campaign of what can only be described as state-sponsored terrorism.  Governor Walz recognized this danger early. He characterized the activities of ICE against pro-Palestinian Muslims as akin to a ‘modern-day Gestapo’ last May.[3] We know Trump is thin-skinned. Maybe he’s getting his revenge with this siege of Minnesota.

 

Consumed by the Gumbo from Louisiana to Minnesota

Those of you who follow me know that I write about the Red Nation- Blue Nation Divide in America, and you know that my message is not optimistic. I believe we are two nations based upon widely divergent notions of what it means to be American.[4] The neo-fascist blitzkrieg of Trump’s second term has only served to deepened the Red-Blue Divide.

How poignant it is that this crisis is unfolding along the upper reaches of the mighty Mississippi River, that great artery that is the spine of the continent and has been central to the drama of settler colonial Manifest Destiny. St Louis at mid-river was the principal jumping off point for hordes of pioneers surging westward to make new lives for themselves.

Near the river’s mouth lies New Orleans, perhaps the most unique of American cities. The American historical project everywhere else is driven Anglo-Saxons, their Protestantism and their approach to slavery. New Orleans was founded in 1718 by the French. It became part of a three-cornered trading circuit between Saint-Dominque (present day Haiti) and Havana Cuba. Under Spanish rule for the last third of the 18^th century New Orleans saw greater liberty of slaves and softer boundaries between Europeans and Africans. That produced a rich cultural ‘gumbo’ with a Latin flavor and a profound African presence at its core.

Somewhere in its lower middle reaches lies Memphis, the place where Martin Luther King was assassinated as he prepared to lead a march of striking sanitation workers. That was as he was leading the national mobilization for the Poor People’s Campaign, the precursor to Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, Bernie Sanders’ two presidential runs and the whole left populist project for multiracial democracy today.

Finally, near the origins of the great river we come to the Twin Cities. Very White terrain, but with a proud history of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL) founded in 1915 with roots in the Populist Party of the 1890s. Minnesota, home of Senator and Vice-President Hubert Humphrey, the ultra-liberal firebrand who pushed the national Democratic Party to include a strong civil rights plank in its 1948 platform. Governor Tim Walz and US Senators Amy Klobuchar and Tina Smith are all DFL members as well as being members of the National Democratic Party.[5] To top it off, very close to the origins of the river as it flows out of Lake Itasca near the Canadian border the great American social justice troubadour Bob Dylan was born in Hibbing.

So Minnesota has a proud history of social consciousness and support of social justice causes, and since 2016 the state has also supported the racial justice movement enveloping the country. The state has gone through a prolonged period of trauma that began with the unnecessary police killing of a Black man, Philando Castile, in 2016 in a St. Paul suburb. Black Lives Matter protests following Castille’s shooting included large numbers of young White people. And the governor at the time, Mark Dayton exclaimed that the shooting would not have happened if Castille were White.[6]

We all know how the entire nation, on lockdown with the COVID -19 pandemic, was traumatized by the police murder of George Floyd in 2020. Legions of White youth went to the streets in protest swelling the ranks of the Black Lives Matter Movement in the Twin Cities and across the country.

Long thought of as a very White place as big metropolitan areas go, the Twin Cities have been browning steadily as this century unfolds. A city of over 400,000 residents, Minneapolis is around 40% POC. The slightly smaller St. Paul (308,000 pop.) is about 45% POC.

The region is home to the largest Somali immigrant population in the country. In 2018 the Somalian Ilhan Omar joined the US House of Representatives as the Democrats regained control of that chamber.  The African American Muslim Keith Ellison, already a Congressman, was elected Minnesota Attorney General that same year. Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey is Jewish, and the mayor of St. Paul, Kaohly Her, is a Laotian American. What is still predominantly White electorate is taking leadership from POC, a key element in building a multiracial American nationalism.[7]

This Upper Mississippi ‘gumbo’ is coming to serve as a fitting complement to that legendary stew from the other end of the great river. Perhaps there is a flow up the river as well. Fittingly these two metropolitan areas brace the river, this watershed for a continent, taking in elements from the Atlantic to the Pacific and enriching the spine of the entire country. Multiracial elements seep into the organic life of the country.

At some point the sociological overtakes the biological and multiracialism becomes a fact of national life. One nation --- the Red one, wants to deny reality and is willing to destroy the constitution, the rule of law and people in a desperate effort to go back to a White supremacist past. My nation --- the Blue nation embraces national reality. We aspire to more deeply ingrain the promises of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution around popular sovereignty, individual liberty and the equality of individuals before the law.

Roll on mighty river! Keep delivering us those juices that come to you from the peoples who inhabit this great continent. And in doing so, turn the ‘blues’ born upon your lower reaches to  Blue nationalism pushing back across the countryside, before you reach the great blue sea!  

---

[1] ‘Frightening’: Tom Homan Uses War Jargon to Describe ICE Operations in Minnesota | Common Dreams

[2] Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Customs and Border Protection and Border Patrol. See https://snyder.substack.com/p/lies-and-lawlessness?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=1fiys&triedRedirect=true

 [3] Tim Walz calls ICE 'Gestapo.' Agency calls comparison 'sickening.'

[4] Two Nations, Not One, Wednesday, February 1, 2017.  Read more extensively at on my two nations thesis at https://damanipolitics.blogspot.com

[5] For the uniqueness of New Orleans and its connection to Havanna and Haiti see Ned Sublette, The World That Made New Orleans. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 2008.

[6]The DFL controls four of Minnesota's eight United States House of Representatives seats, both of its United States Senate seats, the Minnesota Senate, and all other statewide offices, including the Governor of Minnesota, making it the dominant party in the state. Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party - Wikiwand

 [7] Dayton: Castile shooting wouldn't have happened if he were white | MPR News

[8] For more on what we call the multiracial nationalism site Johnson Vernon. D. and Kelsie Benslimane. 2, “Practical Representation and the Multiracial Social Movement.” Journal of Educational Controversy 12 (1): 2017, pp. 13-23, http://www.cedar.wwu.edu/jec/vol12/iss1/5

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Revolution from Within: The Project of Ibram Kendi X

 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.