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.