How to Be an Antiracist
Ibram X. Kendi
I agree with Kendi, that I used to be racist most of the time. I am changing. I am no longer identifying with racists by claiming to be “not racist.” And I’ve come to see that the movement from racist to antiracist is always ongoing—it means standing ready to fight at racism’s intersections with other bigotries.
A racist idea is any idea that suggests one racial group is inferior or superior to another racial group in any way. Sadly, the implicit meaning of “race” to the vast majority of the world includes a racist hierarchy that puts one ethnic group above another. It certainly cannot mean that to an antiracist or someone struggling to become an antiracist.
I agree with Kendi that “race” is fundamentally a power construct of blended difference that lives socially. Race creates new forms of power for the powerful. But it also contains many surplus and implicit meanings that the vast majority of mankind without power also believes as a tenuous hold on power that is fictional.
This critique is basically about Chapter 4, about Xendi’s clinging to the word “Race”. I loved his first book because his ideas were growing and in transition, not yet congealed into an ideology, which may describe his ideas in this book. In “Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America” Ibram X. Kendi was still growing and exploring his ideas, and I especially admired his ability to integrate and go beyond Ta_Nehisi Coates. I especially loved his description of Bill Clinton’s avowal that the human genome offered proof that we are all one race, what Kendi in this book calls a:
BIOLOGICAL ANTIRACIST: One who is expressing the idea that the races are meaningfully the same in their biology and there are no genetic racial differences.
But now he goes on to say that “Only racists shy away from the R-word—racism is steeped in denial.” And this is the opposite conclusion that I arrive at: We need to remove “Race” from our language as a key step in becoming antiracist. The word “Race” has become a pillar upholding way too many racist ideas. We need to cut that pillar down.
He also says: “It is one of the ironies of antiracism that we must identify racially in order to identify the racial privileges and dangers of being in our bodies.” And I firmly do not believe that. We have many, way too many ways to identify racist ideas and institutions in our society. We don’t need to identify racially and we are all better off if we don’t hold on to racist ideas in any way. This is not assimilationist. It is a call for cultural diversity, but outside the shackles of racist racial concepts.
“Biological racism rests on two ideas: that the races are meaningfully different in their biology and that these differences create a hierarchy of value.” Kendi at one point in his past accepted the first, while he rejected the biological racial hierarchy, but he came to see that this was a doubtful ploy by racists to sneak in their racist ideals.
By elevating certain inherited abilities in abused minorities, such as improvisational decision making, that could explain why they predominate in certain fields such as jazz, rap, and basketball, and not in other fields, such as classical music, chess, and astronomy; by acknowledging certain almost irrelevant and certainly lower status ways that Blacks are superior, the racists justified a biological racist distinction that empowers other racist biological ideas that are even more abusive. By upholding a biological distinction between “races” racists could hold on to the fundamental racist idea of a biological sanction for racist hierarchies, and gave them power to subjugate. Racist power at once made biological racial distinction and biological racial hierarchy the components of biological racism.
One of the “great truths” this hid was “that in genetic terms, all human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9 percent the same.”
As Kendi justifiably points out, when geneticists compare different white populations to those in Africa, they find there is more genetic diversity between populations within Africa than between Africa and the rest of the world. Race is a genetic mirage.
Yet, even with this scientific proof, segregationists like Nicholas Wade figure if humans are 99.9 percent genetically alike, then they must be 0.1 percent distinct. And this distinction must be racial. And that 0.1 percent of racial distinction has grown exponentially over the millennia. And it is their job to search heaven and earth for these exponentially distinct races. This argument is not just fallacious and makes no sense; it is increasingly so. Segregationists and non-racists will find it increasingly impossible to cling to.
Anyway, they are not the real problem. The real problem are the millions of racists who believe their racist ideas, including “Race”, are just common sense. It is their implicit positions that have become untenable.
Even Christian fundamentalist Ken Ham, the co-author of One Race One Blood, asked in an op-ed in 2017. “For one, point out the common ground of both evolutionists and creationists: the mapping of the human genome concluded that there is only one race, the human race.”
Given all these sensible positions that Kendi emphasises and describes it came as a total shock to me that he next justified continuing to uphold and promulgate the word “Race”.
He begins by asserting that: “Race is a mirage but one that humanity has organized itself around in very real ways.”
This makes no sense to me as a justification, because humanity has also organized itself in very real ways around racist ideas, especially in America; and in no way does this justify us to hold on to them.
He next challenges an economic interpretation of race by asserting that “imagining away the existence of races in a racist world is as conserving and harmful as imagining away classes in a capitalistic world—it allows the ruling races and classes to keep on ruling.”
This seems self contradictory too. Doing away with classes is a very legitimate goal of modern politcal movements, with the expre3ss goal of taking power away from ruling classes, just as taking away the idea of races is an essential part of taking power away from ruling ethnic groups.
His next justification is a bit more powerful. He says: “They fail to realize that if we stop using racial categories, then we will not be able to identify racial inequity.”
This makes no sense to me. Surely we can identify racist ideas if we destroy the concept of race. If we rail against the concept of race, we begin to destroy racist ideas embedded within the concept of race, such as a hierarchy of inferiority and superiority.
And too, we can still identify economic and social inequities. Especially if races don't exist, the fictions that racisst create become even clearer fictions , and all our energies can be devoted to tearing them down.
Kendi is just plain wrong when he says that if “we cannot identify racial inequity, then we will not be able to identify racist policies. If we cannot identify racist policies, then we cannot challenge racist policies.”
That's just silly. Racist policies, like legal insistence on money for bail and voting can still easily be seen. After all, there are still ethnic groups of blacks and Hispanix to analyze, and arguments become even more powerful when all colored groups are united with other lower economic groups. And there are still huge inequities, especially internationally when we compare the developed northern against the undevelop southern world.
“Terminating racial categories is potentially the last, not the first, step in the antiracist struggle.”
Terminating racial categories may be difficult but may be easier than terminating implicit racist ideas in common sense views, and in many institutions like the police.
Replacing racist “racial” categories with anti-racist ethnic categories does not need to be the first step, and in fact it may be much too difficult in this world where “race” is embedded in all legal canons to be a first step; but for an antiracist it is an essential step in struggling against the racist ideas that dominate our world,
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Popular Highlights in this book
Racist ideas make people of color think less of themselves, which makes them more vulnerable to racist ideas. Racist ideas make White people think more of themselves, which further attracts them to racist ideas.Highlighted by 32,742 Kindle readers- Racism is a marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities.Highlighted by 29,162 Kindle readers
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| Be Antiracist | Four Hundred Souls | Antiracist Baby | How To Be a (Young) Antiracist | Goodnight Racism | How to Raise an Antiracist | |
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| Reflect on your understanding of race and discover ways to work toward an antiracist future with this guided journal from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of How to Be an Antiracist and Stamped from the Beginning. | A "choral history" of African Americans covering 400 years of history in the voices of 90 writers, edited by the bestselling, National Book Award-winning historian Ibram X. Kendi and award-winning historian Keisha N. Blain. | A #1 New York Times Bestseller! From the National Book Award-winning author How to Be an Antiracist comes a picture book that empowers parents and children to uproot racism in our society and in ourselves. | The #1 New York Times bestseller that sparked international dialogue is now a book for young adults! | National Book Award–winning and New York Times bestselling author Ibram X. Kendi (How to Be an Antiracist, Antiracist Baby) returns with a new picture book that serves as a modern bedtime classic. | The book that every parent, caregiver, and teacher needs to raise the next generation of antiracist thinkers, from the author of How to Be an Antiracist |
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A Must Read—Powerful Book for Today!!!
This book was written at a very important moment in history. Antiracist movements became very prevalent globally, and Dr. Kendi’s book could not have been written at a more important moment. In many ways it gives visibility into the experiences of people who are confronted by institutional racism. The author explains racism in the context of a set of beliefs rather than some inborn genetic quality. Often, when discussions of racism occur, people shy away from them. As Dr. Kendi explained in interviews, this definition of racism is often flawed. Quite frequently, people will say things like, “I don’t have a racist bone in my body.” Thus, by linking racism to biology instead of to a set of beliefs and actions, no progress is made when it comes to discussing racism or making the necessary institutional changes to end it. Similar to this work, I also explore racism in my book The Real Wakandas of Africa. To add to this I include the rich history of African people before modern racism infected the world. In this era, Africans created beautiful civilizations. For example, Africans constructed the tallest building in the world. This building contains as much stone as 30 Empire State buildings. It was the tallest building in the world for more than 4000 years. To add to this, surgical procedures of African people were quite complex. African doctors conducted surgery on the eye to remove cataracts 700 years ago, and performed cesarean sections in Central Africa with antiseptics hundreds of years before they were successfully completed with antiseptics in Europe or America. When it came to metalworking, they were equally as advanced. For example, they smelted carbon steel 2000 years before Americans or Europeans were aware of this process. Likewise, in the field of astronomy, they charted star systems for hundreds of years before they were known by scientists in America. West Africans constructed the longest wall in the world for which I also wrote a book called: The Great Wall of Africa: The Empire of Benin’s 10,000 Mile Long Wall. Dr. Kendi is one of the few scholars who has a comprehensive knowledge about Africa’s precolonial contribution to history. Too frequently, this history has been ignored by books that discuss racism, and the exclusion of this leads to a misunderstanding of Black history. While Dr. Kendi’s book is not centered around these ideas, it is a genuinely important book on racism and antiracism. Pick up a copy today!
Top reviews from other countries
H. Poole
Great book - thorough, helpful and hopeful
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 11, 2024
