CANR
WORK TITLE: How to Be an Antiracist
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.ibram.org/
CITY: Gainesville
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
LAST VOLUME: CA 398
https://history.ufl.edu/directory/current-faculty/ibram-x-kendi/ * http://www.ibram.org/#!bio/c1ktj * https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/book-party/wp/2016/04/15/the-racism-of-good-intentions/?utm_term=.a7d3ca6c59d6
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born August 13, 1982, New York, NY; married Sadiqa Kendi (a pediatric emergency physician), 2013; children: Imani.
EDUCATION:Florida A&M University, B.A., 2004; Temple University, M.A., 2007, Ph.D., 2010.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, historian, and educator. State University of New York, Albany, and College at Oneonta, former assistant professor; University of Florida, Gainesville, former assistant professor; American University, Washington, DC, professor at the School of International Service and director of Antiracist Research & Policy Center. Has also worked as a journalist. Appearances on local, national and international radio and television outlets include National Public Radio, the Public Broadcasting System, CNN, Al-Jazeera, the National Broadcasting Company (CBS), and Sirius XM radio.
AWARDS:Best Scholarly Book Award, Diopian Institute for Scholarly Advancement, 2012, for The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965- 1972; National Book Award for Nonfiction, 2016, for Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America; Guggenheim fellow, 2019.
WRITINGS
Author of introduction to The Souls of Black Folk: With “The Talented Tenth” and “The Souls of White Folk” by W.E.B. Dubois, Penguin Books (New York, NY), 2017. Contributor to periodicals, including the Journal of African American Studies, Journal of African American History, Journal of Social History, Journal of Black Studies, the New York Times, the Guardian, Time, and the Washington Post. Coeditor of the “Black Power Series,” New York University Press; served as associate editor of AAIHS Blog.
SIDELIGHTS
Ibram X. Kendi is an expert in black studies and the author (as Ibram H. Rogers) of The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965-1972. The volume charts the history and ideologies of the Black Campus Movement (BCM), with a particular focus on the BCM’s impact on higher education. Kendi reports that black students organized protests on campuses across the country, and these protests eventually led to new racial policies at several universities. Protests were especially effective at historically white universities, and thus black students were responsible for effecting positive change in reluctant institutions. New policies led to an increase in black faculty, black administrators, and black students, Kendi reports. It also led to the implementation of affirmative action and to the creation of black studies programs. Kendi draws on the BCM’s missions, its accomplishments, and subsequent backlash, all by drawing on extensive archival research. Indeed, the author’s study tracks the effects of the BCM at over one hundred universities and colleges.
Commenting on the volume in a lengthy Inside Higher Ed Online interview, Kendi told Mitch Smith that “the principal legacy of the Black Campus Movement is the widespread and public embrace of diversity and multiculturalism in higher education. The arms of this current embrace were molded and energized by the BCM from 1965 to 1972. Publicly and officially, like the BCM’s leaders once did, the vast majority of colleges and universities now profess a desire and commitment to … racial equality, eradicating discrimination and diversifying its students, staff, faculty, administration and curriculum.” Kendi added: “At the same time, the language of the BCM’s ideals—equality, discrimination, justice—are now being used to maintain white privilege and racism in higher education. I coined the notion of egalitarian exclusion, which I define in the book’s epilogue as ‘the prohibition or limiting of nonwhites, nonwhite authority, or race-specific initiatives using derivatives of equality or ‘reverse’ discrimination as justifications.’ Nowhere is this more obvious than in the current (and historic) debate over affirmative action at historically white colleges and universities.”
Kendi additionally remarked that college administrators who read the book “can discover how far black students were willing to go at one point in history (and potentially in the future), even to the depths of death, to combat injustice and racism; how far higher education has come; how, fortunately or unfortunately, black students had to assume the steering wheel of racial progress; and how and where black students are telling us we still need to go.” Critics largely praised the author’s insights, and The Black Campus Movement won the Diopian Institute for Scholarly Advancement Best Scholarly Book Award. As A.O. Edmonds put it in Choice: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries, “The most impressive aspect of Rogers’s work is his prodigious archival research.” Edmonds then went on to declare that “this is an important study.”
With Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, Kendi traces the history of racism in the United States, and he does so by profiling the segregationist efforts of five pivotal men: the abolitionist and social reformer William Lloyd Garrison, the Puritan minister Cotton Mather, President Thomas Jefferson, political activist Angela Davis, and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois. While some of these figures advocated for freedom and equality, they did so in ways that maintained the racist paradigm. For instance, Kendi notes that antiracists who blame racism on discrimination miss the deeper sources of racism and thus fail to address them. These deeper sources are many pronged; while segregationists believe black people are inferior, some believe these “inferiorities” are genetic (and thus impossible to fix) while others believe that these “inferiorities” are behavioral (and thus can be fixed). Either way, both beliefs are racist. Thus, by beginning in the 1600s and extending to the present, Kendi’s volume charts the insidious influence of race on American history.
According to Carlos Lozada in the Washington Post, Stamped from the Beginning is an “engrossing and relentless intellectual history of prejudice in America.” Lozada explained: “The battles over race in America would be fierce but simple if they pitted only racists against anti-racists, segregation against freedom. However, Kendi also calls out the assimilationists—those who seek to combat racial disparity but find blame in both the oppressed and the oppressors and, in the author’s view, are complicit in racism’s endurance and evolution.” As a Kirkus Reviews Online contributor put it, “Racism is the enduring scar on the American consciousness. In this ambitious, magisterial book, Kendi reveals just how deep that scar cuts and why it endures, its barely subcutaneous pain still able to flare.” Thomas J. Davis, writing in Library Journal, lauded the book as well, asserting that “Kendi’s provocative egalitarian argument combines prodigious reading and research with keen insights into the manipulative power of racist ideologies.”
When Kendi began his research for his next book, How to Be an Antiracist, he had some definite ideas about the people who proffered racist ideas and about how racist policies came into being, from slavery to mass incarceration. His research led him to go beyond the belief that racist ideas and policies stemmed from hatefulness and ignorance and that racist policies were the product of racist ideas. Instead, Kendi came to believe that racist policies were the outcome of self-interest within the political, economic, and cultural spheres. Furthermore, he came to believe that racist policies resulted in racist beliefs and the rationalization of such beliefs. “Dr. Kendi defines racist ideas expansively: any idea that there is something inherently better or worse about any racial group,” wrote New York Times contributor Jennifer Schuessler, adding: “There is no such thing as ‘not racist ideas, policies or people, he argues, only racist and antiracist ones.”
While Kendi provides a critique of racism in How to Be an Antiracist, he does so in the form of a memoir in which he also addresses his own racist attitudes. Each chapter in the book presents a specific aspect of racism, focusing on topics such as power, biology, ethnicity, body, culture, and behavior. Furthermore, he highlights examples of these issues via episodes from his own life. “Deftly weaving his personal experiences with the history of racism in America and current racial inequalities, he offers assessments of the ways that racism in America is shaped and perpetuated by power structures, ethnicity, culture, behavior, class, color, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity, and the steps he thinks we need to take to address them.” wrote Terry Hartle in a review for the Christian Science Monitor.
Kendi writes that coming from a middle-class background he initially believed during his teenage years that black people in poor socioeconomic situations could only blame themselves for their situation. Eventually, Kendi notes that he went on to became a racist in terms of his views of white people. Eventually, he came to differentiate between white people in general and racist policymakers. Kendi does not write that he has eliminated all of his racist attitudes towards white people but that his attitudes are evolving and changing toward a more non-racist philosophy. In an interview with Vanessa Williams for the Washington Post, Kendi revealed why he decided to make his book part memoir and open up about his own racist feelings, noting: “I thought that it would help people if they saw me constantly critiquing myself and looking in the mirror. If I opened up, it would open them up to essentially do the same thing to themselves and for themselves.”
Kendi ends his book with a chapter titled “Survival.” In it, Kendi addresses his diagnosis of colon cancer and discusses it in terms of denials to beat cancer with denials about overcoming racism. He goes to discuss his battle with cancer and overcoming what he refers to as “metastatic” racism. Kendi’s “unsparing honesty helps readers, both white and people of color, navigate this difficult intellectual territory,” wrote a Kirkus Reviews contributor, who went on to call How to Be an Antiracist “not an easy read but an essential one.” Writing for the Washington Post, Randall Kennedy noted: “The vexing American race question, retains a towering and tragic salience. In grappling with it, we could use Kendi’s candor, independence and willingness to be self-critical.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, February 1, 2016, Rebecca Vnuk, review of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America.
Choice, November, 2012, A.O. Edmonds, review of The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965-1972.
Christian Science Monitor, September 20, 2019, Terry Hartle, “‘How to Be an Antiracist’ Opens a Vital Dialogue on Race.”
Kirkus Reviews, May 15, 2019, review of How To Be an Antiracist.
Library Journal, February 15, 2016, Thomas J. Davis, review of Stamped from the Beginning.
Washington Post, April 15, 2016, Carlos Lozada, review of Stamped from the Beginning; August 23, 2019, Vanessa Williams, “For Ibram Kendi, Being ‘Not Racist’ Doesn’t Cut It. He Insists That We, and He, Be ‘Antiracist'”; August 26, 2019, Randall Kennedy, “Book World: A Black Author Grapples with His Own Racism.”
ONLINE
American University, https://www.american.edu/ (November 19, 2019), faculty profile.
Ibram X. Kendi, http://www.ibram.org (November 4, 2016).
Inside Higher Ed, https://www.insidehighered.com/ (May 1, 2012), Mitch Smith, author interview.
Kirkus Reviews, https://www.kirkusreviews.com/ (November 4, 2016), review of Stamped from the Beginning.
New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/ (August 6, 2019), Jennifer Schuessler, “Ibram X. Kendi Has a Cure for America’s ‘Metastatic Racism.’”
Pen America, https://pen.org/ (September 12, 2019), Lily Philpott, “’Paint the World with Wortds’: A Pen Ten Interview with Ibram X. Kendi.”
Salon.com, https://www.salon.com/ (October 11, 2019), Chauncy Devega, “Ibram X. Kendi on ‘How to Be an Antiracist’: Racism and Capitalism ‘Will Ultimately Die Together.'”
Washingtonian, https://www.washingtonian.com/ (October 23, 2019), Robert Brunner, “Interview: Ibram X. Kendi Takes a Hard Look at Racism—and Himself.”
Ibram X. Kendi is a New York Times bestselling author and the founding director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University. A professor of history and international relations and a frequent public speaker, Kendi is a columnist at The Atlantic. He is the author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, and The Black Campus Movement, which won the W.E.B. Du Bois Book prize.
He has published numerous essays in periodicals, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, The Huffington Post, and The Root. Kendi has received research fellowships, grants, and visiting appointments from a variety of universities, foundations, professional associations, and libraries, including the American Historical Association, Library of Congress, National Academy of Education, Lyndon B. Johnson Library & Museum, Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, Brown University, Princeton University, Duke University, University of Chicago, and UCLA. He is a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow. Before entering academia, Kendi trained and worked as a journalist. Kendi earned his undergraduate degrees from Florida A&M University, and his doctorate from Temple University. His third book, How to Be an Antiracist, will be published in 2019 by One World, an imprint of Random House.
Ibram X. Kendi
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Ibram X. Kendi
Born
Ibram H. Rogers
August 13, 1982 (age 37)
Jamaica, Queens, United States
Occupation
Writer, historian
Nationality
American
Education
Florida A&M University, Temple University
Notable awards
Winner of the 2016 National Book Award for Nonfiction
Spouse
Sadiqa Kendi
Children
Imani Kendi
Ibram X. Kendi (born 1982) is an American author and historian located at American University.[1][2][3][4][5][6] He won the 2016 National Book Award for Nonfiction for his book Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which was published by Nation Books.[7]
Contents
1
Life
2
Career
3
References
4
External links
Life[edit]
Kendi was born as Ibram H. Rogers in 1982 in Jamaica, Queens. He received his undergraduate degree in Journalism and African American Studies from Florida A&M in 2004, and earned his doctorate in African American Studies in 2010 from Temple University.[5]
In 2013 he married Sadiqa in Jamaica where they unveiled their new last name, "Kendi", which means "the loved one" in the language of the Meru people of Kenya.[8] He is a New York Knicks fan.[9]
In January 2018, a colonoscopy indicated that Kendi had cancer. A further test revealed that he had colon cancer that had spread into his liver. After six months of chemotherapy and surgery that summer, he was cancer free.[10]
Career[edit]
Kendi is a leading scholar of race and discriminatory policy in America.[11] He has published a number of essays in both books and academic journals, including The Journal of African American History, Journal of Social History, Journal of Black Studies, Journal of African American Studies, and The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture.[6] He is the author of three books: The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965–1972, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, and How To Be An Antiracist.[12]
Kendi teaches history and international relations in the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) and School of International Service (SIS) at American University in Washington, D.C. He is the founding director of the Anti-Racist Research and Policy Center at American University.[13] He was previously a professor of African-American History at the University of Florida.
Ibram Kendi
Professor & Director, Antiracist Research & Policy Center
History
Contact
(202) 885-2244
CAS - History
Battelle Tompkins - 131
Additional Positions at AU
Professor, School of International Service
Director, Antiracist Research & Policy Center
Degrees
PhD, African American Studies. Temple University, 2010;
MA, African American Studies. Temple University, 2007;
BS, African American Studies, & BS, Journalism, Florida A&M University, 2004
Bio
Ibram X. Kendi is a New York Times bestselling author and the founding director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University. A professor of history and international relations and a frequent public speaker, Kendi is a contributing writer at The Atlantic. He is the author of THE BLACK CAMPUS MOVEMENT, which won the W.E.B. Du Bois Book Prize, and STAMPED FROM THE BEGINNING: THE DEFINITIVE HISTORY OF RACIST IDEAS IN AMERICA, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. At 34 years old, he was the youngest ever winner of the NBA for Nonfiction. Stamped from the Beginning was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award, and it was nominated for a Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and a NAACP Image Award. Stamped was named to several Best Books of 2016 lists, including by the Boston Globe, The Root, The Washington Post, and Buzzfeed. The Washington Post also named Stamped the most ambitious book of 2016. Kendi has published essays in numerous periodicals, including The New York Times, The Guardian, Time, and The Washington Post. He has published fourteen academic essays in books and referred journals, including The Journal of African American History, Journal of Social History, and Journal of Black Studies. Kendi is the co-editor of the new Black Power Series with NYU Press. He has provided commentary on a host of local, national, and international radio and television outlets, including NPR, PBS, CNN, CBS, BBC, Al-Jazeera, NBC, Democracy Now!, and Sirius XM. He has received research fellowships, grants, and visiting appointments from a variety of universities, foundations, professional associations, and libraries, including the American Historical Association, Library of Congress, National Academy of Education, Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, Brown University, Princeton University, and Duke University. He was named to The Root 100 2017, which listed him as the 29th most influential African American between the ages of 25 and 45 and the second most influential college professor. He was recently honored as a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow. Kendi’s next book is HOW TO BE AN ANTIRACIST published by One World, an imprint of Random House. CONTACTS Media Inquiries: Rebecca Basu, Senior Public Relations Manager, American University, basu@american.edu Speaking Agent: Kathryn Santora, Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau, ksantora@penguinrandomhouse.com Publicity Inquiries on HOW TO BE AN ANTIRACIST: Maria Braeckel, Penguin Random House, mbraeckel@randomhouse.com; or Stacey Stein, Penguin Random House, ststein@penguinrandomhouse.com Literary Agent: Ayesha Pande, ayesha@pandeliterary.com For all other matters, contact Rachel Lee, raylee@american.edu.
See Also
Ibram X. Kendi Website
Ibram X. Kendi Twitter
Ibram X. Kendi Facebook
Ibram X. Kendi Instagram
For the Media
To request an interview for a news story, call AU Communications at 202-885-5950 or submit a request.
AU Experts
Teaching
Spring 2019
SISU-296 Selected Topics:Non-Recurring: Malcolm X and Human Rights
AU Experts
Area of Expertise
antiracism, racism, modern American and African-American history, racial inequality
Additional Information
Ibram X. Kendi is an award-winning scholar of racism and antiracism and a New York Times best-selling author. His second book, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (Nation, 2016), won the 2016 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
For the Media
To request an interview for a news story, call AU Communications at 202-885-5950 or submit a request.
Related Links
AU Media Relations
Ibram X. Kendi Has a Cure for America’s ‘Metastatic Racism’
In 2016, he was a surprise National Book Award winner for a sweeping history of ever-mutating American racism. Now, he’s back with a new book that outlines how to fight it.
Ibram X. Kendi, the author of “How to Be an Antiracist,” argues that there are not “not racist” ideas, policies or people, only racist and antiracist ones.
Credit...
Emma Howells for The New York Times
By Jennifer Schuessler
Aug. 6, 2019
28
WASHINGTON — Three years ago, when Ibram X. Kendi was up for the National Book Award, he thought he had no chance.
He was a little-known assistant professor at the University of Florida. His book, “Stamped From the Beginning,” a sweeping history of nearly five centuries of racist thought in America, had received admiring but sparse reviews.
“Before we walked over to the dinner, my wife asked me if I had written a speech,” Dr. Kendi recalled in an interview last month. “I hadn’t, but I wrote out a few notes just in case. When they called my name, I was shocked.”
It was barely a week after the 2016 election, and Dr. Kendi — at 34, among the youngest ever to win the nonfiction award — made his way onstage to deliver an eloquent speech nodding at the man just elected president, and paying tribute to “the human beauty in the resistance to racism.”
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Since then, he has given a lot more speeches — 46 so far this year alone. He has become one of the country’s most in-demand commentators on racism, and leads the new Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University, which recruited him as a full professor after the award.
It’s been a wild and fast ride to the top of his profession, with one terrifying detour thrown in. Midway through writing his new book, “How to Be an Antiracist,” out on Aug. 13, Dr. Kendi received a diagnosis of Stage 4 colon cancer, which has a five-year survival rate of about 12 percent.
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A recent scan, taken a year after he completed both chemotherapy and surgery, came back all clear. But Dr. Kendi — who turns 37 on publication day — isn’t taking anything for granted.
“I was pretty disciplined and determined before the diagnosis, but now I’ve taken it to a whole other level of seriousness,” he said. “Even though I’m young, I can’t imagine I have so much time. It forced me, compelled me, to take risks.”
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Dr. Kendi’s book “Stamped From the Beginning,” a sprawling history of nearly five centuries of racist ideas, won the 2016 National Book Award for nonfiction.
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Emma Howells for The New York Times
One of those risks is the center, which is still in the ramping-up stage. On a recent visit, it was a pristine but sparsely decorated warren of cubicles, but Dr. Kendi envisions it as a place that will not just study racist ideas, but develop public programs aimed at dismantling them.
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Another is “How to Be an Antiracist,” published by One World, an imprint of Random House. Part memoir, part social analysis, part polemic, it’s a book that, like its predecessor, seems to be arriving at exactly the right moment, as President Trump’s verbal attacks on lawmakers of color and on the city of Baltimore have spurred both intense outrage and debate on how to respond.
But it’s also a book that directs some of its most unstinting criticism at the author himself, and what he sees as his own racist ideas.
Dr. Kendi defines racist ideas expansively: any idea that there is something inherently better or worse about any racial group. There is no such thing as “not racist” ideas, policies or people, he argues, only racist and antiracist ones.
Among the most painful personal episodes he revisited, he said, is the one that opens the book: a speech he gave in a high school oratory contest named for Martin Luther King Jr., in which he assailed African-American youth for its supposed failures.
The thunderous applause from the mostly black audience gave him the confidence, he writes, that he could succeed in college, despite mediocre grades and test scores. The speech, which he listened to over and over, was also, in his view, deeply racist.
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“Every time I listened I felt embarrassed and ashamed, both personally and because of the spectacle I created, with thousands of people cheering on these racist ideas,” he said. “To think back about how I gained confidence by stepping conceptually on the heads of black people is still jarring to me.”
Dr. Kendi might seem to have been anointed as the latest in a line of charismatic (and usually male) African-American public intellectuals, stretching from W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke to Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cornel West.
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Dr. Kendi is the founding director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University, which takes an activist approach to scholarship.
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Emma Howells for The New York Times
But he is also emblematic of a new generation of young black historians who are working collaboratively to create new institutions, and find new ways of reaching the public.
His work “reflects the collective desire to produce innovative research that will not simply meet tenure requirements but transform the world,” said Keisha N. Blain, an associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh and president of the African-American Intellectual History Society, a 5-year-old group to which Dr. Kendi belongs.
Dr. Kendi was born Ibram Rogers in New York, to parents, both later ordained as ministers, who were deeply influenced by liberation theology and the Black Power movement. (He took the middle name Xolani, meaning “peace” in Zulu, and the shared surname Kendi, meaning “loved one” in Meru, in 2013, when he married Sadiqa Kendi, a pediatric emergency room physician.)
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At Stonewall Jackson High School in Manassas, Va., where the family moved when he was 15, he felt stranded academically, and lived down to the low expectations he thought his teachers and mainly white and Asian classmates had for him. “I was even saying I hate reading,” Dr. Kendi recalled. “I think I did read a few books on basketball, but for class I would typically get the CliffsNotes.”
He studied journalism at Florida A&M University, a historically black institution, and initially planned to be a sportswriter. After a few internships at newspapers, he enrolled in the graduate program in African-American studies at Temple University. His doctoral dissertation, published in 2012 as “The Black Campus Movement,” is a study of the 1960s student activism that led to the creation of the first black studies programs.
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Dr. Kendi at his graduation from Florida A&M University in 2004.
Credit...
via Carol Rogers
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And, with his brother Akil Rogers, left, and his parents, Carol and Larry Rogers in 2000.
Credit...
via Carol Rogers
Temple’s department was, and still is, led by Molefi Kete Asante, a leading theorist of Afrocentricism. That influence, Dr. Kendi says, was crucial to his own work, which classifies what he calls “assimilationist” ideas — the belief that African-American people and spaces should strive toward a standardized white norm — as inherently racist.
And he credits his dissertation adviser, Ama Mazama, a Guadeloupe-born scholar of African and Caribbean culture, with providing a model of what an “intellectual combatant” could be.
“She was just a master at being able to speak very softly while saying some of the most powerful things,” he said. “She loved intellectual struggle and never backed down.”
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Dr. Kendi — tall and trim, with long dreadlocks he wears pulled back and a fondness for West African cloth pocket squares — also speaks softly and carries enormous ambition.
After “The Black Campus Movement,” he planned to write a history of black studies. Instead, what was intended to be the first chapter, about the history of scientific racism, morphed into “Stamped From the Beginning.”
Writing a sprawling narrative history rather than a narrower monograph — and publishing it with a trade press, Nation Books, and not an academic one — was a risky move for a junior scholar without tenure.
Also risky was the subtitle, “The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America,” which was suggested by his publisher, to his initial resistance. “I thought it was arrogant,” Dr. Kendi said. (At least one scholarly reviewer agreed.)
But today, he embraces it as a way of boldly claiming space in a field — the intellectual history of race — that has been overwhelmingly dominated by white men.
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Dr. Kendi at the 2016 National Book Awards ceremony in New York.
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Beowulf Sheehan via National Book Foundation
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“I was writing this history as someone critical of racist ideas,” he said. “And one of the more prevailing racist ideas within scholarship was this idea that black people do not write definitive texts.”
Some scholars have questioned Dr. Kendi’s broad definition of racist ideas, which seems to ensnare just about everyone in American history, including Frederick Douglass, Du Bois and Barack Obama. (Mr. Obama’s celebrated 2008 speech on race, Dr. Kendi writes, mixed antiracist and assimilationist ideas).
But others have welcomed “Stamped” as a broad, accessible history that directly and unapologetically engages with the present.
“Once it existed, it was clear that we could use this kind of big-picture synthesis, which we haven’t had in a long time,” said Martha S. Jones, a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. “I think of Ibram as someone who really gives us not only the big historical signposts, but the deep rationale for why we should call racism racism.”
In keeping with his activist approach to scholarship, Dr. Kendi organized the inaugural Antiracist Book Festival, held last April, which drew roughly 3,000 people to hear a mix of junior and senior scholars, along with activists, novelists, poets, Y.A. authors, educators and publishing professionals.
In the final chapter of “How to Be an Antiracist,” Dr. Kendi connects his own cancer with the “metastatic racism” afflicting America. To cure it, he says, we must actively combat it, rather than taking comfort in the false neutrality of being “not racist.”
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“Racial inequalities are pervasive and persistent in every sector of society,” he said. “If a person does nothing in the face of racial inequities that are pervasive, if they don’t challenge them, what are they doing?”
Dr. Ibram X. Kendi
National Book Award-winning historian and author of Stamped From The Beginning
Photo Credit: Jeff Watts
Ibram X. Kendi is the National Book Award-winning author of Stamped From The Beginning: A Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America and How to Be an Antiracist.His relentless and passionate research puts into question the notion of a post-racial society and opens readers' and audiences' eyes to the reality of racism in America today. Kendi's lectures are sharp, informative, and hopeful, serving as a strong platform for any institution's discussions on racial discrimination.
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About Ibram X. Kendi
When Dr. Ibram X. Kendi won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2016 for a book about the history of racist ideas in America, some people felt a disconnect. Emerging from eight years of leadership under an African-American president, a narrative was building in America about the emergence of a post-racial society, colorblind to race and valuing merit over skin color. Kendi challenges this notion in his New York Times-bestselling book Stamped from the Beginning, taking an expansive view on race and racist ideas that spans from 15th century Europe until modern day America. Kendi’s insight on racist structures are the focus of his latest book, How to Be an Antiracist, which empowers readers and audiences to not only recognize the pervasive influence of racism and racist ideas, but to actively participate in dismantling it.
Kendi embarked on the research for his book under the assumption that the major producers of racist ideas were hateful and ignorant. And that borne from racist ideas were racist policies like slavery, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration. But as Kendi dug deeper and contextualized motives, he began to gain a new understanding of the cause and effect actually at play. He soon discovered that political, economic, and cultural self-interest are behind the creation of racist policies and these policies in turn create the racist ideas that rationalize the deep inequities in everything from wealth to health.
Ibram X. Kendi is Professor of History and International Relations and the Founding Director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University. He is a frequent public speaker who speaks with great expertise and compassion about the findings of his book and how they can fit into the national conversation on racial and social justice.
Kendi has received research fellowships, grants, and visiting appointments from a variety of universities, foundations, professional associations, and libraries, including the American Historical Association, Library of Congress, National Academy of Education, Spencer Foundation, Lyndon B. Johnson Library & Museum, Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, Brown University, Princeton University, Duke University, University of Chicago, and UCLA. Most recently, he was named a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow for his work.
In addition to winning the National Book Award, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas was also named a finalist for the 2016 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction and nominated for the 2016 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work in Nonfiction. The book was featured on many Best Books of 2016 lists, including in the Boston Globe, Kirkus, The Washington Post, The Root, Chicago Review of Books, and Buzzfeed.
Kendi has published numerous academic essays as well as op-eds in publications such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, Time, The Guardian, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. He is also the author of the award-winning book, The Black Campus Movement: Black Students and the Racial Reconstitution of Higher Education, 1965-1972. In 2018, he was named a columnist for a new vertical of The Atlantic focusing on ideas, opinion, and political and cultural commentary.
“Paint the World with Words”: A PEN Ten Interview with Ibram X. Kendi
By: Lily Philpott
September 17, 2019
The PEN Ten is PEN America’s weekly interview series. This week, PEN America’s Public Programs Manager Lily Philpott speaks with professor, columnist, and National Book Award Winner Ibram X. Kendi, author of the recently published book How to Be an Antiracist (One World, 2019).
1. What was the first book or piece of writing that had a profound impact on you?
I can’t say a single book or piece of writing, but a reading time that most profoundly impacted me. I started graduate school in the fall of 2005, I felt behind. My classmates kept mentioning all these books I had not read. I was not an avid reader in undergrad. That all changed. I embarked on a reading binge to catch up. I read over 100 books during my first year in graduate school, which profoundly impacted me, nurturing my love of reading. I’ve been avidly reading ever since.
2. How does your writing navigate truth? What role does narrative play in how you shape the truth in your work?
Navigating truth is my writing. As a scholar, I am not striving to be objective. I am striving to share the truth, even when the truth challenges me and my ideas. Truth is complicated. It is difficult to share the multi-layered truth in abstract ways. Narrative allows me to share truth in its personal and societal complexities.
“Writers point to the problem, to whether and what people need to resist.”
3. What does your writing process look like? How do you maintain momentum and remain inspired?
I tend to finish my research, clarify my thoughts, and organize my points before I begin writing books and essays. In other words, I judiciously prepare to write. If I haven’t completely finished my preparatory work, and I have to conduct research, clarify, and organize my thoughts while I write, then my writing is not as good. And when my writing is not as good, it is difficult to maintain momentum. It is difficult for me to remain inspired. Good writing inspires good writing.
4. What is one book or piece of writing you love that readers might not know about?
The book that came to my mind first is the book W.E.B. Du Bois once called his magnum opus. I’m not talking about The Souls of Black Folk. I’m talking about Black Reconstruction in America, published in 1935. The book is most known for taking to task the Jim Crow historian’s propaganda that the Reconstruction period following the Civil War was nothing but corrupt Black politicians and voters (and their northern allies) terrorizing innocent White southerners. But the writing, especially in the first few chapters and the last few chapters, is unbelievable.
5. How can writers affect resistance movements?
Writers point to the problem, to whether and what people need to resist. Take the problem of race in America. Racial inequities exist in nearly every sector of society. For example, Black people have been twice as likely as White people to be unemployed for nearly 50 years. The cause of this racial inequity is either there’s something wrong and inferior about Black workers, or racist policies. The writer can show how there’s nothing wrong with Black people, or any other American group for that matter, and document policies and power as the problem. Resistance movements typically challenge power and policy. The writer can point the way to resistance, to resistance movements.
6. What is your favorite bookstore, or library?
The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture is my favorite library. It is one of the largest repositories of information on people of African descent in the world, located in one of the global centers of Black life: Harlem. As a researcher of Black life, it is a palace, a historic palace that pretty much all the researchers of Black life have been using for decades.
7. What is the last book you read? What are you reading next?
I’m in the middle of David Blight’s brilliant biography of Frederick Douglass that absolutely deserved the Pulitzer Prize. Next up, I’ll be reading an advanced reading copy of Imani Perry’s Breathe: A Letter to My Sons. I have so much respect for Professor Perry’s work, and I have heard nothing but admiring comments about this book, which comes out in September.
“We are told stories to understand the world, to understand our place in this world. Stories are like the soundtrack of truth.”
8. What do you consider to be the biggest threat to free expression today? Have there been times when your right to free expression has been challenged?
I consider the assault against truth—scholars, journalists, science—to be the biggest threat against free expression. It seems as if everything is being reduced to opinion, leading people to dismiss truth they don’t like as a different opinion. If a fact undermines one’s perspective, then instead of changing one’s perspective, we have so many people who dismiss the facts. This is creating a situation where we don’t have the common ground of truth and science to freely express and debate our views.
9. How does your identity shape your writing? How does the history of where you are from shape your identity, and in turn, your writing?
My identity as an African American male allows me to use personal narrative when writing about anti-Black racism and discuss how it has affected me and other Black people like me. How does my history of where I am from shape my identity, and in turn, my writing? I answer that question in detail in my new book, How to Be an Antiracist.
10. What is the most daring thing you’ve ever put into words? Have you ever written something you wish you could take back?
Without question, the most daring thing I’ve ever put into the words is How to Be Antiracist. As someone who’s deeply private, I bore many of my most private moments to the world. I bore my most shameful moments to the world, especially those shameful times in my life when I thought there was something wrong with Black people, when I spent my time resisting Black people instead of racism, when I was being racist. The book is in part a confessional. I was daring to write the book in that way. But then again, I know the heartbeat of antiracism is confession.
11. What advice do you have for young writers?
The key to great writing is great ideas. There are many people who can put together a beautiful sentence. But what makes a sentence memorable is the idea it projects. I would advise spending as much time honing your ideas as you do honing your writing. And do not be shy about putting out new ideas, radically different ideas, ideas that turn the world upside down and right side up. Do not be shy about pushing (or pushing past) the bounds of grammar or writing conventions. Paint the world with words.
12. Which writers working today are you most excited by?
I’m excited by so many writers. Too many to name here, and I feel like I will leave someone out. So forgive me for not naming any. But I will say there are a legion of writers documenting racism and Black life and human beauty (and ugliness) in fascinating ways through fiction and nonfiction. They are my excitement.
13. Which writer, living or dead, would you most like to meet? What would you like to discuss?
I would like to meet W.E.B. Du Bois. I chronicle his adult life as this journey from a dueling consciousness of antiracist and assimilationist ideas to more a single consciousness of antiracism. I’d like to discuss this with him; and hear his reflections on his own ideological evolution. As someone who only recently started using personal narrative in my scholarship, I’d love to get Du Bois’s thoughts on this technique since he was a master at it. And of course, I’d be interested to learn what Du Bois thinks about the current racial politics in the United States and abroad.
14. Why do you think people need stories?
From infancy, we are told stories. We are told stories to understand the world, to understand our place in this world. Stories are like the soundtrack of truth.
15. Your newest book, How to Be an Antiracist, is infused with elements of memoir, along with instructions on how to be an antiracist. You have written that being antiracist requires regular, critical self-examination: How did you prepare to do that self-examination, and write those portions of your book? Are there memoirs you returned to as inspiration while doing so?
When I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X closely, I read about someone who is constantly self-examining himself and constantly self-critiquing himself and constantly changing. It is a story of personal growth and change at the same time Malcolm X is striving for societal growth and change. I kept returning to this book and its courage as I wrote How to Be an Antiracist.
Ibram X. Kendi is a New York Times bestselling author and the founding director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University. A professor of history and international relations and a frequent public speaker, Kendi is a columnist at The Atlantic. He is the author of Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, and The Black Campus Movement, which won the W.E.B. Du Bois Book Prize. Kendi lives in Washington, D.C.
Interview: Ibram X. Kendi Takes a Hard Look at Racism—and Himself
In his recent bestseller, the American University professor makes a thought-provoking case that it’s not possible to be “not racist.”
Written by Rob Brunner | Published on October 23, 2019
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Ibram X. Kendi. Photograph by Jeff Elkins
An indifferent student when he went to high school in Manassas, Ibram X. Kendi is today a renowned academic who founded American University’s Antiracist Research & Policy Center. How did he turn himself from an unmotivated kid into a public intellectual who’s redefining the way we think about race in America?
The answer can be found in his recent bestseller, How to Be an Antiracist. Part memoir, part argument, the book lays out a new framework for looking at racism—and reveals, in a remarkably personal way, the author’s own struggles with ideas that he now considers racist.
We met up with the soft-spoken professor in his unadorned office at AU. The conversation was as candid and eye-opening as his book.
Discussions about race and racism can be difficult—people don’t want to say the wrong thing. I’m a little nervous myself about having this conversation.
One reason these discussions are hard is because people believe that a racist is a bad person, that it’s a fixed category, so therefore they don’t want to be called that. People conceive of the term “racist” as an attack and also feel ashamed if they are indeed saying or doing something that’s racist. Having conversations about racism is deeply personal to people, so we have to recognize that. But at the same time, I don’t know of a way in which we can have a discussion about anything that is problematic about a person that’s going to be easy.
One of the hallmarks of white privilege is that white people feel they don’t have to have those difficult conversations—it’s somebody else’s problem. Is that starting to change?
I can’t necessarily ascertain whether white people are more likely to value and have those conversations, but I do know there is a sizable number having those conversations right now. Part of it is because they are looking out at American politics and at America’s racial polarization, and in many ways they can’t deny that some of the policies and forces and people in positions of power are there because of racism. I think that’s become inescapable for people.
Your book defines racism as ideas and policies that promote inequality. Many people consider the opposite of racism to be a lack of racism—either you’re racist or you’re not racist. You say the opposite is antiracism: actively opposing those ideas and policies. Why is that a more useful way of thinking about all of this?
First and foremost, many people hold both racist and antiracist ideas and support both racist and antiracist policies. How can you identify them as racist or antiracist in general? It’s conceptually impossible. But what we can do is, when they’re saying a racist idea, they’re being racist. When they’re saying an antiracist idea, they’re being antiracist.
In both cases, that means that “racist” and “antiracist” are descriptive terms. They describe what a person is saying or doing in a moment. People change from moment to moment. That’s more accurate, and it’s more reflective of the complexity of people as it relates to race and the complexity of humans in general. We live with contradictions.
How does the more traditional, Confederate-flag-waving sort of racist fit into that formulation?
I talk about two kinds of racists: segregationists and assimilationists. Segregationists have historically stated that black people are genetically or biologically—thereby permanently—inferior. All that can be done is to segregate them, deport them, enslave them, lynch them, or move away from them.
But there’s another kind of racist. The assimilationists would say that we’re all created equal but that, let’s say, black people are culturally or behaviorally inferior as the result of their environment, whether that environment is their culture, their oppression, poverty, or slavery. An assimilationist would essentially say: It’s our job to civilize them and develop them, and we are actually progressive because we view these people as having the capacity to be civilized. Antiracists would say: No, you’re racist, too, because you think black people are inferior, just for a different set of reasons.
How did you arrive at that idea of racism versus antiracism?
Studying the history of racism, I found that when charged with being racist, people have typically stated, effectively, “I’m not racist.” Fundamental to racism has always been denial: denying that one is racist, that ideas are racist, that policies are racist. The sound of that denial has always been :“not racist.” So clearly, to me, the term “not racist” could not truly be the opposite of “racist.”
Because racism does exist, so it can’t be that nobody is racist.
And if the racists themselves have been calling themselves “not racist,” then we probably should not use that term to describe people who are truly challenging racism. Then I came across a quote from Angela Davis: “It’s not enough to be not racist. We must be antiracist.” I’d been looking for a way to frame the opposite of racist, and I found it through Angela Davis’s formulation.
You’re pretty hard on yourself in the book, describing your own views early on as racist. Why was that important to talk about?
The heartbeat of racism is denial, and the heartbeat of antiracism is confession—reflecting on our own lives and confessing the racist ideas we’ve said, in an effort to strive to be different, to be antiracist. I thought it was absolutely critical for me to not just say that the heartbeat of antiracism is confessional but to show it.
Were you anxious about revealing yourself to that extent?
Yeah, it was difficult. I was very nervous about the book coming out because many of the most shameful moments of my life were in the book. But at the same time, people who are concerned about racial justice, sometimes we think too much about our own feelings and our own discomfort, especially those of us in positions of privilege, as I am as a university professor. My discomfort in writing the book pales in comparison to the discomfort of the millions of people suffering under the foot of racism.
When you’re talking to people about any issue that they’re struggling with, they’ll be much more open to reflecting on themselves if you approach them by saying, “Well, I’ve struggled with this, too.” The strategy of talking down to people has not worked. If anything, it’s led to more polarization in this country.
I was very nervous about the book because many of my life’s most shameful moments were in it.
I assume you’ve gotten pushback, as anyone who writes a book will. What form has that taken?
Of course people have pushed back against the elimination of the concept of “not racist.” That’s mainly come from white Americans who imagine themselves as not racist.
People who say things like “I don’t see color.”
Precisely. And they know that by eliminating that term, they’d essentially fall into the racist category, and obviously they don’t want to fall into that racist category. Then you have people of color who believe that people of color can’t be racist, so they’ve pushed back against my challenge of that idea.
I thought it was interesting that you don’t like the term “micro-aggression,” preferring to just call it racism. To me, it’s been a useful lens through which to examine my own ways of interacting with people. Do you think by removing that as a tool, it makes it harder for people to self-reflect?
When a person thinks of micro-aggression, they’re primarily thinking about the perpetrator: I did a minor sort of thing. But from the standpoint of the victim, if those things are happening to them 10, 20, 30 times in a day, then it operates very differently than the term actually connotes. It operates more as a form of abuse. Now, if you have, let’s say, 50 different [perpetrators], each of those people isn’t necessarily being abusive. But as a collective, they’re being abusive.
As I ask these questions, I realize how much they’re all from the point of view of a white person. It’s so hard to step out of your own experience when talking about this stuff.
I do think it’s critical for people who are white to be able to understand the way racism operates from the perspective of people of color. Obviously, it’s difficult to really think about things from the standpoint of other people, but like with anything else, that’s what allows people to be empathetic. One of the things I try to do in my book is to sort of de-center whiteness in the discussion on race.
Whereas I’ve been basically doing the opposite here.
Even people of color often center whiteness. What I mean by centering whiteness is centering white perpetrators as opposed to centering victims, or people of color. When we center the victims, we begin to see the perpetrators as white—but also some of the perpetrators as people of color. It’s critical for us to be able to see all perpetrators, and we’re better able to do that if we center the actual victims of racist policies and ideas.
You went to high school in Manassas and now have returned to the area. How does gentrification in DC fit into all of this? Are the forces that have transformed the city over the last 20 years racist in the sense you use the term in the book, of creating inequality?
Yeah, I think the gentrifying forces in DC primarily harmed black poor and working-class people. It’s driven them out of the city. Who’s benefited has primarily been white people as well as wealthier people of color. Generally, the poorer you are in this country, the less political power you have, the less of an ability to fight against developers or gentrifiers.
In the book, you write about “space racism”—the idea that, say, predominantly black neighborhoods are inferior to predominantly white neighborhoods. When people talk about DC’s “bad old days,” is there a sort of “time racism” at play? In the same way people look down on black spaces, are they looking down on the period when DC was majority-black?
If people are essentially creating a scenario in which the blacker it was, the more dangerous and violent it was, and the whiter it’s becoming, the safer and better it is, then certainly that’s a function of space racism.
AU has been in the news in the last couple of years for several racist incidents on campus, one of which was seemingly directed at you, or at least the opening of the center. How has it felt to be in the middle of all of that?
I mean, we live in the United States, and this nation is deeply racist. There are many people who want to display their racism. There are many people who want to send signals that they don’t like that we’re building an Antiracist Research & Policy Center. And I expect that. Because historically, when we’ve made antiracist progress, there’s been a reaction to it. It’s deeply hurt our students and many members of our community, but for me, it’s something that I expected. If nobody is not liking what I’m doing, then probably I’m not doing anything impactful.
What kind of feedback have you gotten to the book? Are you getting emotional reactions from people?
Oh, yeah, quite a few people have contacted me privately or publicly and told me they were really moved by the book to reflect on their own ideas. There was an 83-year-old white woman who came up to me after an event. She had just read the book and said she didn’t realize the ways in which for eight decades she had been raised to be racist—it’s only now that she’s beginning to reflect on herself and change. For somebody that age to confess that and to begin the process of changing themselves, that was moving to me. And if an 83-year-old can do that, the rest of us should be able to do it, too.
This article appears in the November 2019 issue of Washingtonian.
Ibram X. Kendi on "How to Be an Antiracist": Racism and capitalism "will ultimately die together"
Author of new bestseller on America's second most racist president (guess!) and turning the tide of history
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Chauncey DeVega
October 11, 2019 4:15PM (UTC)
In 1903, sociologist, historian and writer W.E.B. Du Bois observed that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line." That problem remains in the 21st century.
Racism and white supremacy endure because they are a "changing same," a social and political paradox. Since black people were deemed by white society to be chattel in 17th-century America, and then won their freedom in the 19th and 20th centuries, there has been a great amount of positive change in terms of the written letter of the law and public attitudes along the color line.
Racism has been largely rejected as a public norm in the United States. Black and brown faces are central to global popular culture. Nonwhites hold key positions of power in the United States and other majority white countries. Barack Obama was twice elected president of the United States.
This progress coexists with centuries of racial inequality in the United States (and the West more generally), where black people continue to face systemic, institutional forms of racial disadvantage across almost all areas of society, including the labor market, wealth and income, health care, the environment, criminal justice, education and overall well-being. Such disparities are generally true for other nonwhites as well including Latinos and Hispanics, Native Americans and other indigenous peoples. Contrary to the “model minority” myth, East and South Asians are also damaged by racism and white supremacy in the United States.
As a group white people retain control over every social, political, economic and cultural institution in the United States. As a group, white Americans also benefit from intergenerational unearned advantages and privileges, relative to nonwhite Americans.
What is the state of the color line in the Age of Trump?
New polling from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research shows that an overwhelming percentage of blacks and Latinos report that Donald Trump has made their lives worse. As reported by NBC, the same poll also shows that “about half of all Americans think Trump’s actions have been bad for African Americans, Muslims and women, and slightly more than half say they’ve been bad for Hispanics.”
Other polls show similar findings. For example, Pew’s 2019 “Race in America” study made clear that most Americans believe that Trump has made “race relations” worse.
Unsurprisingly, there is a clear partisan divide on such issues. A majority of Republicans believe that Trump has improved the lives of blacks, Latinos, and women. Democrats have a clearer view of the negative impact of Trump’s policies, behavior and values, overwhelmingly reporting that Trump has hurt women, Latinos, black people and Muslims.
Political scientists and other researchers have shown that Republicans are more likely than Democrats to be racist.
In addition to feelings of racial hostility towards black Americans, Republicans and conservatives are notably hostile toward nonwhite immigrants, Muslims and other groups they deem to be inherently “un-American.”
Racism distorts reality. Despiteoverwhelming and obvious evidence to the contrary, social scientists have shown that a large percentage of white Americans actually believe that “racism” against white people is a bigger problem in America than racial discrimination against black people and other nonwhites. Other research has shown that a majority of Trump’s supporters hold similar beliefs.
The many lies of whiteness helped to elect Donald Trump in 2016. They remain the source of his deep reservoir of support among his overwhelmingly white base of supporters and enablers.
The color line was and remains international: Trumpism is part of a global white racist movement. What has been called the “New Right” is a reactionary, racial-authoritarian international movement, largely driven by white grievance-mongering and a desire to restore what its members view as “the natural order of things”: White people should be forever dominant and in control of the United States and Europe; black and brown people are to be submissive second-class citizens.
In general, the American people acknowledge that racism as an idea, and a vague set of actions and behaviors, is a problem. They share no unified notion, however, about set of public policies might remedy the structural and institutional inequalities caused by racism and white supremacy.
What would anti-racism look like in practice? How does racism hurt people on both sides of the color line? Do black and brown people have an obligation to educate white people about racism — and about how to limit or reduce its harm? Is the language of “white privilege” still useful when discussing racism and white supremacy in post-civil rights America? How are capitalism and racism tied together? How did we end up electing one of the most racist and white supremacist presidents in American history?
In an effort to answer these questions, I recently spoke with Ibram X. Kendi, a professor of history and international relations and founding director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University. Kendi is also a 2019 Guggenheim Fellow, and is the author of several books, including the 2016 National Book Award winner "Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America." Kendi's new book is the bestseller "How to Be an Antiracist."
This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.
You are unapologetically committed to telling the truth about racism and white supremacy. How are you able to muster that strength?
For me it is simple. Racism is a problem that's ravaging humanity. It's ravaging people all over the globe.
Donald Trump was not elected because of “economic anxiety" among the white working class. The research and other data are clear: Trumpism is white rage in the form of a racist backlash against nonwhites. To suggest otherwise is an assault on the truth. Trumpism is also a moral crisis. That truth must be spoken to as well.
It has always has been a moral crisis. People in positions of power have been supporting policies that are fundamentally immoral. These policies are fundamentally immoral because they are literally harming people. They're killing people. They're keeping people in misery. And then these same policymakers try to argue that the misery is not the results of their policies.
Given that Trump and the Republican Party are trying to undo most of the progress of the 20th century in terms of human rights and civil rights, I often find myself wondering, “What year is it?” How do you answer that question for yourself?
What is critical is that we should recognize not only racial progress but to also understand how racism morphs and changes over time. In 2019 there are forms of racism that are more destructive and sophisticated than ever before. We need to focus on both racial progress and racism’s ability to evolve if we are to truly understand what is happening in America and around the world.
What is the very short history of “racism” and “antiracism”?
The term “racism” did not become popular in American scholarly discourse until the 1940s. It is still a relatively new term. But of course, racism as power, policies and ideas is nearly 600 years old. And “antiracism” itself — meaning those who are making the case that there's nothing wrong with a particular racial group — which means literally creating racial equity, and those movements that are fundamentally challenging racism and its ideas and policies, is also as old as racism itself.
So from the beginning, of course you had enslaved people resisting the slave trade at the ports of Africa and throughout the Middle Passage. There was public and private resistance across the Black Atlantic. It was both violent and nonviolent. Antiracism resistance persists and continue to this very day.
How do you conceptualize the long Black Freedom Struggle?
The Black Freedom Struggle has been a persisting and enduring phenomenon. Within that larger Black Freedom Struggle there have been social movements — and what I mean by social movements are large numbers of black people who, in an organized manner, have effectively challenged racist policies, and to a certain extent, dismantled some of them. These movements have been going on the offensive against racism.
If you want to think about it in a longer view, the most recent part of the Black Freedom Struggle spans from roughly when black people returned from World War I and became “New Negroes.” Some other observers would say that the Black Freedom Struggle began with the NAACP’s successful lawsuits against Jim Crow, beginning in the 1930s. That of course then involved more direct action tactics by the late 1950s.
America has only been a multiracial democracy for 50 years. In many ways, Donald Trump and his movement are a return to the norm.
The emergence of Donald Trump, of course, puts up a mirror to the country’s history that many Americans had thought was resolved by electing a black man, Barack Obama, as president. It forces them to recognize that in many ways Donald Trump and his ideas and his policies are indeed more reflective of the United States presidency than were Barack Obama’s.
I think that's very difficult for people to accept, but that is the reality. In order for us to create a different type of America where Obama is more representative than Trump, we have to transform systems and policies and ideas in a pretty radical way. This involves not just one person in a particular office. The change needs to be more deep-seated and widespread.
It has been 100 years since the Red Summer of 1919 when white racist mobs rampaged across the United States killing thousands of black people. How are you making sense of that anniversary?
The easiest way for us to understand that relationship is how in many ways Donald Trump is very reflective of someone like Calvin Coolidge, who signed the Immigration Act of 1924, which essentially barred or limited people from every country on earth except so-called Nordic nations of northwestern Europe. Everyone else was considered to be an alien undesirable. And he said America must be kept American.
One hundred years later, Donald Trump is essentially saying the same thing — and they both utilize a tremendous amount of xenophobic and nativist sentiments among white Americans, both in the early part of the 20th and now 21st centuries, to mobilize and organize political support for themselves and to demonize immigrants as the reason why (white) people are struggling, as opposed to their political policies. It was a great bait-and-switch then, and it is a great bait-and-switch now.
It should be surprising to me that in 1919, one of the bestselling books was the racist, eugenicist, nativist tract “The Passing of the Great Race.” Now, in 2019, tens of millions of Americans are yearning for America to be made “great again.”
Donald Trump positioning himself as the next Andrew Jackson also signals to his white supremacist values.
Because Trump and [Steve] Bannon and these right-wing, revanchist nativists, they're so transparent and honest. I get so frustrated with the mainstream corporate media when they treat anything that this man does as a surprise. He's telegraphing all his punches. I mean, he'd be the worst, most lazy boxer in the world — don't use overhand rights, but everybody acts surprised.
When he embraces Andrew Jackson and that version of white populism — hell, Andrew Jackson, never mind genocide against First Nations people — correct me on this history, but I think he was the last president to be a literal slave driver. And they embrace this image of Jackson as this heroic man. It's right out in front of us.
Several years ago, I wrote an essay ranking the most racist American presidents of all time. Donald Trump actually ranked one step below Andrew Jackson. It did not surprise me one bit that Donald Trump would connect himself with a man who I considered to be the most racist president of all time.
What is gained or lost by using the phrases “black and brown folks” or “people of color” in these conversations about race and inequality?
We should be precise in whatever conversations we are having. So if we're talking about disparities between all white people and all black people or black people and white people, I don't have a problem with the use of the term “black people.” But we cannot ignore that, for instance, that there are disparities between African Americans and black immigrants. We can't ignore that there are disparities between black elites and the black poor, just like there are white elites and people that they call “white trash.” Disparities within the larger racial group should not be ignored.
Then, when we talk about those disparities, we of course have to use specific language to talk about how the racism that African Americans are facing is in some ways distinct from the forms of racism that black immigrants are facing. Or the way in which black poor communities are subjected to the intersection of policies stemming from both racism and capitalism that are not affecting black upper-income people as severely. In total, we must also be very precise in terms of the group we're referring to and the specific policies we're discussing.
How can we do a better job of talking about the intersection of this version of capitalism with racism and white supremacy?
In “How to Be an Antiracist,” I identify racism and capitalism as “the conjoined twins.” They essentially have the same body with different faces and different personalities. Because when you really look at the history of racism, it cannot be properly understood without grappling with the history of capitalism. The history of capitalism cannot be properly understood without understanding the history of racism. Racism and capitalism emerged simultaneously, they have grown together, they have ravaged together — and one day they'll ultimately die together.
The term “racial capitalism” — which is essentially this fusion of racism and capitalism — is a more effective way for us to understand those dynamics, those forces of history. I think the term “conjoined twins” allows for the recognition of racism and capitalism essentially being so closely tied together, No. 1 and No. 2.
That is very dangerous thinking because in America the civil religion is capitalism. Too many people confuse “capitalism” and “democracy." You are introducing the relationship between racism and capitalism, which is even more challenging for many people — and not just to reactionaries or conservatives.
It is dangerous thinking. What is dangerous is how there are so many Americans who say that they're not racist. But then you ask them to define the term “racist,” they cannot provide a definition. You have so many Americans who swear that they support capitalism, but then when you ask them to define “capitalism,” they have no definition — or they use a definition that is actually not the material reality of how capitalism functions. They talk about a system with markets, a system with competition, a system of buying and selling goods, a system in which businesses are operating for profit. They imagine that is what capitalism is.
Or they try to define capitalism by comparing it to communism or socialism. These common definitions of capitalism do not actually reflect what capitalism is in practice. For a person even to suggest that markets have been free, or to say that the competition between individuals and classes and even nations has been equal, is to completely not understand the reality of how capitalism functions.
“Reverse racism” is another nonsense term in post-civil rights-era America.
It persists because those who use it are not positioning the conversation in inequity. When the conversation is approached from what is commonly considered to be “discrimination,” as opposed to outcomes, the framing is totally different. For example, consider affirmative action policies. Detractors begin with how admissions factors are “race neutral.” Then affirmative action is depicted as somehow unfairly benefiting people of color. That formulation would lead many people to believe that affirmative action is discriminating against white people. Why? Because it is commonly thought that racial discrimination is a pejorative thing. It is bad. Essentially affirmative action is “reverse racism” or “discrimination,” from that point of view.
But what if we had a conversation that is rooted in inequities and then we assess policies based on those criteria? From that premise and framework, a reasonable person cannot look at affirmative action programs and say that they are racist because the goal of such programs is to reduce racial inequity.
We should actually rethink the term "discrimination" itself. Instead of using the term “racial discrimination” and saying that that is fundamentally bad, we should actually use the terms “racist” and “antiracist discrimination.”
For example, let's say you have a lily-white classroom and the policies allowing that lily-white classroom to stay lily-white involves continuously barring black people at the door. We should call that policy and discriminatory action “racist.”
By comparison, when you have a lily-white classroom with a fixed number of seats and you have a policy that effectively bars or reduces the number of white people entering the room until you get to a more equitable and representative number of people in that room, to me that's antiracist. That is a policy that leads to equity.
Language is very important. By using the term “discrimination,” it has really created an entry point for racial reactionaries and other conservatives to create this fiction of “reverse discrimination.”
Is “white privilege” a useful term? Some critical race theorists as well as antiracist activists prefer the language of “unearned white advantages.” How have you resolved that tension?
I believe that “white privilege” is a useful term, specifically when it's used appropriately. Do I think that, for instance, there is such a thing as the white privilege of life? Yes. The data shows, for example, that if you are white, you are likely to live several years longer in the United States.
The reasons why are a different conversation. If you own a home in a neighborhood that is overwhelmingly white, there is an advantage in terms of how much the home will increase in value in a racist society. That is a type of white privilege. When you are holding a gun and a police officer approaches you, is the police officer less likely to execute you? Yes. There are indeed white privileges. But then again, I also think there are ways in which “black elites” have privilege, men have privilege, and heterosexuals and other in-groups have privilege. We should also recognize those privileges as well.
How do questions about “representation” play into these discussions about “antiracism” and “racism”?
“Diversity” and “inclusion” and “representation” are a bit different than the striving to be antiracist. An antiracist is more concerned with getting a person who is striving to be antiracist in a position of power than they are with getting a person of a particular race in a position of power. Just because a person is black does not mean they are going to support antiracist policies. It just means that you're black.
If you put a person — regardless of their skin color — who is going to support antiracist policies in a position of power, then it is more likely that there will be better “diversity” and “representation.” In that way, “representation” is the effect or the result of antiracist work. It is not the starter.
What is “antiracism”? How do we articulate it as a set of principles and practices?
In terms of principles, antiracism is the recognition that there is nothing wrong or right with any racial group. And when I say, “racial group,” I am not just talking about black people or Asian people or Native peoples. Black women are a racial group. Latinx immigrants are a racial group. As such, there is nothing inherently wrong or right about any racial groups.
The principle here is that an antiracist is not going to denigrate or even lift up any racial group. And because there's nothing inferior or superior about any racial group, inequities in our society must be the result of racist policies that are being supported by racist power structures and institutions or racist policymakers.
We should challenge racist power, remove racist power, and then replace racist power with antiracist power.
Racism is absurd. Race as a concept is also absurd. But in the United States, we are living in a moment when even the Ku Klux Klan claims that it is not “racist.” Donald Trump is an obvious, transparent, bonafide racist and white supremacist. Yet, he claims to not have a “racist bone” in his body. How do we ameliorate racial inequality when even the most obvious racists and white supremacists claim to not be “racist”?
What's absolutely critical is that we should stop using the phrase and broader language of “not racist.” We should stop saying, "I'm not racist," because when you use that term as someone who is opposed to Trump, and as someone who is opposed to white supremacy, you are opening the door to allowing them to use that term.
That is indicative of what racists have always done. So when the language of “racist” or “racism” emerged in the 1940s to describe eugenicists they responded, "I'm not racist. This is science that black people are genetically inferior.” During the fight against Jim Crow segregation, white racists said, “I'm not racist." And now, in the post-civil rights era and the Age of Trump, white supremacists are saying, "I'm not racist."
Instead of using the language of “I’m not a racist” the framing should be about antiracism. None of these real racists are saying that they are antiracists. That is how they should be challenged.
There are many well-intentioned white people who ask random black people — or perhaps even black people who study these questions and topics — what they should do to fight racism. In that moment, when a well-intentioned white person asks a black person for guidance about fighting racism, how do you suggest we as black folks should respond?
One of the reasons why I wrote “How to Be an Antiracist” is so I can just refer them to the book or some other expert on the topic.
I specifically refer people to the work of people who are writing on these issues because there needs to be a recognition that there are such things as experts, that there are people where these questions about racism and politics and power are their primary areas of study.
That is not the expertise of every individual black person. Most black people are trying to go about and live their lives. To be happy. Of course, black people are more knowledgeable about racism than white people, because they must face it as part of day-to-day life. Some black folks are trying to understand what they're facing. But even regular black folks are not necessarily experts who can explain all the complexities of racism.
What about those instances, very often online, where white folks reach out to a black person and basically demand that the latter teach them about racism?
We need to have a serious conversation about the emotional labor and stress that black folks and brown folks, but especially black folks, are suffering under racism. But somehow we're also expected to educate other folks about what they should be doing as moral human beings.
I actually tell and encourage people of color first and foremost that it is not necessarily your responsibility to teach anyone about racism. This is especially true if that's not your job or career.
Now, if a black person chooses to do that work based on their knowledge, I suggest that they focus on those white people who are open-minded, who are not going to cause us to have a very difficult experience when we're essentially trying to talk to them about these issues. These white folks should also not be resistant. They should also not be defensive. They should be open-minded. Once they start being defensive, resisting or being argumentative, that is the time for us to walk away. If people are close-minded, it is a waste of our time trying to teach them anyway.
In this moment under Donald Trump’s presidency, what is your greatest fear? And what is your greatest hope?
I think my greatest fear in this moment is that the white supremacist movement in this country will continue to organize itself and amass even more power. That's not just Trump being re-elected and his maintaining control over the Senate, but also Trumpian Republicans maintaining or even growing control in certain states through continued voter suppression and mass manipulation of white working-class people into believing that the problem is Latinx people. Trump’s white voters will continue to struggle under his presidency. As their struggles grow deeper because of Trumpian public policies, their anger toward people of color will only grow. As a result, mass murders and mass shootings will only increase as well. That is my fear.
My hope is that the antiracist movement in this country will help Trump’s people and others to see what is really happening which is how the public policies they support — and not nonwhite people — are actually causing them harm. I also hope that people who are antiracist will get into positions of power at a federal level, and also at the local level, and then put into place policies that allow democracy to exist and thrive.
This would allow for more equal opportunity. Such an outcome would also allow for white people and others who are hurting to receive a better life. That in turn eliminates the likelihood that they are going to consume racist ideas and then mass murder people.
Byline: Randall Kennedy
How to Be an Antiracist
By Ibram X. Kendi
One World. 305 pp. $27
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"How to Be an Antiracist" is a memoir by Ibram X. Kendi that details his grapplings with racism and his advice for eliminating it. Kendi is the director of the Antiracist Research & Policy Center at American University and the author of "Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America," which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2016. Kendi's latest book describes his peregrinations as a child and early adolescent in predominantly black, urban settings in New York; as an anxious student at the predominantly white Stonewall Jackson High School in Northern Virginia; as a journalism major at the virtually all-black Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University; and as a Ph.D. candidate in the African American studies department at Temple University. Kendi dissects what he sees as his own racism in each of these phases of his life.
He maintains, for example, that in winning the Martin Luther King Jr. oratorical contest in high school, he voiced racist ideas by excoriating fellow African Americans for inattentiveness to schoolwork, unwed pregnancies and criminality. "It is hard for me to believe," he recalls, that "I finished high school in the year 2000 touting so many racist ideas. A racist culture had handed me the ammunition to shoot Black people, to shoot myself, and I took and used it. Internalized racism is the real Black on Black crime." He believes that in college he capitulated to racism by wearing honey-colored contact lenses ("I wanted to be Black but did not want to look Black"), by (temporarily) preferring lighter-skinned over darker-skinned African American women, by subsequently preferring darker-skinned over lighter-skinned African American women, and by hating white people (nurtured by the writings of anti-white theorists such as psychiatrist Frances Cress Welsing). He writes that when he began graduate school he was indifferent to or even prejudiced against fellow black students who were gay.
The principal lesson that Kendi gathers from his catalog of self-criticism is that to be truly anti-racist, one must set oneself against all forms of social oppression. "How to Be an Antiracist" is a journal of Kendi's efforts to free himself of the ideological manacles clamped upon him by a society suffused with white supremacism, capitalist exploitation, misogyny and the repression of unconventional sexuality.
The persona reflected in this memoir is compellingly attractive in important respects. At the end of his book, Kendi reveals that in 2018, he received a diagnosis of Stage 4 colon cancer - a frightening prospect for anyone but especially for a young academic with a 2-year-old daughter. That he was able to marshal the wherewithal to push his manuscript through to publication in the face of such grim circumstances warrants applause.
Kendi also displays an admirable independence and candor. Though he situates himself far to the left among black activist intellectuals, he is unafraid to say things likely to singe the sensibilities of many of his potential followers. Kendi illustrates the deep-rooted problem of sexism within black political circles by detailing violence perpetrated by members of the Nation of Islam and the Black Panther Party against women whom they deemed to be insufficiently deferential. He is similarly uncompromising in his attack on the spurious but surprisingly widespread notion that black people cannot appropriately be deemed to be "racist" because they supposedly lack the power to effectuate their prejudices. Noting the presence of 700 black state court judges, 200 black federal judges, 3,000 black police executives, two black U.S. attorneys general, a black president and many others occupying posts of substantial authority, Kendi writes that "Black people can be racist because Black people do have power, even if limited." For him that point is central, because a key theme of his book is that all people can and do a play a role in struggles around social justice. Everyone is accountable. And just as anyone can be racist, so, too, can anyone be anti-racist.
Kendi's book suffers, alas, from major flaws. On one page he posits the interesting and potentially fruitful idea that "racist" ought not to be used as a pejorative term connoting a moral failing but ought instead to be used clinically, as a strictly descriptive term of analysis. On an adjacent page, however, without qualification, he condemns racism as a "crime." He aspires to establish "lucid definitions" of key terms, particularly "racism" and "antiracism." But then he writes, "Racism is a marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities" - an exercise in pure tautology. He maintains that "every time someone racializes behavior - describes something as 'Black behavior' - they are expressing a racist idea." Yet Kendi himself appears to do just that when he disapproves of "African American bigotry" aimed at black Haitians.
Kendi derides as "racist" commentary that bemoans social pathologies such as criminality in black America. He fails to explain, however, why it is that black people can be appropriately chastised for being insufficiently attentive to fighting racism, misogyny and economic inequality, but cannot appropriately be chastised for being insufficiently attentive to maintaining the communal conditions - safety, solidarity, habits of civic participation - essential to better defending and advancing their interests in the hurly-burly of American politics.
In the most obtuse pages in "How to Be an Antiracist," Kendi condemns standardized testing, disparages the significance of what should be alarming racial patterns in academic achievement gaps and excoriates efforts to redress those gaps by elevating the scores of those (typically disadvantaged students of color) lagging behind. His polemic is littered with misleading red herrings, as when he says that implicit in the idea of academic achievement gaps, as measured by statistical instruments like test scores and dropout rates, is a conviction that the qualities measured by such criteria constitute "the only form of academic 'achievement.'" There is no such necessary implication. One can certainly believe that there are important attributes outside those typically measured by standardized tests - such as people skills, persistence and compassion - and still believe that attributes that are measured by standardized tests, such as mastery of arithmetic and reading, are also important, indeed imperatively so.
Yes, the outcomes of testing can be put to malign uses. They have been deployed as justification for subordinating those with lesser scores. But testing can also be used to show the lingering consequences of past wrongs and to apprise society of which students are learning well and which are not, regardless of the cause of the disparity. Intelligently designed tests that are soundly interpreted are messengers that deliver essential news. Kendi suggests stoning the messenger, denying the significance of the bad news delivered or concocting new tests that he assumes will generate more palatable results. Hence he ventures: "What if we measured intelligence by how knowledgeable individuals are about their own environments? What if we measured intellect by an individual's desire to know?" Fine. But what if those tests also generated outcomes in which certain racial minorities fared poorly? Would that pattern discredit those tests as "racist" as well? Seeking to escape this dilemma, Kendi ultimately proposes rejecting all rankings, urging the recognition only of differences, not levels of achievement. Does that mean that the applicant for a professorship who has a Ph.D. should stand on merely a different, not a higher, basis than the applicant who is illiterate?
Despite misgivings about various features of "How to Be an Antiracist," we should fervently hope to see more work from Kendi in the months and years to come. His subject, the vexing American race question, retains a towering and tragic salience. In grappling with it, we could use Kendi's candor, independence and willingness to be self-critical.
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Kennedy is the Michael R. Klein professor of law at Harvard Law School.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 The Washington Post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Kennedy, Randall. "Book World: A black author grapples with his own racism." Washington Post, 26 Aug. 2019. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A597454248/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1ddebda8. Accessed 10 Nov. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A597454248
Byline: Terry Hartle Correspondent
Abstract:
Ibram X. Kendi spares no one from critique - not even himself - in this takedown of racism and the attitudes and policies that perpetuate it.
When President Barack Obama was inaugurated in January 2009, many Americans thought it would usher in a new era in America's long and tortuous history of race relations. After all, if a black man could be elected president, went the thinking, perhaps we had entered a "post-racial" period in which race would be a less prominent and divisive issue.
A decade later, those hopes have been dashed. If anything, racial tensions have increased considerably over the last decade. The progress we thought we had made was a mirage.
A number of writers have recently tried to understand the past and present place of racism in America. Some, like Jill Lepore in "These Truths: A History of the United States," have sought to reconsider American history, highlighting the many ways in which it is both profoundly beautiful and deeply tragic.
Others, like Ibram X. Kendi, an African American scholar at American University, have focused on the origins of American racism and how it became such an entrenched part of our national character. His previous book, "Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America," which won the National Book Award in 2016, was a sweeping examination of the ways that intellectuals, including some usually thought of as progressives, facilitated the establishment and growth of racism over the last 400 years.
Kendi's latest book, "How to Be an Antiracist," continues this theme in a far more personal way. In it, he candidly identifies and confronts racism in America by telling the story of his life from his upbringing in Queens, New York, where he was, at best, an indifferent student, to his time as a PhD student at Temple University in Philadelphia and, later, to some of his experiences as a professor.
Deftly weaving his personal experiences with the history of racism in America and current racial inequalities, he offers assessments of the ways that racism in America is shaped and perpetuated by power structures, ethnicity, culture, behavior, class, color, gender, sexuality, and ethnicity, and the steps he thinks we need to take to address them. It is a wide-ranging and often insightful discussion.
It is also a remarkably candid and deeply self-critical portrait. "How," he asks, "can antiracists ask racists to open their minds and change when we are closed-minded and unwilling to change? I ignored my own hypocrisy, as people customarily do when it means giving up what they hold dear. Giving up my conception of racism meant giving up my view of the world and myself."
He repeatedly returns to the theme of his personal racism to underscore his belief that anyone - regardless of their skin color or ethnicity - is a racist if they generalize about entire groups based on negative stereotypes. To Kendi, black people are just as capable of racism as white people. Indeed, he begins the book by recounting a prize-winning high school speech based entirely on racist generalizations that, today, makes him "flush with shame." Later he admits, "I arrived at Temple as a racist, sexist homophobe." And he has particularly strong words for African Americans who hold positions of power like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and former Ohio Secretary of State John Kenneth Blackwell, and use that power, he charges, to advance racist policies.
Kendi, like any good academic, is clear about his terms and definitions. He believes that a racist is someone who supports "a racist policy through their actions or inaction or expressing a racist idea," while an antiracist is one who supports "an antiracist policy through their actions or expressing an antiracist idea." Most of us, he concludes, hold both racist and antiracist views. But our beliefs are not necessarily fixed and immutable. "'Racist' and 'antiracist' are like peelable name tags that are placed and replaced based on what someone is doing ... in each moment. These are not permanent tattoos." In other words, our views and positions can change - as the evolution of his own thinking demonstrates.
He calls policies that increase racial disparities "racist" while policies that reduce such disparities are "antiracist." So affirmative action policies in college admissions designed to increase the enrollment of students of color are antiracist. (Presumably this means that legacy preferences in admissions, which do not reduce racial disparities and indeed may reinforce them, are racist.) Working to repeal the Affordable Care Act is racist because doing so would increase racial disparities in health care. "Do-nothing climate policy is racist policy, since the predominately non-White global south is being victimized by climate change more than the Whiter global north."
Intriguingly, Kendi argues that the word "racist" should be seen as descriptive rather than pejorative. If we regard it that way, we might be able to talk far more candidly about racism in all its manifestations. But in 21st century America, the word is a pejorative slur and there is no easy way to make it less emotionally laden.
One of the challenges is that addressing our deeply ingrained tendencies to default to racist ideas requires "persistent self-awareness, constant self-criticism, and regular self-examination." This won't be easy because many of us would rather avoid these often difficult discussions. Recently The Washington Post wrote that the efforts of tour guides at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's plantation, to introduce descriptions of slavery into their presentations have been dismissed by some visitors. One guide, after describing how slaves at Monticello had tended the garden, was reportedly told, "Why are you talking about that? You should be talking about the plants." Not much self-examination there.
Sometimes Kendi generalizes to the extent that complex policy issues are overly simplified - such his almost casual description about racial achievement gaps in education. Indeed, he argues that President George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind Act and President Obama's Race to the Top and Common Core policies were racist because they were based on the idea of an achievement gap.
Individual readers are likely to find much in "How to Be an Antiracist" that they agree with. Most will also find points or ideas that they disagree with. Regardless, this is a thought-provoking and insightful book even if it makes some readers uncomfortable. As such, it represents an important and necessary contribution to our understanding of racism in America.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 The Christian Science Publishing Society
http://www.csmonitor.com/About/The-Monitor-difference
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Hartle, Terry. "'How to Be an Antiracist' opens a vital dialogue on race." Christian Science Monitor, 20 Sept. 2019. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A600311494/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=999cbcfc. Accessed 10 Nov. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A600311494
Kendi, Ibram X. HOW TO BE AN ANTIRACIST One World/Random House (Adult Nonfiction) $27.00 8, 20 ISBN: 978-0-525-50928-8
Title notwithstanding, this latest from the National Book Award-winning author is no guidebook to getting woke.
In fact, the word "woke" appears nowhere within its pages. Rather, it is a combination memoir and extension of Atlantic columnist Kendi's towering Stamped From the Beginning (2016) that leads readers through a taxonomy of racist thought to anti-racist action. Never wavering from the thesis introduced in his previous book, that "racism is a powerful collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity and are substantiated by racist ideas," the author posits a seemingly simple binary: "Antiracism is a powerful collection of antiracist policies that lead to racial equity and are substantiated by antiracist ideas." The author, founding director of American University's Antiracist Research and Policy Center, chronicles how he grew from a childhood steeped in black liberation Christianity to his doctoral studies, identifying and dispelling the layers of racist thought under which he had operated. "Internalized racism," he writes, "is the real Black on Black Crime." Kendi methodically examines racism through numerous lenses: power, biology, ethnicity, body, culture, and so forth, all the way to the intersectional constructs of gender racism and queer racism (the only section of the book that feels rushed). Each chapter examines one facet of racism, the authorial camera alternately zooming in on an episode from Kendi's life that exemplifies it--e.g., as a teen, he wore light-colored contact lenses, wanting "to be Black but…not…to look Black"--and then panning to the history that informs it (the antebellum hierarchy that valued light skin over dark). The author then reframes those received ideas with inexorable logic: "Either racist policy or Black inferiority explains why White people are wealthier, healthier, and more powerful than Black people today." If Kendi is justifiably hard on America, he's just as hard on himself. When he began college, "anti-Black racist ideas covered my freshman eyes like my orange contacts." This unsparing honesty helps readers, both white and people of color, navigate this difficult intellectual territory.
Not an easy read but an essential one.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Kendi, Ibram X.: HOW TO BE AN ANTIRACIST." Kirkus Reviews, 15 May 2019. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A585227131/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=35cde80e. Accessed 10 Nov. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A585227131
Byline: Vanessa Williams
About US is an initiative by The Washington Post to explore issues of identity in the United States. Sign up for the newsletter.
In the current debate over race, people are quick to defend themselves by declaring that they are "not racist."
That's not good enough for historian Ibram X. Kendi, who argues that the phrase has little meaning. After all, even white nationalists such as Richard Spencer and David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, insist that they are not racist.
The goal for those who believe in equal opportunity and justice should be to be "antiracist," says Kendi, who has written a new book to help guide the way.
"How to Be an Antiracist," which came out last week, is a follow-up to Kendi's 2016 bestseller, "Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America." Kendi, 37, is a professor and the director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University.
In "Stamped from the Beginning," which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, Kendi challenges the widely held belief that racism is the product of ignorance or hatred. Instead, he argues, people in power enact policies to further their financial or political goals, then create racist ideas to justify them. For example, whites in need of free labor to build their empires declared that Africans were inferior and fed the idea to the masses to defend slavery.
In his new book, Kendi argues that it's not enough to say you're not a racist. "What's the problem with being 'not racist?' " Kendi writes in the introduction. "It is a claim that signifies neutrality: 'I am not a racist, but neither am I aggressively against racism.' "
He adds: "One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist."
Kendi is just as hard on himself in the book, sharing his own conversion from a middle-class teenager who believed black people trapped in struggling communities had only themselves to blame to a scholar who now believes, as he writes, that "internalized racism is the real Black on Black crime."
He also talks about the period of his life when he engaged in "anti-white racism," before he learned to "discern the difference between racist power (racist policymakers) and White people."
"I used to be racist most of the time," he writes. "I am changing."
Kendi talked with About US on what he hopes people take from his work. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
"Stamped from the Beginning" was quite a thorough examination of racism in America. What do we learn in the new book?
"Stamped" was largely a history of racist and antiracist ideas, and from what people told me, it really did not give them a very clear path forward as to how they as individuals can strive to change themselves and change society to be antiracist. So the more I spoke about "Stamped from the Beginning," and the more I urged people to express antiracist ideas, the more people were like, "Tell me more about being an antiracist. I've only been taught to be not racist." The more people asked me how to be antiracist, the more I felt I needed to write a book that systematically walked people through that.
When we think about the term "not racist," that really stems from the statement "I am not racist," which people say when charged with being racist. Everyone says, "I'm not a racist," no matter what racist idea they've said, no matter what racist policy they support. "I'm not a racist" is a term of denial; it doesn't have any other meaning. The term "antiracist" has a very clear meaning. It's someone who has expressed ideas of racial equality or supports antiracist policy that leads to racial equity.
The book is part memoir, because you talk about the work you did and continue to do, on yourself to become antiracist. Why did you decide to open up?
I thought that it would help people if they saw me constantly critiquing myself and looking in the mirror. If I opened up, it would open them up to essentially do the same thing to themselves and for themselves. I didn't want to lecture down to anyone as much as I wanted to explain what I have sought to do and hope that it could serve as a model for other people.
Talk about how black people have absorbed anti-black racist ideas and why you call internalized racism "the real Black on Black crime."
Black people have power. I have power, and every single black person on earth has the power to resist [racist ideas], but they don't resist because they think the problem is black people. I think that you also have black people who are in positions of power who use their power to support policies that reproduce racial inequity. Do black people have the same amount of power as white people? Of course not, and it's not even close. But to suggest black people don't have the power to resist believing something is wrong with black people is also to live an alternative reality.
Often people think that racism is about personal relationships, attitudes, behaviors, rather than structures, institutions that perpetuate racism. Where is the call for structural, institutional change in the book, whose title suggests it's about converting people one by one?
For me, what I realized in researching racist ideas was that the effects of racist ideas on people is that it causes them to see people as the problem. It causes them to see black people as the problem. It does not cause them to see the structures and systems and power and policy as the fundamental problem. An antiracist -- someone who really strives to be antiracist and essentially frees themselves of racist ideas -- then realizes that the fundamental problem isn't people, it's power and policy. And then, of course, they become a part of the movement to dismantle those racist policies and racist policymakers, and that's ultimately the goal for the individual. You're either going to, as an individual, continue to reinforce the notion that something is wrong with a particular racial group and allow those policies and power and structures to stay in place or be part of a force to dismantle those policies and powers and structures.
You're a former journalist. How do you think journalism as an institution has helped or hindered society grapple with racism?
It's been a mixed bag. When journalists have hindered the struggle against racism, one of the ways they've done so has simply been to be unwilling to use the r-word. There's a term, "racism" and "racist" -- they're in the dictionary. The job of journalists is to use words appropriately based on their definition. Words give us the ability to formulate reality, and if the reality is that something is racist, it's absolutely critical for journalist to call that reality racist, and when they choose not to and use some other term, like "racially insensitive," they are not doing their jobs of documenting and reporting reality.
President Trump's rhetoric and policies seem to have forced the country to address racism in a way that didn't happen during the tenure of the nation's first black president. Is this helpful or healthy, the way the conversation is happening, which often seems to be in response to his outbursts?
I do think that whenever we're talking about racism, it's a good thing. Because at least we're talking about it and not acting as if it doesn't exist. I do think we could talk about it in a better way. We can be consistently defining what a racist is, what racism is and changing our conversations on those definitions. Instead of people saying, "I'm not racist because I'm not like Donald Trump," people can ask themselves, "How, actually, do I share ideas with Donald Trump? Maybe I need to give up those ideas because I'm really opposed to him." Or it may be that people are taking the charges against President Trump personally. In other words, when people call Trump racist, it's like calling them racist, so of course they're going to defend him by saying, "He's not racist." In defending him, they're defending themselves because they share his ideas.
Are those people reachable?
I think they are reachable. I think the way we reach those people is to build relationships with them, such that they can feel comfortable being self-critical and vulnerable, and simultaneously, we figure out what is harming them and ailing them and stressing them. Chances are they have explained the source of that stress as, let's say, people of color. When we can prove to them that Trump or someone else they support is actually the very source of what is stressing them out, then we can prove to them that they have been misled to believe the source is people of color.
Are you hopeful that we can have an antiracist country?
I don't think we have any reason to be hopeful, but at the same time, I know that in order to bring about an antiracist America, we have to believe that it is possible. In order to bring about change, we have to believe that change can come. Philosophically, I know that, and philosophically that gives me hope.
What I want people to take away [from the book] is that, first and foremost, all of us can and should be striving to be antiracist, because ultimately we have to be able to create a better nation for ourselves and our children, who won't be able to be manipulated by racists who have the power to create policies that harm us. Only antiracists truly have the power to heal the country of its racism. I'm encouraging people to self-reflect and self-critique and to grow, like I am continuing to do.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2019 The Washington Post
Source Citation
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Williams, Vanessa. "For Ibram Kendi, being 'not racist' doesn't cut it. He insists that we, and he, be 'antiracist.'." Washingtonpost.com, 23 Aug. 2019. Gale General OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A597234108/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=888864ce. Accessed 10 Nov. 2019.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A597234108