Book Review: “How to be an Antiracist” by Ibram X. Kendi

How to be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi

How, indeed?

I read Kendi’s “Stamped Form The Beginning” with great interest, and it certainly left us all wondering just how to actually do antiracism. That this new book is ‘eagerly awaited’ is an understatement!

Much of the new book elaborates on his definitions of racism and anti-racism, with extra attention to “intersections”, including gender-racism, class-racism, and so on.  These definitions are important, though the result is overkill.  Once you get the point, it’s all the same.  I get it.

The main point is: “What is a racism?  Racism is a marriage of racist policies and racists ideas that produce and normalizes racial inequalities.” (p. 18)  In particular, ‘racist’ isn’t a quality of a person, and policies or ideas can be racist without intending to be racist. Furthermore, Kendi says that everyone has some racist and anti-racist ideas, and participates in both racist and anti-racist policies.

These ideas were explained in his earlier book.

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OK, so the ‘how to’ part.

First, the goal is to change policy to foster equality.  Notably, his goal is not to persuade or educate people, but to exert power to produce anti-racist results, i.e., racial equality.  To be clear, Kendi’s view is that changing policy will change ideas, not the other way around.

Given this tenet, it was a bit surprising to me that so much of this book is confessional.  Kendi dives deep into his own experience, telling of his own racist ideas and actions, and his moves to anti-racist ideas and actions.  Some of this is difficult reading, but he is demonstrating just how serious he is.

As he says, “growing myself” is a key aspect of his program.

In the end, the book presents a sketch of the manifesto for Kendi’s Antiracist Research and Policy Center.  The short version is something like:

• Identify racial inequality,
• Investigate racist policies causing racial inequality,
• Invent or find antiracist policy.

(I absolutely love the work “invent” here!)

This is good stuff, but it comes at the end of the book, and we are left hanging.  We need manuals for how to do these things, which I hope the ARPC may provide.

I’d say he lays the groundwork, but this is hardly the final word.

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There is a lot to think about in this book.

I have to say that his “fix the policy” approach, applying power to implement new policies, is “naïve”.  I mean, if it were simple to change policy, we’d already have fixed it, right? For that matter, if I had the power to change policy, I’d already have changed it.  But I don’t and it isn’t.

However, I happen to hold similarly “naïve” views about racism and other things, such as poverty, health care, homelessness, and everything else  The solution is to, well solve it.  Poor people are poor because they lack resources, so the solution is resources.  And so on.

I can’t help but like Kendi’s naïve approach.

Now, there are aspects of Kendi’s academic approach that do bother me.  In his effort to create a clear definition of racism, he makes quite a few general statements which are logically questionable.

He makes a strong case ahat there is no such thing as  “non-racist” ideas and policies.  In his view, every idea and policy is either “racist” or “anti-racist”, because every idea and policy has outcomes that are either racially equal or not.

OK, I get that point, and I understand that claims of “post racial” or “non-racist” policy are usually a defense of the status quo, which produces racist results.

However, this flat, absolute claim that “…there is no such thing as a non-racist idea, only racist ideas and antiracist ideas.” (p. 20) is just flat absurd when taken to extremes.

For one thing, many ideas are not inherently racist or anti-racist, but have their effects in context.  For example, a preference for publicly funded schools is, in itself, neither racist nor anti-racist.  Everything depends on how the resources are distributed and applied within the schools, not the source of the resources.

And, of course, there are an infinite number of “ideas” in the world—and even an infinite number of ideas about people—but many of them have no discernable relation to racism.  The concept that “2 + 2 = 4” is an idea.  I can’t say it’s either racist or anti-racist.  It seems ‘non racist’ to me.

More importantly, even an idea or policy that definitely has significant effects on equality might have many other effects as well, and might even have both racist and antiracist effects.  Again, the idea of universal public education and policies that implement it have a broad range of effects.  It can both promote equality and inquality, and have different effects in different places and for different people.

So I can’t really swallow the notion that every idea, and every policy is either racist or anti-racist.  I can’t even swallow the notion that the effects of an idea can be said to be either more or less racial equality.  For most ideas, the link to outcomes is hard to demonstrate, and generally not either/or.

I know this is quibbling, but Kendi is being academic here, so it is right to rigorously dispute the logic of his definitions.

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Now, this does not mean that I disagree or oppose his platform.

On the contrary.  What it means is that when we want to “identify, investigate, and invent”, we are going to have to parse out these difficult issues.

Making schools “anti-racist” is going to be harder than just fiddling with allocations of money, because we need better teaching and better learning, where “better” needs to be defined and implemented (if not “invented”).  And the outcomes will be messy, so the definition of success—of anti-racist outcomes—will need to be done carefully.

In short, he’s got the right idea, though it’s not going to be trivial to do.

But who expected it to be easy or simple?

If it isn’t hard, it doesn’t count.

And this is important, and it counts.

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The full list of “how to be an anti-racist” (from pp. 231-2)

“Admit racial inequality is a problem of bad policy, not bad people.
“Identify racial inequality in all its intersections and manifestation.
“Investigate and uncover the racist policies causing racial inequality.
“Invent or find antiracist policy that can eliminate racial inequality.
“Figure out who or what group has the power to institute antiracist policy.
“Disseminate and educate about the uncovered racist policy and antiracist policy correctives.
“Work with sympathetic antiracist policymakers to institute the antiracist policy.
“Deploy antiracist power to compel or drive from power the unsympathetic racist policymakers in order to institute the antiracist policy.
“Monitor closely to ensure the antiracist policy reduces and eliminates racial inequality.
“When policies fail, do not blame the people. Start over and seek out new and more effective antiracist treatments until they work.
“Monitor closely to prevent new racist policies from being instituted.” (pp. 231-2)

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1. Ibram X. Kendi, How to be an Antiracist, New York, One World, 2019.

 

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