I just finished reading Kendi’s How To Be An Antiracist. I really liked the book. That includes the format of mixing personal narrative with propositional statements. And the overall content. Why did I like it?
1) Kendi has a clear definition of antiracism that makes sense to me. He identifies antiracism as working to change racist policies. Racist policies in government. Racist policies in corporations. Racist policies anywhere. He sees racist ideas as following racist policies rather than leading racist policies. This doesn’t rule out learning as much as you can about racist ideas – Kendi’s major work Stamped From The Beginning was a thorough history of just that. But where do racist ideas come from? He finds that source in the self-interest of policy makers including both persons who directly make laws and persons with economic power to protect who influence them.
2) Kendi acknowledges racist ideas and actions in the black community throughout the book. This includes his own disparaging of blacks in his prize-winning high school Martin Luther King Day speech; E. Franklin Frazier’s sociological writings which dominated sociological thought about race from the early 1930s through the mid 1960s; the misguided widespread support in the black community for the War On Drugs which eventually included the 26 out of 38 members of the Black Caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives voting for the 1994 anti-crime legislation that led to mass incarceration; and many other examples. Kendi explicitly refutes the argument that black people can’t be racist because black people don’t have any power.
3) Kendi affirms everyone’s basic humanity. This is where the question of assimilation gets a little sticky. Many advocates of assimilation see those whom they want to assimilate as inferior. This was very true of Oscar Romero’s1966 book, The Culture Of Poverty, and only slightly less true of the monumental 1944 Carnegie Foundation study by Gunnar Myrdal, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 Johnson Administration report, The Negro Family: The Case For National Action, drew heavily from E. Franklin Frazier’s 1955 book, Black Bourgeoise, to make the case that fixing the Negro family should be a top governmental priority – all the government needed do for black America.
4) Kendi points everyone in the same action direction: change racist policies! He doesn’t talk about “white supremacy culture” as in Critical Race Theory. He doesn’t say “white should fix it” as I understand Critical Race Theory to say. His message to blacks, to whites, to everyone is that we need to identify specific racist policies and then work hard and work together to get them changed.
5) Kendi’s message contrasts directly with the penchant in many contemporary anti-racism training programs to look for racism only in the white psyche.
The personal narratives included in the book make the entire message come alive. I can't recommend it more highly.
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- Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial HarmDr. Robin DiAngeloPaperback$6.99 shipping
A Must Read—Powerful Book for Today!!!
This book was written at a very important moment in history. Antiracist movements became very prevalent globally, and Dr. Kendi’s book could not have been written at a more important moment. In many ways it gives visibility into the experiences of people who are confronted by institutional racism. The author explains racism in the context of a set of beliefs rather than some inborn genetic quality. Often, when discussions of racism occur, people shy away from them. As Dr. Kendi explained in interviews, this definition of racism is often flawed. Quite frequently, people will say things like, “I don’t have a racist bone in my body.” Thus, by linking racism to biology instead of to a set of beliefs and actions, no progress is made when it comes to discussing racism or making the necessary institutional changes to end it. Similar to this work, I also explore racism in my book The Real Wakandas of Africa. To add to this I include the rich history of African people before modern racism infected the world. In this era, Africans created beautiful civilizations. For example, Africans constructed the tallest building in the world. This building contains as much stone as 30 Empire State buildings. It was the tallest building in the world for more than 4000 years. To add to this, surgical procedures of African people were quite complex. African doctors conducted surgery on the eye to remove cataracts 700 years ago, and performed cesarean sections in Central Africa with antiseptics hundreds of years before they were successfully completed with antiseptics in Europe or America. When it came to metalworking, they were equally as advanced. For example, they smelted carbon steel 2000 years before Americans or Europeans were aware of this process. Likewise, in the field of astronomy, they charted star systems for hundreds of years before they were known by scientists in America. West Africans constructed the longest wall in the world for which I also wrote a book called: The Great Wall of Africa: The Empire of Benin’s 10,000 Mile Long Wall. Dr. Kendi is one of the few scholars who has a comprehensive knowledge about Africa’s precolonial contribution to history. Too frequently, this history has been ignored by books that discuss racism, and the exclusion of this leads to a misunderstanding of Black history. While Dr. Kendi’s book is not centered around these ideas, it is a genuinely important book on racism and antiracism. Pick up a copy today!
Top reviews from other countries
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- ChloeReviewed in the United Kingdom on September 18, 2020
An eye-opening read for all
