I'm not aware of being racist, but that doesn't mean that I'm not. Anti-racism is a step beyond thinking that I'm not a racist. It's taking a stand that you will actively oppose racism. The book that I'm reviewing is How To Be An Anti-Racist .
How To Be An Anti-Racist is the first book I've read by Ibram X. Kendi. I think I may want to read The Black Camps Movement which is one of his previous works. I definitely want to read his most recent book, Chain of Ideas, which I've placed on hold at the library.
Some may think that racism causes no harm, but it definitely does. It destroys the possibility of positive interaction with persons of other races. Racism prejudices you against such a possibility.
The book opens with Kendi as a teen. He'd given an MLK Competition speech saying that Black youth believed that it was OK to be feared, not to think and not to value education. He also said "They think it's OK to confine their dreams to sports and music." He'd adopted a sports career as his aspiration himself. He realized that he'd been reproducing racist ideas in his speech, but he ended that he still "had a dream" which is a reference to MLK's famous speech. After that, he had nightmares about his racist speech.
At that point I included this significant quote from How To Be An Anti-Racist:
" Internalized racism is the real Black on Black crime."
One example of internalized racism was Kendi wearing hazel contact lenses. He thought they made him look more White and that they looked better than his natural eye color which presumably looked more Black. Why did he want to look more White? Why did he think it looked better? Kendi calls this Colorism which is a set of racist ideas about skin color. So he was aware that this was racist, yet he continues to wear hazel contact lenses. I consider this sad.
Saying that you aren't racist means that you consider yourself neutral. Kendi points out that "there is no neutrality in the racism struggle". You need to be fighting against the constructed hierarchy of the races in order to be anti-racist.
It seems to me, that if racism is a fire that's burning down bridges between the races, you need to be anti-racist to fight the fire.
"Racist" isn't just an insult. It describes the way someone categorizes other people. You need to be able to identify racism in order to dismember the categorization process.
My father was part of the civil rights struggle as an active member of the American Civil Liberties Union. I think he could be considered an anti-racist.
"Our constitution is color blind," said U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Harlan is his dissent to Plessy v. Ferguson which legalized segregation in 1896. Harlan also said that the White race would remain dominant "if it remains true to its great heritage." This is a White supremacist statement, not a color blind one. So Justice Harlan's statement should be considered unconstitutional.
"Racist" and "anti-racist" define thoughts and actions not "fixed identities", Kendi tells us. Theoretically, we can be racist one minute and anti-racist the next. Kendi no longer believes that a Black individual can't be racist. He also no longer believes that the actions of a Black person reflect on him. No one is a "race representative", but we need to focus on changing racist policies. Unfortunately, I believe that so long as there are racist individuals, we can't prevent them from organizing to pass racist laws. I don't consider that cynicism, I consider it realism.
Kendi says that the most threatening policy is race neutrality. This is true for the same reason that a do nothing climate policy is the most threatening. The non-white global south is the most victimized by climate change. In the U.S., nearly 4000 areas that are mostly poor and non-white have higher rates of lead poisoning than Flint, Michigan. Flint is pretty toxic, so that makes these 4000 areas ultra-toxic. So if we had prioritized cleaning up poor non-white areas, the people who lived there wouldn't be dying of lead poisoning.
Kendi says that he is one generation removed from picking cotton. I would like to point out that some Whites are also one generation removed from agricultural serfdom. My grandmother was a serf which meant she worked in the fields involuntarily for no pay for a Polish count. I think that such exploitation was widely practiced in a number of parts of the world.
One Black police officer was reported as saying that Negroes are "too stupid" to get a good education, so they could get a good job. I guess when police are abusive and don't enforce the law properly, then being a cop is a terrible job.
Kendi complains that 80% of teachers are White. I recall reading that few Blacks can afford to train to be teachers in addition to taking the classes to get a B.A. as a prerequisite.
When I read about the hundreds of thousands of Black women having been involuntarily sterilized, I wrote in my notes that this was an attempt at medical race genocide. Another sign of medical race genocide was the statistic that Black women are three to four times more likely to die while pregnant than White women.
Kendi points out the differences between protests and demonstrations. I've always used these terms interchangably, but Kendi says they have specific definitions. "A protest organizes people for a long lasting campaign that has the goal of bringing about change. A demonstration is a short term mobilization to bring attention to a problem. In that case, my most recent political actions have all been protests, not demonstrations.
I hadn't been aware that racist policies pre-exist racist ideas. The ideas are elaborated in order to justify the policies. This observation by Kendi made complete sense when I thought about it. The reverse only makes sense in the context of someone studying racism. Out in the real world, racist politicians want to start by implementing racism through policy.
Of course the goal of rational people who want to live in a civilized society without racial conflict is to end racism. That is what I hope for, and it's what Kendi hopes for too. This attitude needs to spread as widely as possible.
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