Everyone's a little bit racist.

I used to read voraciously. Over time, chaos and obligation have conspired against me so that when I do have time to sit, I'd rather scroll mindlessly through my phone and not think at all.  Every couple of years, though, circumstances align and I find myself in a flurry of reading.  That time has come, so I hit the library.

One of the books I picked up is How to be an Anti-Racist, by Ibram X. Kendi.  It's not my usual, to be honest; I lean more toward fiction, and from various articles I'd perused over the years I already knew we disagreed on several major philosophical points.  However, he is one of the leading contemporary voices on race.  Jordan Peterson (another author I've binged lately) says that if you want to understand someone, you have to listen to them, and be able to describe their point of view to their satisfaction.  It naturally follows that if I want to understand Kendi and his acolytes, I need to go to the source material instead of skimming brief and often biased articles.  

What I found was unexpected.  The book is part autobiography, part socio-academic commentary, and part reflection on wrestling with his own racism.  Kendi's definition of racism is interesting because while he does describe racism as a power structure, he does not assign it any skin tone even while acknowledging that contemporary racist structures skew towards keeping white people in power.  In fact, according to Kendi, anyone can be racist to anyone else, regardless of race, which is itself a social construct and not a biological one.   Racism is the attitude of assigning preconceived motivations, feelings, or expectations to an individual or group of individuals based on skin color.  A person is not smart or stupid, hardworking or lazy, law-abiding or criminal based on their race. A race is not a reflection of its good or bad individuals.  Since I have always tended toward humanism instead of collectivism and all the generalizing that goes with it, this definition resonated with me.  I would agree with Kendi that we should treat people as individuals who make choices, and that their choices reflect only on them, not on everyone who looks like them.

Kendi's main argument is that racist policies, not racist people, need to change--that while people can create policy, policy can force behavioral and ideological change.  He outlines multiple intersectionalities such as gender, socioeconomic status, ethnicity, and more that need to be addressed as well as political and systemic racism in order to abolish racism, and that to fail to address any of these is to allow racism to continue. Therefore, we must be constantly self-assessing, reflecting, and trying to eradicate biases towards others.  No group of people, no culture, no society, is better or worse than another, according to Kendi--they are simply different.  Anti-racist policy does not promote one people or culture above another but seeks to incorporate them all without assimilating them into one homogenous mass.

Throughout the book, Kendi emphasizes the responsibility of the individual to address their own racist ideas.  We all have them, consciously or otherwise.  The reader is allowed to share Kendi's own racist ideas and see how he strives to eradicate them.  I appreciate his ability to reflect on his own racist ideas towards white people and other black people at various times in his life and hold himself accountable for them.  That's something that a lot of people aren't willing to do.  Ultimately, he contends, to be anti-racist you have to be interested in equity for everyone--not seeking policies that benefit only the chosen few or yourself.  

Though Kendi emphasizes the power of the individual and the need to see people as individuals, he ultimately doesn't go far enough.  The individual is not responsible for their failures; in fact, he says that any inherent inequity is due to failure to make sufficiently anti-racist policy.  This allegation infantilizes the individual.  There is no way to legislate our way to equal outcomes.  There are too many factors--policy, yes, but also personality, individual ability, individual interest and agency, cultural values, family support, socioeconomic status.  Most of these cannot be legislated.  It reminds me of the push to have more women in STEM.  I never had a single teacher tell me that I couldn't be a scientist, engineer, or doctor.  In fact, most of the media we consumed or materials we were given had female representation in the sciences. 2/3 of my Calculus class was female. So why is STEM still only 28% female?  It isn't because some male boogeyman is gatekeeping, or because girls aren't given enough opportunity or because a dinosaur of a teacher made them feel stupid.  Policy after policy has been crafted to incentivize women to join the sciences. Most women simply aren't interested for a variety of individual reasons. Trying to legislate our way to performance and representative equity is doomed to fail because we simply can't without either discriminating, dropping standards, or artificially limiting opportunities based on gender or whatever other disqualifiers besides actual competency.  Even if equal opportunities could be guaranteed, they do not guarantee equal outcomes.

Continuing along that tangent, while it is possible that I misunderstood or missed an important point, it seems to me that it is impossible to create an equitable society with equitable opportunities and outcomes without organizing some sort of hierarchy of values.  If every culture is valuable, then how do you provide equitable outcomes to cultures with conflicting values or traditions without some degree of assimilation?  Assimilation isn't strictly forcing one culture be subsumed by another, it can also be two or more disparate groups fusing together, which by necessity means parts of each group will be discarded by the whole--in essence, deciding certain parts of the culture or certain traditions are not desirable.  

Kendi contends that racism as defined by skin-color didn't exist until the Portuguese kicked off colonialism and European expansion, and that racism was developed to justify Afro-slavery.  While he does acknowledge that slavery existed before the 1400s, he asserts that it was not along racial lines.  I feel this is splitting hairs to bolster his argument.  His assertions are based on the first European records ascribing personality characteristics by skin-color, but I'd argue that this only works if we limit racism to the definition we use today.  Slavery was always based on othering.  Just because someone shared your skin tone doesn't mean that you saw them as one of you; you saw them as weaker, less intelligent, less deserving, less human. While I acknowledge that some precolonial cultures practiced slavery on more ethnic or tribal grounds, it is an assumption at best to say that all people didn't discriminate based on skin-color simply because they didn't write it down in carefully kept ledgers.  For example, the Arab slave trade primarily focused on white Europeans (specifically designated as Saqaliba) and black Africans.  It is much easier to justify and accept enslaving people who look differently than you do.

For all his talk about the need to see the individual for who he or she is, and his emphasis on not assigning racial ideology or identity to individuals (as this is racist), all of the white people mentioned in Kendi's narrative are fearful, cruel smug, dismissive, or ignorant.  He makes a lot of assumptions about their motivations.  This falls in line with Kendi's own self-admitted tendency towards drama. He is the anti-racist hero of his own narrative. Furthermore, it is interesting that he says "Racist ideas suspend reality and retrofit history, including our individual histories." We can give new flavors to old experiences and rewrite the facts by assigning contemporary motives or points of view or feelings to them.  This makes people not very subjective--a point I agree with--but it does mean that we should be careful about classifying people as arbiters of truth, and Kendi is no exception to that.

I also think there's a danger in proponents of Kendi citing his work without understanding it.  He acknowledges that people can be racist within their own race.  That's worth considering.  However, I have read too many instances of people, particularly black conservatives or even liberal critics like John McWhorter, being called racist and shut down.  This silences black voices and encourages the belief that black people--and whites, and indigenous, and Asians, etc.--are racial monoliths of thought and experience, something that Kendi actually argues against.  Yet claiming internalized racism is a simple way to silence dissenting viewpoints and ideas.  It dismisses any challenge to anti-racism by using definitions provided by anti-racism, a self-licking lollipop if I ever heard of one.  This circular self-supporting logic is harmful because it limits debate and protects ideas that may not stand up to rigorous, logical scrutiny.  If an idea is sound, it can handle questions. Seeking to protect ideology from questions or critiques suggests one of three things: a reverence for the idea that borders on worship and sees dissent as heresy; a lack of intelligence or introspection; or a desire to gain power through the ideology.  Since racism is associated with power and trying to keep it, this last one should be the most concerning.  While I think that most people who fall into Kendi's camp are interested in addressing historical and contemporary inequities and not interested in subjugating others, there are those who also seek power they feel they have been denied, or those who seek to take advantage of the ideology.  In Kendi's own words, "the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination." I think Kendi would expect those claiming to build so-called anti-racist policy to be self-reflective enough to ensure they are creating equity, not seeking power. I also think that his expectations would ultimately be disappointed.  Many progressives speak of humans idealized, not as they are.  Policies are crafted by imperfect people and will therefore themselves be imperfect.  There will always be a cost, and most people are willing to have others pay it for them.

Ultimately, I enjoyed the book.  Professor Kendi is a very smart man, and I appreciated his perspective.  I don't agree with all of his analysis or conclusions, but his arguments provoked thought.  We could all do a better job listening, and who knows--it might just help us understand each other a little better.

Now on to McWhorter.