Let’s face it: the United States has been under a bit of upheaval of late for, among other reasons, racial unrest. People like myself would rather not make things worse for people, but how can we help? It’s one thing to go to a protest. It’s another thing to change our everyday lives consistently over the rest of our lives. Has there been progress against racism, or are we just fooling ourselves?
I know I don’t have any answers, but author Ibram X. Kendi’s new book How to be an Antiracist might give me some help there.
Let’s start by saying what Kendi’s book is not. It’s not a set of final answers on how to solve the problem of racism. It’s not a list of priorities we need to settle to make our world a more equitable place. And it’s not about assimilating everyone into one culture. What it is, instead, is a series of definitions. Kendi has studying racism in one form or another his entire life. Indeed, that’s how he sets up the book. It’s part autobiography, part explanation on what he believes racism actually is.
In Kendi’s work, there’s no such thing as “not racist”. Either a person, idea, or policy is racist or it is antiracist. There’s no inbetween. As such, Kendi chronciles moments of his life when he confronted a racist idea, often coming up short either due to his own thoughts, actions, and beliefs, or due to others’. He then uses that shortcoming to make his point on whatever aspect of racist or antiracist thought each individual chapter is covering.
Kendi’s ideas here work for me. He isn’t offering a solution so much as a first step. He ties in many issues and ideas to racism, explaining that racism hurts everyone and is felt by everyone. In fact, I thought his conclusion on what racism is and where it originally came from fits in well with the ideas of Howard Zinn in his People’s History of the United States. Kendi sets racism up as bad ideas and policies to be combated, not so much bad people who need to be punished. If everyone can be and has moments when they are racist, perhaps we should judge people more by how much they try to change their bad ideas to better ones as opposed to how much they buckle down and hold to better ones. Everyone’s only human, so we can expect a lot of people to continue to make mistakes, but the real goal of being antiracist isn’t to set ourselves up somewhere and decide we’re done, but to work hard at continually reevaluating our ideas and the policies that run our societies. Such ideas are worth considering at the very least.
Grade: A
0 Comments