Ibrahim X. Kendi’s How To Be An Antiracist has been a must-read for the left side of the political spectrum in 2020, and there’s a lot to be said for it. It explores the author’s experience as a Black man growing up in America in an episodic series of events, from his childhood to his achievement of finding a position in academia.
From this journey, he draws lessons, definitions, and prescriptions, using not only the experiences of himself, his family, and his friends, but historical incidents as well. His subjects cover a number of areas: biology, culture, and class are just some. His findings are cast not just at the White community, but the Black community, the Asians, as well as previous generations, along with the current generations. As we should expect, the findings are rarely comforting for any of them, as Kendi suggests his own parents had shared in widespread misconceptions in the Black community of how race should be handled in America, along with the necessary blame of the southern slave owners of the years previous to 1865, that the researchers of the 20th century got key conclusions completely wrong, often based on preconception rather than actual research.
Each chapter contains definitions of his key antiracist concepts, pronounced in a manner that is grating, and almost certainly intended to be that way; a recounting of incidents from his life that help illustrate his point; and prescriptions drawn from them. This approach can be a trifle bracing, particularly in the first category of definitions. As they tend to lead each chapter off, they can come across as unsupported, but by doing so, they provoke the reader to react and, hopefully, organize their thoughts on the subject. The personal anecdotes then give valuable insights into the thought processes of Kendi, perhaps leading to a better understanding of why the matter of race has never been a transactional process.
The prescriptions can range from the relieving, such as the observation that anyone can be racist, rather than just Whites, to the puzzling intellectual error that suggests that if a non-racial group’s racial composition doesn’t reflect surrounding society’s racial composition, then it should be changed until it does, which completely ignores the realities of statistical mechanics.
And it leads to perhaps the most important omission from this book: the role of merit, or excellence, in any group, and how that interacts with a historically racist society. The negatives of promoting someone based on something other than ability is well-known, even as it continually occurs in nepotistic and other non-merit based environments world-wide; yet, just such an excuse from that realm, i.e., a fallacious use of He’s just not good enough, is also well known to be an excuse for satisfying racist impulses. How does Kendi propose to balance the proposition of enforced racial composition against that of the requirement of excellence? He doesn’t say.
Like any book that strives to break new ground, sometimes it gets off the trail and plunges into the river, and that’s all well and good: it shows striving. I don’t accept all, or even any, that I read; in particular, his suggestion that racism started with the Portuguese makes me wonder if an anthropologist trained in evolutionary theory would agree.
But the fact that I finished this two months ago and only now have written a review suggests that, along with the time taken up with the recent election, it took time to absorb and think about the proposed debating points, and that’s not a bad thing.
You may not like it, you may hate it, but it might make you think.
