18 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST19, 2019
As the word “racist” becomes more capacious, will it lose its power?
AMERICAN CHRONICLES
THE COLOR OF INJUSTICE
Fighting racism by redefining it.
BY KELEFASANNEH
PHOTOGRAPH: EYEEM/GETTY
ILLUSTRATION BY NA KIM
S
ixteen years ago, in 2003, the stu-
dent newspaper at Florida Agricul-
tural and Mechanical University, a his-
torically black institution in Tallahassee,
published a lively column about white
people. “I don’t hate whites,” the author,
a senior named Ibram Rogers, wrote.
“How can you hate a group of people
for being who they are?” He explained
that “Europeans” had been “socialized
to be aggressive people,” and “raised to
be racist.” His theory was that white
people were fending off racial extinc-
tion, using “psychological brainwash-
ing” and “the AIDS virus.” Perhaps the
most incendiary line appeared at the
end, after the author’s byline and e-mail
address: “Ibram Rogers’ column will
appear every Wednesday.”
As it turned out, that final claim, like
a few of the claims that preceded it, was
not quite accurate. The column caused
a stir, and Rogers was summoned to see
the editor of the local newspaper, the
Tallahassee Democrat, where he was an
intern. The editor demanded that Rog-
ers discontinue his column, and Rogers
agreed under protest, though he resolved
to continue his examination of race in
America, which became his life’s work.
He eventually earned a Ph.D. in Afri-
can-American studies from Temple, and
gained a reputation in the field, along
with some new names. He changed his
middle name from Henry to Xolani,
which is Zulu for “be peaceful,” after
learning the history of Prince Henry
the Navigator, a fifteenth-century Por-
tuguese explorer who helped pioneer
the African slave trade. And at his wed-
ding, in 2013, he and his wife, Sadiqa,
told their guests that they had chosen
a new last name: Kendi, which means
“the loved one” in the Kenyan language
of Meru. In 2016, as Ibram X. Kendi,
he published “Stamped from the Be-
ginning,” a voluminous, sober-minded
book that aimed to present “the defini-
tive history of racist ideas in America.”
In the thirteen years since his abor-
tive college-newspaper column, Kendi
had become ever more convinced that
racism, not race, was the central force in
American history, and so he reached back
to 1635 to show how malleable racism
could be. The preachers who justified
slavery used racist arguments, he wrote,
but so did many of the abolitionists—
the ubiquity of racism meant that no
one was immune to its seductive power,
including black people. In his view, the
pioneering black sociologist W. E. B.
Du Bois was propping up racist ideas in
1897, when he condemned “the immo-
rality, crime, and laziness among the Ne-
groes.” So, too, was Barack Obama, when,
as a Presidential candidate in 2008, he
decried “the erosion of black families.”
Although Obama noted that this ero-
sion was partly due to “a lack of economic
opportunity,” he also made an appeal to
black self-reliance, saying that members
of the African-American community
needed to face “our own complicity in
our condition.” Kendi saw statements like
these as reflections of a persistent but de-
lusional idea that something is wrong
with black people. The only thing wrong,
he maintained, was racism, and the coun-
try’s failure to confront and defeat it.
“Stamped from the Beginning” was
an unreservedly militant book that re-
ceived a surprisingly warm reception.
Amid a series of police shootings of
African-Americans during President
Obama’s second term, “Black lives mat-
ter” became a rallying cry and then a
movement, and helped push racism to
the front of the progressive conversation.
By the time Obama left office, in 2017,
polls showed record-high support among
Democrats for “special treatment” to help
African-Americans, and for the idea that
