THENEWYORKER,AUGUST19, 2019 19
“racial discrimination” is the main ob-
stacle to racial parity. A prominent co-
hort of writers, led by Ta-Nehisi Coates,
was calling for a serious reckoning with
racism, and with the way racist policies
had worked to depress black earnings
and constrain black life. In this climate,
Kendi’s book was celebrated as a well-
timed contribution to a national conver-
sation. It won a National Book Award
and transformed Kendi into a leading
public intellectual. His scholarly project
has been institutionalized: Kendi is now
the founding director of the Antiracist
Research & Policy Center at American
University, in Washington, D.C.
In modern American political dis-
course, racism connotes hatred, and just
about everyone claims to oppose it. But
many on the contemporary left have pur-
sued a more active opposition, galvanized
by the rise of Donald Trump, who has
been eager to denounce black politicians
but reluctant to denounce white racists.
In many liberal circles, a movement has
gathered force: a crusade against racism
and other isms. It is a fierce movement,
and sometimes a frivolous one, aiming
the power of its outrage at excessive prison
sentences, tasteless Halloween costumes,
and many offenses in between. This
movement seems to have been particu-
larly transformative among white liber-
als, who are now, by some measures, more
concerned about racism than African-
Americans are. One survey found that
white people who voted for Hillary Clin-
ton felt warmer toward black people than
toward their fellow-whites.
Most white people in America are
not liberals, of course, and so the cam-
paign against racism has often taken the
form of an intra-white conflict. One of
the most prominent combatants is Robin
DiAngelo, a white workplace-diversity
trainer, available to help organizations
teach their employees to be more sen-
sitive to race. Last year, DiAngelo pub-
lished “White Fragility: Why It’s So
Hard for White People to Talk About
Racism,” a reflection on her career and
her cause. “White identity is inherently
racist,” she writes. “I strive to be ‘less
white.’” She cites Kendi as an authority,
even if she sometimes seems closer in
spirit to Ibram Rogers, the undergrad-
uate. But, then, Kendi himself is in an
instructive mood: his new work presents
itself as a how-to book, although, in a
little more than two hundred absorbing
pages, it’s also a manifesto and, from
time to time, a memoir. It is titled “How
to Be an Antiracist,” and in it Kendi ex-
plains how he became one, which means
explaining how he used to be (as he cur-
rently sees it) a racist. Kendi is convinced
that racism can be objectively identified,
and therefore fought, and one day van-
quished. He argues that we should stop
thinking of “racist” as a pejorative, and
start thinking of it as a simple descrip-
tion, so that we can join him in the diffi-
cult work of becoming antiracists. “One
either endorses the idea of a racial hier-
archy as a racist or racial equality as an
antiracist,” Kendi writes, adding that it
isn’t possible to be simply “not racist.”
He thinks that all of us must choose a
side; in fact, he thinks that we are al-
ready choosing, all the time.T
he modern battle against racism,
as many people have observed, is
driven by a kind of sacred fervor, and in
“How to Be an Antiracist” Kendi makes
this link explicit. “I cannot disconnect
my parents’ religious strivings to be
Christian from my secular strivings to
be an antiracist,” he writes. Indeed,
Christianity and antiracism were inti-
mately connected for his parents. They
were inspired by Tom Skinner, a fiery
black evangelist who preached the gos-
pel of “Jesus Christ the Radical,” and
by James H. Cone, one of the origina-
tors of black-liberation theology. Ken-
di’s parents taught him black pride, and
he took these lessons seriously. As Kendi
tells it, his parents’ belief in black pride
led them to embrace black self-reliance,
a doctrine that urged black people to
overcome the legacy of racism by work-
ing hard and doing well. Kendi bitterly
recalls a speech he gave at an oratory
contest in high school, decrying the bad
habits of black youth. “They think it’s
okay not to think,” he said. “They think
it’s okay to be those who are most feared
in society.” Kendi won the competition,
but he now regards the speech as shame-
fully racist, because it blamed black peo-
ple for their own failures. “I was a dupe,
a chump,” he writes. He argues that the
idea of black underachievement lends
support for anti-black policies, which
in turn help perpetuate the conditions
that inspire speeches like his.
By the time he got to college, Kendiwas outspokenly pro-black: he “pledged
to date only Dark women,” as a per-
sonal protest against standards of
beauty that favor lighter skin. His in-
famous newspaper column was actu-
ally a fairly mild representation of his
collegiate beliefs, which included a dal-
liance with the notion that white peo-
ple were literally aliens, and a convic-
tion that racist whites and treacherous
blacks had formed a sinister partner-
ship—“a team of ‘them niggers’ and
White folks.” But as he studied Afri-
can-American history he came to be-
lieve that the basic story was even sim-
pler than he had thought. American
history, he discovered, was “a battle be-
tween racists and antiracists.”
In “Stamped from the Beginning,”
Kendi divided the racists into two kinds,
segregationists and assimilationists.
Historically, segregationists argued
that black people were inherently de-
fective or dangerous, and needed to be
kept under control. Assimilationists
sounded kinder: they often fought
against black oppression, but they also
argued that black people needed to
change their behavior—their culture—
in order to catch up to white people
and assimilate into white society. In 1834,
the American Anti-Slavery Society is-
sued a pamphlet of admonishment:
We have noticed with sorrow, that some of
the colored people are purchasers of lottery
tickets, and confess ourselves shocked to learn
that some persons, who are situated to do much
good, and whose example might be most sal-
utary, engage in games of chance for money
and for strong drink.Sometimes these lectures were in-
tended as a political strategy, on the the-
ory that civil rights would be easier to
win if black Americans were perceived
to be working hard. And sometimes, es-
pecially in the twentieth century, they
were intended as acknowledgments of
the limits of politics. In Kendi’s view,
though, talk of failures in culture or con-
duct supposes that black people are some-
how to blame for the effects of racism—
as if they could have chosen, instead, to
be unaffected by it. He thinks that it is
both unfair and impractical to suggest
that black communities must somehow
heal themselves before the government
can intervene. Ranging across the cen-
turies, “Stamped” identified segregation-
ists, assimilationists, and antiracists with