20 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST19, 2019
a confident clarity that was also the book’s
greatest weakness, because it reduced
complicated lives to a series of pass-fail
tests. Kendi noted with satisfaction that
when Du Bois was in his sixties he con-
cluded that black people would never
“break down prejudice” through virtu-
ous comportment—thus becoming, at
last, an antiracist.
Kendi’s position has radical impli-
cations: in ruling out criticism of black
culture or black behavior, it stipulates
that any problems must be either fic-
tional or the result of contemporary
discrimination. If you reject “assim-
ilationism,” then you can’t suggest, as
Obama did, that centuries of racism
have eroded the black nuclear family.
You might try to show, instead, that
black men are often shut out of the
labor market, which makes them less
likely to marry. Or you might conclude
that the nuclear family is merely one
cultural ideal among others, and not
one to be universally preferred.
In the case of education, Kendi’s
commitment to antiracist thinking
leads him to dispute the existence of an
“achievement gap” between white and
black students. Black students may, on
average, get lower scores on standard-
ized tests, and drop out of high school
at higher rates. But such metrics, he ar-
gues in “How to Be an Antiracist,” are
themselves racist, devised to “degrade”
and “exclude” black students; he suggests
that a “low-testing” black student and a
“high-testing” white student may sim-
ply be demonstrating “different kinds of
achievement rather than different lev-
els of achievement.” This celebration of
difference comes to an end when it is
time to judge the educational systems
themselves. Kendi claims that “chronic
underfunding of Black schools” does
create “diminished”—and not merely
“different”—“opportunities for learn-
ing.” Throughout the book, the idea is
to judge unfair policies, while refusing
to judge, as a group, the people who
are subjected to them. Kendi believes
that “individual Blacks have suffered
trauma” in America, but he rejects the
“racist” idea that “Blacks are a trauma-
tized people.”
In successive chapters of “How to Be
an Antiracist,” Kendi explains that there
are many forms of racism: there is class
racism, which conflates blackness with
poverty, as well as gender racism, queer
racism, and something called “space
racism,” which is less exciting than it
sounds—it has to do with the way people
associate black neighborhoods, or spaces,
with violence. “‘Racist’ and ‘antiracist,’”
Kendi writes, “are like peelable name
tags that are placed and replaced based
on what someone is doing or not doing,
supporting or expressing in each mo-
ment.” This suggests that people can
change, as Kendi did, and as Du Bois
did. But it also suggests that nonracist
identity is contingent and unstable: we
are all constantly peeling and resticking
those nametags.
The result is to complicate the seem-
ingly straightforward definitions Kendi
offers in “How to Be an Antiracist.”
For instance, he says that a policy can
be either racist or antiracist; it is rac-
ist if it “produces or sustains racial in-
equity,” and a person is racist if he or
she supports such a policy. But it may
take many years to determine whether
a policy produces or sustains racial in-
equity. For instance, some cities, in-
cluding New York, generally forbid
employers to ask job seekers about their
criminal history, or to check their credit
scores. These measures are designed
in part to help African-American ap-
plicants, who may be more likely to
have a criminal record, or to have poor
credit. But some studies suggest that
such prohibitions make black men,
in general, less likely to be hired, per-
haps because employers fall back on
cruder generalizations. Are these laws
and their supporters racist? In Kendi’sframework, the only possible answer
is: wait and see.
Kendi’s definition of racism is de-
cidedly unsentimental. If the word “rac-
ist” is capacious enough to describe both
proud slaveholders and Barack Obama,
and if it nevertheless must constantly
be recalibrated in light of new policy
research, then it may start to lose theemotional resonance that gives it power
in the first place. There are a few mo-
ments in the book, though, when Kendi
uses the word in a more colloquial, less
rigorous sense. In the third grade, he
had a white teacher who was, Kendi
thought, quicker to call on white stu-
dents, and quicker to punish nonwhite
ones. One day, after seeing a shy black
girl ignored, Kendi staged an impromptu
sit-in at chapel. Years later, he says that
the teacher was one of a number of
“racist White people over the years who
interrupted my peace with their sirens.”
In a moment like this, “racist” seems
less like a sticker and more like a tat-
too: the word stings because it seems
to convey something distasteful and
profound about the person it describes.
Even for the exponent of a new defi-
nition of racism, older ones are not eas-
ily banished.I
t is no criticism of Kendi’s book to
say that its title is misleading: he offers
a provocative new way to think about
race in America, but little practical ad-
vice. He wants readers to become po-
litically active—to work to change pub-
lic policy, and to “focus on power instead
of people.” DiAngelo, the author of
“White Fragility,” is unapologetically
interested in people, particularly white
people. She is perhaps the country’s
most visible expert in anti-bias training,
a practice that is also an industry, and
from all appearances a prospering one.
(Last year, anti-bias training was in the
headlines when Starbucks closed its
American stores for a day to conduct a
company-wide lesson in “racial bias and
discrimination.”) DiAngelo has been
helping to lead workplace seminars since
the nineties, and she has encountered
some resistance. “When we try to talk
openly and honestly about race,” she
writes, “we are so often met with silence,
defensiveness, argumentation, certitude,
and other forms of pushback.” To ex-
plain this phenomenon, she coined the
phrase “white fragility.”
DiAngelo holds a Ph.D. in multi-
cultural education, but her most im-
portant credential is all the time she
has spent in conference rooms. Where
Kendi insists that racism can cloud any-
one’s judgment, DiAngelo sees white
people as singularly responsible. “Only
whites have the collective social and