22 THENEWYORKER,AUGUST19, 2019
comparison, people of color seem good,
wise, and perhaps rather simple. This
narrative may be appealing to its target
audience, but it doesn’t seem to offer
much to anyone else. At least, that’s my
interpretation, and perhaps DiAngelo
will be grateful to hear it. After all, I
am what she would call a person of
color, and whatever I write surely counts
as “feedback.” Maybe that means she
is, indeed, doing well.
P
art of what makes DiAngelo’s proj
ect surreal is the difference in scale
between the historical injustices she in
vokes and the contemporary slights she
addresses: on one side, the indescrib
able horror of lynching; on the other,
careless crying. Kendi is less concerned
about manners, and he strives to stay
grounded in the brute facts of racial op
pression. But his latest book, too, grows
surreal at times, as he tries to reconcile
the reality of black life in America with
his own refusal to generalize.
“To be an antiracist is to realize there
is no such thing as Black behavior,” he
writes. He did not always grasp this.
As a boy in Queens, Kendi found his
life shaped by a fear of victimization.
“I avoided making eye contact, as if my
classmates were wolves,” he writes. “I
avoided stepping on new sneakers like
they were land mines.” In South Ja
maica, his neighborhood, there was a
local bully named Smurf, who pulled
a gun on Kendi, and once, with Kendi
watching, beat a boy unconscious on
a city bus in order to steal his Walk
man. This sounds terrifying, but Kendi
now claims that his fears were delu
sional. “I believed violence was stalking
me,” he writes, “but in truth I was be
ing stalked inside my own head by rac
ist ideas.” He thinks that prominent
AfricanAmericans can be unduly
influenced by their rough childhoods.
“We don’t write about all those days
we were not faced with guns in our
ribs,” he writes, at which point his anti
racist project sounds less like a form
of truthtelling and more like a kind of
propaganda.
Crime poses a conceptual problem
for Kendi. As most people know,
AfricanAmericans are greatly over
represented among both victims and
perpetrators of violent crime in Amer
ica—indeed, this fact provides stark
evidence of the country’s stubborn ra
cial inequality. But Kendi’s approach
disallows talk of criminality as a par
ticular “problem” in black neighbor
hoods; he suggests that white neigh
borhoods have their own dangers,
including crooked bankers (they “might
steal your life savings”) and suburban
traffic accidents; he even insists that
there are a “disproportionate number
of White males who engage in mass
shootings,” although mass shootings
account for a tiny percentage of gun
deaths, and white people are not dis
proportionately likely to commit them.
By the end of the section, the bully
named Smurf seems less like a real per
son and more like a spectre: the per
sonification of old racist ideas, come
to life in the imagination of a fretful
future scholar in Queens.
As it happens, there actually is a no
torious tough guy named Smurf who
grew up in Kendi’s neighborhood around
the same time. He came to be known
as Bang ’Em Smurf, a sometime rapper
who, during the twothousands, was an
ally turned antagonist of 50 Cent, the
hiphop star. Not long ago, Bang ’Em
Smurf selfpublished a memoir cum
manifesto of his own, a seemingly un
edited collection of fragments that pro
vides a glimpse of the world that Kendi
writes about. Smurf is evidently happy
to think of himself as one of the “wolves”
who roamed the neighborhood: his book
is called “Wisdom of a Wolf,” and in it
he recounts how he started stealing after
his own bicycle was stolen, and explains
the formative effect of seeing his mother
stabbed when he was four or five. (Ac
cording to Smurf, she fought back and
won the fight.)
Smurf doesn’t mention a bookish
militant named Ibram, but he does offer
his own assessment of the neighbor
hood: “Where we are from Jamaica
Queens the average youth doesn’t have
hope or inspiration to live.” Smurf no
longer lives there: in 2004, he was con
victed of illegalweapon possession, and
after serving his sentence he was de
ported to Trinidad and Tobago, where
he was born. But he is sure that things
have grown only more difficult for
young people in neighborhoods like
Jamaica. Unlike Kendi, Smurf thinks
that something is wrong there. “Most
of these youth come from poverty,” he
writes. “There is Lack of love and dis
cipline in the household.” Smurf thinks
that these families could and should
do better, which means that, by Ken
di’s definition, he is an assimilation
ist—and probably a space racist, too.
Kendi thinks that calls for racial up
lift are doomed to failure, because they
can never change enough minds, black
or white, to alter either behavior or pol
icy. They are prayer disguised as poli
tics. But his approach demands a fair
amount of faith, too, given that it re
quires a great part of the country to
undergo a revolution in thought that
took Kendi decades of study to achieve.
Where DiAngelo says she is not sure
that the country is making any prog
ress toward reducing racism, Kendi
thinks an antiracist world is possible.
“Racism is not even six hundred years
old,” he writes, tracing its origin to the
fifteenth century explorations of his
former namesake Prince Henry. “It’s a
cancer that we’ve caught early.” But the
cure, he thinks, will start with policies,
not ideas. He suggests that, just as ide
ologies of racial difference emerged
after the slave trade in order to justify
it, antiracist ideologies will emerge
once we are bold enough to enact an
antiracist agenda: criminaljustice re
form, more money for black schools
and black teachers, a program to fight
residential segregation.
“Once they clearly benefit,” Kendi
writes, “most Americans will support
and become the defenders of the anti
racist policies they once feared.” This
is an inspiring prediction, although
Kendi’s own scholarship provides less
reason for optimism. But, if he is right,
becoming an antiracist might entail a
realization that our national conversa
tion about race is largely beside the
point. If it is possible, as Kendi insists,
to change “racist policy” without first
changing “racist minds,” then perhaps
we needn’t worry quite so much about
who thinks what, and why. Kendi wants
us to see not only that there is noth
ing wrong with black people but that
there is likewise nothing wrong with
white people. “There is nothing right
or wrong with any racial groups,” he
writes. This is the bittersweet message
hidden in his book: that, in the grand
racial drama of America, every group
is already doing the best it can.
