50
The Observer
25.08.19 BooksAgainst the
‘impotent
simplicity of
who is or isn’t
a racist’: US
senator Cory
Booker in
Charleston after
the Dayton and
El Paso killings.
Photograph by
Randall Hill/
Reuters‘Writing calmly
but insightfully’:
Ibram Kendi.
Practise what you preach
and hold racists to account
I once considered outing a manager
at work as a racist. I hesitated from
the discomfort of embarking on
such action, an unwillingness to
fall into the category of victim, and
because of the potentially serious
consequences for the manager to be
so labelled. I also knew that it was
near impossible to prove; the racism
was covert, though obvious to me.
But in the end, I pulled back for a
more prosaic reason: I realised that
the boss to whom I’d have to report
my assessment was more obviously
racist than the offending manager.
It’s a mark of the transformative
and unsettling power of Ibram X
Kendi’s writing that I relaxed into
How to Be an Antiracist with the
comforting and self-righteous
knowledge that the title
was not addressing me.
After all I am black; I
couldn’t possibly be
racist, could I? By the
book’s end, I wasn’t
so sure.
Donald Trump
has made the
assertion repeatedly
that he is the “ least
racist person in the
world ”. But Kendi, the
founding director of theAntiracist Research and Policy
Center at American University
in Washington, DC , argues that
a minimum requirement for
claiming antiracist bona fi des is
not to deny that which is palpably
true. He highlights how Trump
and his enablers have often
countered criticism with “the
white-supremacist idea that calling
something racist is the primary
form of racism”.
How to Be an Antiracist offers
a way out from the tangled
disingenuousness of mainstream
narratives around racism. Whether
you’re an institution such as
the BBC, fumbling editorially in
determinedly refusing to describe
Trump as a racist, or an individual
in moral paralysis, dumbfounded
by the febrile emotions now at large
in a resurgence of racist attitudes,
you are not alone; hope is on its
way. At its simplest, the book argues
that to be an antiracist is to take
an active and persistent stance
against racism.
In Kendi’s conception, words and
phrases that obscure the offence –
unconscious bias, microaggressions
and others – should make way for
clearer-eyed defi nitions.
Rather than institutionali sed
racism , which always takes some
unpacking from the abstract, let’s
call out the active ingredient:
racist policy. Kendi believes that“we become unconscious to racist
policymakers and policies as we lash
out angrily at the abstract bogeyman
of the ‘system’”.
But it’s not just white people
whose prejudicial thoughts and
actions have been affected by
racism. Kendi places himself
front and centre of the argument,
exploring how black people,
too, have been seduced by racist
ideology, owning up to his
misguided adoption as a youth of
the “virtuous/reprehensible black
man” dichotomy, in which he
distanced himself from those
African Americans considered to
be unworthy and guilty of letting
down the race. The teenage Kendi
avoids stepping on the “kicks”
(trainers) of other black boys “like
they were landmines”. Fed on
noxious mainstream media tropes
and propaganda about “ ghetto
blacks” and the “growing army
of super-predators”, he describes
being “stalked inside my head by
racist ideas”.
Poor racist whites have also been
“played” by the establishment,
buoyed, writes Kendi, by the notion
that “I may not be rich, but at
least I am not black ”. In the 1960s,
US president Lyndon B Johnson
expanded on that pitiable belief:
“If you can convince the lowest
white man he’s better than the
best coloured man, he won’t noticeyou’re picking his pocket. Hell, give
him somebody to look down on, and
he’ll empty his pockets for you.”
Writing calmly but insightfully
in a series of brisk chapters, Kendi
teases out the evolution of racism- from its historical underpinning
and providing cover for the
“civili sing mission ” of slavery and
coloni sation, through to the present,
so-called “academic achievement
gap” between black and white
students, and the allegedly neutral
standardised tests that serve as
“the linchpin of a racist idea of
behavioural racism”.
Ultimately, racism is not the
product of hatred and ignorance
but, rather, the design of “racist
power [to exploit] out of raw
self-interest”, Kendi asserts. He
cites cynical voter registration
suppression techniques as a clear
example in the 2000 presidential
election of George W Bush ,
which was determined by the
disqualifi cation of thousands of
votes from black people in Florida.
In the course of How to Be an
Antiracist, Kendi moves from his
rigid framework and selective
perception of the inequalities
endured by black people as
primarily explained through the
prism of race; he’s increasingly
inclined towards the view held by
Martin Luther King Jr – espoused
in his Poor People’s Campaign - of the intersection of racism
with capitalism. Further, to be an
antiracist is to challenge spurious (if
perhaps well-intentioned) notions
such as the “culture of poverty”,
which allegedly traps impoverished
black people in dependency – in
opposition to, and ignorant of, the
“culture of work”.
“We can’t let these conversations
devolve into the impotent simplicity
of who is or isn’t a racist,” said the
African American senator Cory
Booker in the aftermath of the
mass shootings in the US cities of
Dayton and El Paso . Booker spoke
movingly of this “moral moment”
at the Emanuel AME church in
Charleston, where four years ago
a white supremacist shot and
killed several of the congregation.
Echoing Kendi’s call to action,
he argued : “ If the answer to the
question ‘Do racism and white
supremacy exist?’ is yes, then the
real question isn’t who is or isn’t a
racist, but who is and isn’t doing
something about it ?”
This vital book asks those same
age-old questions: When does
silence become complicity? Why
do we fear taking action more than
the devastating consequences
of inaction? Kendi’s writing is a
search for a language to enable the
antiracist that resides in all of us.
Towards the end, the 37-year-old
scholar draws on the analogy of
fi ghting the colon cancer that has
threatened his own young life. How
to Be an Antiracist encourages self-
refl ection on the compelling truth:
“Racism has always been terminal
and curable.”
To order How to Be an Antiracist
for £12.99 go to guardianbookshop.
com or call 0330 333 6846How to Be an Antiracist
Ibram X Kendi
Bodley Head , £ 16.99 , pp320When does silence
become complicity?
Colin Grant welcomes
a vital and hopeful book
that urges each of us to
be more proactive in the
fi ght against racism
Society