I bought this book after watching the author speak at the Edinburgh Book Festival in 2019. He was clear, calm and concise. I was thrilled to hear someone talk about racism the way he did. I wanted to ask questions and stay behind to get my book signed. Sadly, my raised hand wasn’t chosen and I had another event immediately after. In the end, it didn’t matter because I got the book and it answers a lot of questions I had!
As a white person, I wanted nothing to do with racism for much of my life. ‘Racism’ was a word I didn’t want to associate with and didn’t really want to discuss. Of course I would never discriminate against anyone based on their race. That went without saying and was something only bad, evil people did. Racism was something I had no personal experience of. I thought, or hoped, had ceased to exist. Simultaneously, I held lots of racist ideas and undoubtedly treated people in racist ways. To me, the world was full of injustices and racism was probably one of them but it was rare, like religious extremism, and disappearing. If someone called me a racist, I would have been very upset and defended myself against the slanderous attack. ‘Racist’ was a scary word for me and more often than not I would simply shut down if someone talked about it. This book helped me to confront some of these contradictions and think about racism in a more structured and less emotional way.
Kendi gets it absolutely bang on when he writes that the word ‘racist’ has lost all meaning. The word has become too emotive and the concept too vilified. Even the most racist people claim they’re not racist. The problem demonstrably exists, but no one is prepared to be called a racist and therefore no one is responsible. In its place he introduces the concept of ‘antiracism,’ defined as “one who is supporting an antiracist policy through their actions or expressing an antiracist idea” (p13). To me, this transforms the subject in a couple of ways. It takes away some of the stigma and taboo attached to being called a racist. Being racist isn’t a permanent condition, like your blood type; it is something an individual can be or not be, depending on their actions. It makes the word less of a terrifying stamp that will brand you forever and turns it into something that can be recognised without the perpetrator becoming the devil incarnate. To be able to discuss the topic in a slightly more sane manner seems better than the insane situation whereby racism exists but there are no racist people or racist actions.
One powerful perspective I got from the book is this: statistically speaking, huge disparities exist between racial groups in the US and UK. This extends to huge swathes of life and includes almost everything. Including, it appears, being more likely to contract and die from the current covid-19 pandemic. The explanation for this situation can be one of two broad choices according to Kendi. Either, A - people of different races have different experiences of life, on average, because there are fundamental differences between their abilities, or, B - it’s because of racism. As Kendi puts it:
“Either racist policies or Black inferiority explains why White people are wealthier, healthier and more powerful than Black people today.” (p117)
The idea that different races could be fundamentally different is genetically and experientially absurd to me, so I must choose that it is down to racism. But is it all down to racism? For Kendi, the answer is yes. I feel like this explanation is undoubtedly important but could become tricky as a theory when examining other types of inequality. Disparities exist between all sorts of groups of people for all sorts of reasons and, unlike Kendi, I can’t see this as all coming from one source. In a seemingly random world of genetic mutations and natural selection, naked luck plays a large part. To use an example I read in a Coleman Hughes review of the book, what explains the difference between earnings of different nationalities of the same race in America? Whereas it seems Kendi would argue it is racist policy, or in this case discriminatory policies of some kind, I feel it is at least partly cultural and associated with values of the society they’ve emigrated from. That is not to judge one culture as “better” than the other, an idea Kendi identifies as culturally racist and rightly rejects, but to observe that they are different and that some can be more suitable to certain circumstances than others, which is observable statistically.
Against this, immigration policy has clearly racial aspects and America’s role in global history could also explain some of these differences. The topic is a complex one and I’m sure Kendi has thought about it more than me! However, his vision is a radical one and I found it more useful as a tool for thinking about what racism really means than a rigorous, all encompassing philosophical schema. Kendi doesn’t really address this question of difference or inequality without discriminatory policy as a cause. I was left wondering if, in a reductio ad absurdum, an antiracist world was one with absolutely no differences between people and how that could work. The idea of all arbitrary groups having statistically the same opportunities struck me as fair and appealing but I wondered how it would work in practice. If income is an example then how do you determine how much of a given disparity is down to discriminatory policy and how much is down to free choice to earn less than they could if one group’s culture prioritises earning money more than another’s? For example, different nationalities of immigrants to the US. Thinking about disparate cultures and people and their choices through narrow statistical lenses could also prove to be problematic.
It’s fair to critique Kendi’s invention as simplistic but I think it brings more clarity to the subject than simply denying its existence. The book isn’t long on specific proposals either but, as an introduction to the subject, it’s not fair to demand too much of it in this respect. The antiracist formulation is black and white and it seems it would be possible to find actions and policies that could not be conclusively proved to be racist or antiracist. For example, the US grant of $1,200 to all Americans earning under $70k during coronavirus doesn’t seem either to me. Although perhaps that makes it antiracist? Or racist because white people have more money on average? The concept isn’t as straightforward to apply as it is to state. Despite these issues with the antiracist concept, I feel it is a good starting point for talking about the problem and understanding it. Given how racist America is, policymakers should definitely be thinking more about this and Kendi is right about this.
Kendi is also keen to dismantle the race as a meaningful grouping. The idea of race as a social construct is not a new one. However, many people, including myself, continue to use unbelievably broad groups like race, nationality and gender to generalise. I liked the way Kendi wants to individualise behaviour and proposes, “to be antiracist is to deracialize behaviour, to remove the tattooed stereotype from every racialized body. Behaviour is something humans do, not races.” (p105)
So given that the concept of race has such poor rational underpinnings, why does the concept surround us everywhere we go and why is society suffused with its assumptions? This is a huge question and Kendi does an admirable job of describing a potted history of colonialism, the slave trade and racial stereotyping that I won’t attempt to precis here. One idea he presents when trying to understand the origins of racism, which of course must be various, is: “racist power produces racist policies out of self-interest and then produces racist ideas to justify those policies” (pp129-130). Like Spinoza, I am convinced that self-interest is the governing force in human behaviour so this theory really struck a chord. It feels intuitively correct but also made me worry that racism is, in some sense, a natural human proclivity. When humans encounter something different or new that looks and behaves differently from them, I feel like the normal reaction is fear, a desire to see oneself as superior and negative discrimination. When you add a eurocentric interpretation of progress to this natural fear of what is unknown or different, I feel like racism is a very easy, convenient and, crucially, self-interested idea to arrive at. Is there any way to stop self-interest? Or to stop it from turning into discrimination? The fact that generalisations about the behaviour of people based on such broad categories is so pervasive makes me nervous.
Kendi is disarmingly honest about his own personal experiences with race and admits to being an assimilationist, racist towards black people and racist towards white people at various stages of his life. His honesty and experiences are crucial to the power of the book and really help a white person like me with no experience of racism. His journey from a disengaged teenager to a leading race scholar is hugely educational because he covers all the mistaken ideas he had to abandon along the way, as opposed to just pretending he knew it all from the outset. The book is at its best explaining the interconnections between race, society and personal experience.
Kendi shares a lot of his personal history in the book and, as I mentioned above, this can be really enlightening. It can also be a bit boring and formulaic. The books chapters discuss race as it intersects with various other areas like biology, ethnicity or culture. By the end of the book, I felt like the structure of each chapter was too formulaic and that Kendi overuses his personal experiences in his writing. Sometimes they’re really illustrative but sometimes they’re too tangential. It also doesn’t help that Kendi is loquacious in his writing style. By the end of the book, it feels like talking to a friend who always has a half hour story full of irrelevant details that he has to tell you to demonstrate a fairly straightforward point. I have a pet theory that Kendi picked this up from his proximity to sermons as a child, being the son of a preacher. Just like a sermon, every chapter starts with an intriguing story from the speaker’s life to get the punters interested before we turn to the serious content of God or, in this case, racism. Sometimes it’s illustrative and other times it’s extraneous and I felt it should have been used more sparingly as a technique. One of the stories about how Kendi showed one his students the folly of his ways is nauseatingly self-congratulatory and trite (pp 64-66).
Another criticism I have is the sheer number of times Kendi will repeat the same point. Sometimes a whole paragraph will be filled with multiple examples of the same point when the point is perfectly clear from the first example. Sometimes it might be justified on grounds of clarity but usually it just feels like Kendi has a long-winded style.
More annoyingly, while some concepts are explained half to death, others are tossed in with hardly any justification or explanation whatsoever. For example, while Kendi spends 250 odd pages painstakingly explaining the nuances of racism, he dismisses capitalism in 4 short pages without any of the care and attention to detail he shows in the rest of the book. It’s not so much that I disagree with his conclusion but that I’d like him to explain what he means in more detail. He uses a vague analogy about racism and capitalism being conjoined twins and only really gives the most precursory sketches of a theory itself based on skimming vast swathes of history. For example,
“the conjoined twins entered adulthood through Native and Black and Asian and White slavery and forced labor in the Americas, which powered industrial revolutions from Boston to London that financed still greater empires in the 18th and 19th centuries. The hot and cold wars in the twentieth century over resources and markets, rights and powers, weakened the conjoined twins - but eventually they would grow stronger under the guidance of the US, the EU, China and the satellite nations beholden to them, colonies in everything but name.” (p157)
It’s impossible to deny that capitalism's history is inextricably intertwined with a lot of injustice and inequality. But there’s no mention of capitalism’s more positive aspects or, crucially, analysis of the relative merits of alternative systems. At its best the book is thorough, methodical and lucid. The quote above gives some flavour of how it is anything but on the subject of capitalism. Ideas are piled willy-nilly on top of each other without any of care or detail I’d come to expect from it. The subject is so vast, I feel it would have been better to leave it out than to try and deal with it in a few hundred one-sided words that make it feel like he is trying to gloss over it. The juxtaposition of carefully argued, over-exemplified points followed by sweeping, unsupported assertion is certainly jarring to read.
This book was a strange mixture. Part of it is intensely personal reflection. Part of it is a textbook or primer on the subject of racism. The latter was, in the main, much better than the former. Kendi has obviously read widely on the subject and the book provides many interesting areas for further reading for a non-specialist like me. It is beautifully footnoted and indexed, which makes it easy for the reader to find out more. In this sense, the book had an academic quality. The inclusion of the more folksy, autobiographical material may be there to help break up the denser sections. I felt it was overused, formulaic and didn’t always bring much to the chapter. For me, Kendi is not an especially talented writer and he writes too much. However, Kendi should definitely be admired for trying to make this book accessible. Some academic literature I have read on inequality is actually incomprensible to the layperson. Equally, I had a lot of admiration for his desire to be an active agent of change and not limit himself to just writing about it. He presents himself as relentlessly self-critical and in search of new ideas and understanding, which is something I have nothing but respect for.
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