{"id":9821,"date":"2020-10-15T06:11:25","date_gmt":"2020-10-15T12:11:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news.library.depaul.press\/full-text\/?p=9821"},"modified":"2020-10-15T08:24:55","modified_gmt":"2020-10-15T14:24:55","slug":"how-to-be-an-antiracist-by-ibram-x-kendi-reviewed-by-susan-bazargan","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.library.depaul.press\/full-text\/2020\/10\/15\/how-to-be-an-antiracist-by-ibram-x-kendi-reviewed-by-susan-bazargan\/","title":{"rendered":"How to be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi Reviewed by Susan Bazargan"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>2020 will perhaps be remembered not only as a year of consuming sorrow and heartache but also as a time when multiple contradictions ruled our daily lives. The invisible enemy made visible a great deal about ourselves, our values and our weapons of mass salvation: kindness, generosity, and good information. The cloistering at home led to revelations, about who we are and what and whom we deem \u201cessential\u201d in a time of crisis.<\/p>\n

Many of us turned to essential readings. I went back to Toni Morrison and reread her brilliant introduction to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1996, OUP)<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The 1880s saw the collapse of civil rights for blacks as well as the publication of Huckleberry Finn<\/em>. This collapse was an effort to bury the combustible issues Twain raised in his novel. The nation, as well as Tom Sawyer, was deferring Jim\u2019s freedom in agonizing play. The cyclical attempts to remove the novel from classrooms extend Jim\u2019s captivity on into each generation of readers. (xxxvi)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Those \u201ccombustible issues\u201d\u2014as the events of this past summer demonstrated\u2014 revealed their force once more, only with added urgency, igniting, demanding new conversations and policies focused on race and racial disparities. Ibram X. Kendi\u2019s memoir offers us a starting point for such new dialogues, in which the painful issues of racism are not \u201cburied,\u201d deflected, or handed over to yet another generation but honestly confronted.<\/p>\n

While Kendi\u2019s book is not fiction, it follows the tradition of the Bildungsroman<\/em> in its tracing of the protagonist\u2019s development from childhood into maturity, all the while concentrating on his evolution into the \u201cantiracist\u201d person he is today, an individual who supports \u201cany idea that suggests the racial groups are equal in all their apparent differences\u2014that there is nothing right or wrong with any racial group.\u201d\u00a0 Furthermore, \u201cantiracist ideas argue that racist policies are the cause of racial inequities.\u201d\u00a0 In sharing his life altering experiences, Kendi is also urging the readers to engage in similar acts of self-inquiry to evaluate their own biases and perceptions of race and racial disparities.\u00a0 Change is possible\u2014he points out that \u201cracism is not even 600 years old\u201d and \u201cracist ideas are not natural to the human mind\u201d\u2014but only communal efforts, both personal and public, can eradicate racist policies.<\/p>\n

As Kendi demonstrates, the path from the \u201ccaptivity\u201d of racist thinking towards liberation is an arduous one.\u00a0 His journey takes him from his delivery of a well-received \u201cracist speech\u201d at his high school oratory competition\u2014even after twenty years, he is haunted by the \u201cnightmare\u201d of that event\u2014to his current position as the director of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University. Looking back, he realizes the extent to which he had been saturated with the dominant culture\u2019s ethos: \u201ca racist culture had handed me the ammunition to shoot Black people, to shoot myself, and I took it and used it. Internalized racism is the real Black on Black crime.\u201d<\/p>\n

In narrating his life-story, Kendi pauses to examine the key terms used in discussions of race and identity. In a chapter called \u201cBiology,\u201d for example, Kendi interrogates terms such as \u201cassimilationist\u201d versus \u201canti-racist\u201d; he examines the idea that even if race is a \u201cmirage\u201d with no scientific basis, \u201cto be antiracist is to also recognize the living, breathing reality of this racial mirage\u2026 [and] focus on ending the racism that shapes the mirages, not to ignore the mirages that shape people\u2019s lives.\u201d These dual features of the book\u2014a candid, courageous self-critique accompanied by a methodical dissection of the embedded language of race dynamics\u2014offer the book its unique strength and resonance.<\/p>\n

The eighteen topics, each the subject of one chapter, lend the book its tight structure and its usefulness as a \u201cmanual,\u201d a handbook on antiracism that uses an accessible language, appealing to a wide audience. But perhaps a more accurate title for Kendi\u2019s book would be \u201cHow to become<\/em> an antiracist\u201d since, as he demonstrates, the journey towards a true transformation is a long and at times painful one which involves, on the one hand, constant self-appraisal and re-evaluation, and on the other hand, civic engagement in creating and activating antiracist public policies. By offering us an education in re-examining such basic concepts as being \u201cwhite,\u201d or \u201cblack,\u201d Kendi compels us to re-think the ways in which we conceptualize not only race but also gender, class, and sexuality, those distinctions that influence our understanding of ourselves and shape our interactions with our fellow human beings.<\/p>\n

Kendi has offered us an excellent opportunity to re-examine the convoluted subject of racism, and as his readers, we can enrich the dialogue. We can engage in more extensive examinations of related topics that deserve attention but are missing from his discussion; for example, how technology has reinforced the powers of capitalism in creating and sustaining racism beginning with the advent of slavery. Issues of character and identity formation (being\/becoming) in the context of educational policies can also be discussed further.<\/p>\n

How to Be an Antiracist<\/em> is a book for our times. With so much suffering, disruption, and turmoil amongst us, Kendi\u2019s hopeful message about the possibility of initiating social equity and justice is most welcome. Traditional heroes of the Bildungsroman<\/em> assimilate into the presiding social structure or, resisting it, they strike out for the unknown \u201cTerritory,\u201d as Huck Finn does. Kendi offers another alternative: by eradicating those policies that create racial inequities, we can create a social system in which we can all live in communion, in \u201ca world of equity,\u201d a world in which we have a chance \u201cto be forever free.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

2020 will perhaps be remembered not only as a year of consuming sorrow and heartache but also as a time when multiple contradictions ruled our daily lives. The invisible enemy made visible a great deal about ourselves, our values and our weapons of mass salvation: kindness, generosity, and good information. The cloistering at home led <\/p>\n

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