Antiracism Won’t Save Us

Taking up residence on antiracist reading lists everywhere, How to Be an Antiracist (2019) professes to bring new insights on the systemic power of race and racism. At first glance, it would appear that Ibram X. Kendi’s book may lay out some instructions on the process of becoming anti-racist, but in actuality, the reader encounters a quasi-historical and autobiographical work with very little proscription for antiracist actions. Drawing upon his memories, family history, and major historical events, he constructs his own life alongside his construction of racism and antiracism. Over the course of eighteen chapters, Kendi uses other aspects of identity, such as gender, sexuality, and class to define different forms of racism, e.g. queer racism, gender racism, etc. These chapters are arranged chronologically, taking the reader through his journey as an antiracist intellectual while also narrating selected events that framed national discourse about race. Most chapters begin with a dyad of definitions, to fortify his initial claim that actions are either racist or anti-racist. While they may help readers distinguish between “racist” and “anti-racist” actions, the binary definitions in this text only make sense through a series of elisions about how racial power and privilege actually function. Because the majority of the book draws upon his family history and personal memories and does not significantly engage with other antiracist, feminist or Marxist works, the historical evidence for his arguments remains limited. Perhaps the lack of significant engagement with other academic texts on race, gender, class, and sexuality within the book was a purposeful move on his part to keep the book “readable” for a wider audience.

Initially, Kendi defines racism as a “marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities.”[1] Antiracism is defined as its opposite. We later learn “a racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups…. [It includes] written and unwritten laws, rules, procedures, processes, regulations, and guidelines that govern people.”[2] Kendi claims the term “racist policy” is less confusing and more precise than terms like institutional racism, structural racism, and systemic racism, but its definition is so capacious that it does not leave the reader with much clarity. Though Kendi aims to dispel common sense myths about racism and to clarify what both racism and antiracism is, by the end of the book, I found myself much more confused. Racism takes many forms throughout the work: a road, cancer, and addiction. Racism is not a detour, disease, or mental illness; it is integral to the foundation of this nation and this modern world—that is one of the racist myths that Kendi does not dispel. He describes cultural relativism as the goal of antiracism, but cultural relativism has its own fraught intellectual history within the discipline of Anthropology, where it originated, and has largely been debunked as an analytical framework because of its colonial, white supremacist roots. To align antiracism with a comparative analytical framework that defines white Western society as the pinnacle of civilization would necessarily mean that antiracism is not a project for colonized peoples. It would necessarily mean that antiracism is not a tool for Black liberation but for white supremacist absolution.

Kendi diverges from canonical critical race scholarship with his assertion that any racial and ethnic group can be racist, and he specifically names that Black people can be “racist.” He states that we should no longer look to groups of people as the holders of racist power, and anyone who believes that white people have power because of their race is an “anti-white racist.” Who then is responsible for racism? The seemingly raceless central agents of racism are racist policy and racist policymakers which make up racist power. Kendi’s definition of racism and racist power, and his universal application of racism and racist power to all racial groups, is only possible through his refusal to incorporate anti-blackness and settler-colonialism into his theoretical framework.

In his chapter “White”, he defines an “anti-white racist” as “one who is classifying people of European descent as biologically, culturally, or behaviorally inferior or conflating the entire race of White people with racist power,” filling the chapter with examples of anti-white racist violence, claiming that white supremacy is the main cause of white genocide. The reader would expect that the next chapter, entitled “Black,” would take the same care to define antiblackness and its life-threatening impact on Black people around the globe, but instead, Kendi chooses to draw out his argument about the ways in which Black people can be racist. He coins the term “powerless defense” to describe the “racist” idea that Black people cannot be racist because they do not have power[3]. He posits that the denial of Black people’s “racism” is a denial of individual Black people’s power to change the lives of other Black people. This argument does not engage with scholarship on antiblackness and settler-colonialism, turning structural race relations into series of colorblind individual choices. By flattening racist power and doling it out equally to all racial and ethnic groups, Kendi does not sufficiently attend to histories of global oppression founded upon the denigration of Black bodies, Indigenous genocide, and the systems and institutions created to uphold that oppression.

The Problem of Gender and Sexuality

In the chapters entitled “Gender” and “Sexuality,” Kendi describes his own struggles with sexism and homophobia. He links gender and sexuality to racism (with a brief nod to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectionality), transforming gendered racism and homophobia to gender racism and queer racism without changing their definitions. Though there are some references to the specific racialized challenges that women of color and queer people face, these chapters do not take on the same level of analysis as his previous chapters. Kendi primarily uses these chapters to reflect upon his own journey from a gender/queer racist to a gender/queer antiracist. As a cis queer Black woman, I was offended by his narration of his experiences with Black lesbians. He describes them as “intimidating” and “large,” reinforcing misogynoirist stereotypes. Specifically, he cites graduate school experiences where these women would challenge his beliefs and push him to learn as frightening encounters. These Black women serve as mules for his own learning, as mirrors for reflection upon his own “racist,” sexist, and homophobic behavior. Often, Black cis het men use “self-reflection” as a space to perpetuate anti-black, cissexist, and homophobic discourses about Black trans and cis women and to escape accountability for their harmful actions. They center themselves and their feelings and position themselves as experts at our expense.

This work is dangerous for Black liberation movements, for it decenters the violence of white supremacy and antiblackness with its focus on individual actions. The revolution will not rest in scholarship that perpetuates antiblackness, and it’s obvious that Black liberation is not the goal of How to Be Antiracist (and arguably, the entire project of antiracism). Kendi’s “redefinition” of racism and antiracism reinforces existing oppressive structures in hopes of bringing an antiracist future that “liberates” Black men like him at the expense of Black women, girls, and queer and trans people.

[1]  p. 18

[2] ibid.

[3] pg. 137