Ibram X. Kendi, Prophet of Anti-racism | National Review - 0 views
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Kendi now has four books at or near the top of the best-seller lists, including Stamped from the Beginning, which is a history of American racism that won the National Book Award in 2016, and two books on racism for younger readers. Racism is Kendi’s thing. His newest, How to Be an Antiracist, reappeared at the top of the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list this summer
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Boston University announced it would offer Kendi, 38, the most prestigious tenured chair at its disposal, making him only the second holder of the Andrew W. Mellon Professorship in the Humanities.
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The chair has been vacant since the death of the novelist and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel four years ago.
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The “antiracism” of which Kendi is the most trusted exponent is not just a new name for an old precept. It is the political doctrine behind the street demonstrations, “cancelings,” Twitter attacks, boycotts, statue topplings, and self-denunciations that have come together in a national movement
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His parents moved to Manassas, Va., where he attended Stonewall Jackson High School. He won an oratory contest for a Bill Cosby–style exhortation calling on blacks to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, a performance that (on one hand) he remembers with shame but that (on the other) he begins the book with.
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the anti-racism movement has grown to the point where Ibram X. Kendi can be said, for better or for worse, to be changing the country.
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Anti-racists assume that the American system of politics, economics, and policing has been corrupted by racial prejudice, that such prejudice explains the entire difference in socioeconomic status between blacks and others, that the status quo must be fought and beaten, and that anyone not actively engaged in this system-changing work is a collaborator with racism, and therefore himself a legitimate target for attack.
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Asante’s goals were polemical as much as scholarly. “The rejection of European particularism as universal is the first stage of our coming intellectual struggle,” he taught Kendi
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“What other people call racial microaggressions I call racist abuse,” he writes. “And I call the zero-tolerance policies preventing and punishing these abusers what they are: antiracist.”
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His mentor in Philadelphia was Molefi Kete Asante, notorious at the dawn of political correctness a generation ago as the author of Afrocentricity (1980), which stressed that, long before the high point of Greek culture, Egyptians, who lived in Africa, were building the Pyramids.
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The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity. If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist. . .
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“Racism is a marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities.”
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it uses the concept of racism to define the concept of racism. It will seem less strange, and more powerful, when examined through the lens of academic race theory.
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As the Minnesota legal theorist Alan David Freeman noted in his landmark 1978 essay “Legitimizing Racial Discrimination through Antidiscrimination Law,” the beneficiaries of a racist system (Freeman calls them “perpetrators”) are likely to view its dismantling as an ethical challenge. Getting over such a system means adopting an attitude of fairness and treating everyone the same.
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The historic victims of that system, however, have a different perspective. They look at the system as having taken from them concrete things that were theirs by right — above all, jobs, money, and housing. They will not consider the problem fixed until those deprivations have been remedied
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Kendi has done a bit of everything. He is an ideological everyman of race consciousness, his life a Bunyanesque pilgrimage from the Valley of Assimilation to the Mountains of Intersectionality.
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ideas about race and racism are central to Kendi’s system of thought, and you will understand why when you focus on its one truly original element: His “antiracism” is not a doctrine of nondiscrimination. In fact, it is not even anti-racist, as that term is commonly understood.
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If practical equality for blacks is the imperative, discriminating on their behalf is going to be necessary
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He wants not pious talk but the actual policies that will redistribute the advantages, the stuff, that whites have undeservingly acquired. “What if instead of a feelings advocacy,” he asks at one point, “we had an outcome advocacy that put equitable outcomes before our guilt and anguish?”
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The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.
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It is why this book really is as “bold” as reviewers say it is, and why the judges who in 2016 gave Kendi the National Book Award were right to say he “turns our ideas of the term ‘racism’ upside-down.”
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Kendi has decided that the two approaches to civil rights described by Freeman are not simply different perspectives on the same issue; they are mutually incompatible — one must destroy the other. “There is no neutrality in the racism struggle,” he insists. The old view of the perpetrators — that everything will be well as long as we treat people with equality, neutrality, and respect — is no longer just a different approach to the problem. It is illegitimate. It is a “racist” obstruction.
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But also Oscar Lewis, once considered the hippest of radical anthropologists, for describing a “culture of poverty” in La Vida (1966) and other books.
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To allude to color blindness or talk of a “post-racial society,” to back religious freedom or voter-ID laws . . . these are racist things, too. Even the overarching vision that rallied white liberals to civil rights — the belief that blacks could, and should, assimilate into American society — becomes morally suspect
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Assimilation, Kendi announces at the start of his second chapter, expresses “the racist idea that a racial group is culturally or behaviorally inferior.” The idea is racist, Kendi reasons, because it is assumed the out-group would be improved by joining the in-group.
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Also racist are those intellectuals and politicians whose explanations lessen in any way the weight of white racism among the causes of inequality:
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Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Nathan Glazer, naturally, for their ideas on black family structure in Beyond the Melting Pot (1963)
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Ihad to forsake the suasionist bred into me, of researching and educating for the sake of changing minds,” Kendi writes. “I had to start researching and educating to change policy.” Something similar is inscribed on Karl Marx’s gravestone in Highgate Cemetery in London. It is the credo of an activist, not a scholar
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Kendi grants that blacks, too, can be racist, but we must understand the grudging sense in which he concedes this
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He believes blacks can collaborate with the structures of white racism, as turncoats, agents, and enforcers
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When Kendi opposes “racism,” he means only the treatment of blacks by European-descended peoples since the Age of Discovery, especially under the American system of slavery and Jim Crow.
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He explicitly does not mean that he considers it wrong to discriminate by race in any abstract ethical sense.
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On the contrary: He is carrying out the de-universalization of Western values that his mentor Asante urged.
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In African-American studies departments you can address racial problems in an atmosphere of esprit de corps and ideological unanimity.
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their very isolation has turned them into mighty bases for consciousness-raising, dogma construction, and political organizing
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It is from these hives of like-minded activists that the country’s human-resources departments have been staffed.
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Those who are confident that Kendi’s argument is something they can take or leave probably do not understand what civil-rights law has become
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The word “racist” is a powerful disciplinary tool; whoever controls its deployment can bend others to his will
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it has become clear that corporations fear the word “racism” so much that they will betray their employees and permit their lives to be destroyed rather than risk being accused of it.
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All this requires is a few redefinitions, and here the law appears to be on Kendi’s side. With its Bostock decision this spring, the Supreme Court went into the business of policing transphobia,
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In Kendi’s book — which, it bears repeating, has been for much of this summer the best-selling nonfiction book in the United States — the line between white supremacists and climate-change deniers, between white supremacists and opponents of Obamacare, is hard to draw or discern
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It is difficult to imagine a reform more likely to drive American ethnic (and other) groups apart than the much-discussed project of defunding, or even abolishing, urban police forces
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The same can be said for the wave of iconoclasm. Satisfying though it may be to throw ropes around a monument of Andrew or Stonewall Jackson and pull it down on one wild night, the effect is to add a grievance to American history, not remove one
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In light of these unintended consequences, one assertion of Kendi, mentioned earlier, is particularly troubling, because even a skeptical reader will need to pause over the author’s point. This is Kendi’s dismissal of assimilation — the belief that blacks can “join” American society on equal terms — as racist. “While segregationist ideas suggest a racial group is permanently inferior,” Kendi writes, “assimilationist ideas suggest a racial group is temporarily inferior.”
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. For a couple of decades after the passage of civil-rights legislation, such black socioeconomic inequality as remained could be wished away by well-meaning people of all persuasions, whether quota Democrats or enterprise-zone Republicans
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the persistence of this inequality through two whole generations puts those promises in a different light. The difference between “temporary” and “permanent” disadvantage looks like a rhetorical one. The dream, as Langston Hughes put it, has been deferred. A radical temptation arises.
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Kendi, terrible simplificateur that he is, has picked up the gauntlet. As he sees it, there are only two explanations for this delay: Either you believe the problem is with blacks, unable to make it in a system that has been designed fairly for everyone, or you believe the problem is with whites, who have designed an unfair system that keeps blacks down.