How to write a how-to on being antiracist

 

The politics book club decided to read Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist and, after a short bout of being like “But I’m in the middle of reading one of his other books” and “But that’s one of the Ten Books Every White Person In the US Is Reading Right Now,” I’m glad they did. Kendi is a truly excellent writer in a way that few people with Ph.D.s are, and so despite being about a lot of extremely distressing material, a lot of it was actually quite a joy to read, and I ended up spending a lot of time examining the writing to see if I could learn a thing or two about that in addition to learning things about racism.

Much of the book is framed around Kendi’s personal journey through adopting a variety of theories and hot takes about race in varying levels of half-bakedness, beginning with a high school speech competition in which he gave one of those “you’re letting down Martin Luther King Jr.” harangues that James Forman Jr. skewers in Locking Up Our Own (predictably, he won an award for this entry) and going through a variety of self-deprecating learning experiences until, after publishing a weighty tome on the history of racist ideas, he founds a policy research center, on the suspiciously left-wing idea that the secret to defeating racism is not focus on ideas in isolation, but to change the policies that these ideas were created to naturalize and provide justification for. I can’t tell to what degree this “history of my own wrongness” framing is intended to actually widen the audience for the book beyond white people and how much it is just intended to make it less threatening to white people by pretending not to be aimed at them--I can only speculate based on how cynical I’m feeling--but it does provide us with an entertainingly impressionable central character to follow as we explore every take anyone in the US has ever had on race, from the Nation of Islam’s origin story of white people (i.e. we were bred on an island by a mad scientist to be terrible) to the assimilationist logic behind the bussing policies of the ‘70s. (I admit I wasn’t expecting the moment’s foremost scholar on racism in America to take the “bussing was stupid, actually” line, but his argument checks out). Chapters in the second half of the book focus on the intersections between racism and other major categories of oppression, such as gender, sexuality, immigration status, and class. The class chapter does not shy away from calling out capitalism explicitly as the historically and intrinsically racist system it is, including a couple of polite but firm digs at Elizabeth Warren’s well-meaning but ahistorical  “capitalist to her bones” comment. (There are also quite a number of much less polite digs at assorted stupid things Dinesh D’Souza has said; I don’t know why Dr. Kendi specifically singles out D’Souza so much but it is extremely satisfying, because D’Souza is a fucking idiot.) 

Kendi is very big on providing clear, concrete definitions of terms and then sticking with them, which is an enormously important writing practice and something that nearly everyone should do more of. Some of these are extremely funny, such as when he defines and contextualizes the term “microaggression” and then goes on to explain why he doesn’t use it anymore (short version: it got popular and then all the meaning got beaten out of it). Others are just, like, very no-nonsense! I approve greatly and I hope that once Kendi is done writing how-tos on having better opinions for every conceivable market segment (I’m not sure where he can go from smol babby but I’m sure the publishing companies will figure it out) he writes a book of writing advice. 

Plotwise--to the degree that nonfiction books have plots--the climax of the book is Kendi’s battle with stage 4 colon cancer, which gave him only a 12% chance of survival. As you can probably tell by the fact that he was hired at BU this year, he did, in fact, survive. This allows him to set up a somewhat cheesy but surprisingly workable metaphor for racism in America, where it has metastasized throughout our entire society, is making us horrendously sick, and is probably going to kill the country stone dead any day now--but there is still a fighting chance, even if it is hard and unpleasant and the odds are quite bad. In this scenario, developing antiracist ideas is analogous to the exercise and eating healthy portion of the recovery regimen, in that it is extremely important in order for the heavy medical intervention stuff to be able to work and not leave you completely fucked up, but the idea that you’re going to diet and exercise the cancer away without the rest of it is delusional hippie shit. 

Anyway, the book is very good and deserves a more thoughtful review than I can muster at the moment, but I finished it more than a week ago and have been slowly forgetting things as I put off writing this by taking a nap every time I have a spare minute instead. So I’m going to wrap up my rambling now and go take another one.

Team America: World Police version 2.0

 In one of my book sale fugue states I picked up an extremely short book called The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Spies, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare, by Nick Turse. The book is barely 95 pages long so the subtitle seems like a bit much for it, but it does mean that you get Exactly What It Says On The Tin. It is essentially a repackaged batch of blog posts from during the Obama administration detailing the steps the military was taking during that time to pivot away from the heavy boots-on-the-ground land invasion type stuff that brought so much bad press during the Bush years and towards things that are full of fancy words and expensive technology and therefore sound more sophisticated and nuanced to people who really want to think of Democratic administrations’ approach to bombing brown people as being more sophisticated and nuanced than the Bush administration’s, but which essentially just constitutes another iteration of expensively expanding the military surveillance state over the entire world to the benefit of absolutely no one except defense contractors because we simply cannot abide the notion of doing anything else. If you are on the foreign policy left, this basic thesis is likely already known to you; what The Changing Face of Empire does is basically just fill that in with a bunch of facts about particular projects in particular parts of the globe, how they work, how they don’t work, how the people pitching them said they’d work, and why they were never going to work like that. It is a disheartening read, unsurprisingly, but it is also quite interesting if you think special ops stuff is inherently interesting, but also does its bit to puncture the mystique of special ops being ~special~ and point out how utterly bad the U.S. military is at anything except setting money (and other people’s countries) on fire, no matter how much fancy equipment or training it has.

 

I read this book over, like, two entire cups of coffee, and overall I’m glad I did and would be happy to lend my copy to anyone else who would like to be depressed for 95 pages.

 

A bite-size Gothic delicacy

 

Partly in an attempt to boost my Goodreads numbers by reading short things but also because several people said they were really, really good, I have started in on the sequels to Seanan McGuire’s Every Heart a Doorway. This weekend I finally got in the ebook for the second installment, Down Among the Sticks and Bones, the story of twin girls Jacqueline and Jillian and the Hammer Horror universe they wandered into. 

While this book was not strictly about Goths it was certainly extremely Goth, possibly even more Goth than the last one. The twins’ home life is freaking creepy, for starters, and the emotionally sterile environment has done a number on both of them psychologically by the time they, at 12 years old, stumble into the Moors. Due to some creepy pact, one of them has to go with the vampire that rules over most of the Moors and the other has to go with the mad scientist that lives in a windmill at the edge of the village. Surprising everyone except themselves, Jillian, the one who had been forced into the role of the tomboy at an early age, elects to go with the Master and become a waiflike vampire princess, and Jacqueline, who had been forced into the role of the quiet and obedient girly-girl, ditches her frilly dresses and goes off with the good doctor to become a mad scientist’s apprentice, wear pants, and become a lesbian. Despite my own fondness for long dresses and vampirism, it is clear to me that Jack is the sensible one and Jillian is stone cold insane. 

The story is at every turn atmospherically weird and creepy and unsettling, and it contains a lot of wonderfully unsettling exploration of how expectations shape people. In that, in the complex webs of submission and rebellion, of expectation and reaction, of love and predation, of allure and revulsion, it becomes an extremely Gothic story in the most classical sense. There are even two tall dark and brooding houses, one for each twin. My only regret about having zipped through this in one evening--mostly in the bath, because obviously--is that I can now no longer read it for the first time, I can only reread it and I don’t know if that’ll be as much fun. Otherwise, it was basically a perfect little devil’s food cupcake of a novella.