Polygenesis and other lies

I did not pick a yearlong book to read at the beginning of 2020 the way I had in 2019 with A People’s History of the United States, and partway through the year I began to regret that and thought it would make a good tradition for making myself get through some of the longer books that tend to sit around on my shelf. So over the summer I decided to parcel out over the remaining six months of the year the 500 pages of Dr. Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which I had picked up at a launch party at Trident a few years earlier.

 

Shortly after I did this, a book club I was in decided to read Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist, which made me worry that the two would be too similar. But mostly they aren’t. How to Be an Antiracist has quite a lot of biographical information, whereas Stamped from the Beginning focuses most of its time on its actual subject: the history of the production, dissemination, and reinvention of racist ideas in the U.S. 

 

The book starts with Portugal’s enslavement of Africans and the subsequent concocting of justifications for doing so, and goes up right until about midway through the presidency of Barack Obama. It chronicles the rises and falls of various theories about the inferiority of Black people, and the failures of a number of common strategies to end racism, such as “uplift suasion,” which is a fancy academic term for just behaving really unimpeachably in the hope that this will prove to other people that their racism is factually incorrect. 

 

Strengths of the book include that it puts a lot of emphasis on laying out really clearly the way that racist ideas are manufactured, they don’t just sort of occur to people, and that they are deliberately manufactured because they serve certain people’s material interests, often providing post-hoc justification for theft and violence that they have already committed. I personally got occasionally annoyed that the 500-page serious volume of history seemed hardly less chicken than the self-help primer for liberals who just discovered police brutality in terms of avoiding introducing the reader to any suspicious Marxist language, thus effectively presenting this as a new insight of Kendi’s and not something that the anticapitalist left has been saying for years. That said, it’s not like he chickens out of bashing capitalism. 

 

A random thing that jumped out at me is that Michael Harrington is mentioned a few times, and I think might be the only white guy in the book that is spoken of in un-hedged positive terms (I’m sure this is only because there’s like three sentences about him total, though). Another thing that jumped out at me is that not only does Kendi have big issues with much of the Black elite’s classism and general moralizing, but he seems to take a sort of glee in puncturing the images of Black elites that are highly regarded by Whites, in particular, including ones that are seen as antiracist icons. Also, he has some amusingly vicious things to say about John McWhorter. 

 

One thing that gets a bit frustrating--and this is hardly unique to this book, although I find it more often when reading older primary sources, rather than modern books commenting on older writings--is trying to parse precisely what sort of judgments are being made and then how we should judge those judgments when it comes to older commentary around education and standards of “achievement” and other such vague terms. A lot of older writing advocating education for various groups that had traditionally been denied it can certainly be read as privileging certain types of education as inherently worth more than others, and as saying that people who have not had these particular types of education are stupid, but that hardly seems to me like a fair reading when you’re trying to parse stuff written before we came up with terms like “epistemic injustice” that now allow us to talk about why denying people access to the mainstream education that gatekeeps the stuff they need to know to navigate the dominant culture is discriminatory and is a form of harm, without implying that being ignorant of specific culturally privileged information makes them worse people. It’s certainly quite possible (or… extremely likely) that Dr. Kendi knows a lot more than I do about how to properly interpret what was being said in these sorts of writings in the language of their time, but I’m not sure this book actually explained that as much as I needed it to, as I kept being like “I suppose that’s one way to read that” or “How precisely are we using the term ‘something wrong’ here” and anyway, education is a complex topic, and in my experience discussions of it feature quite a lot of people talking past each other, so I’m always on high alert for Places Where People Might Be Talking Past Each Other. Some of the other parts of the book had similar places where I thought the language being used was a little more vague than Kendi was treating it as, but educational topics are where it stuck out at me the most.

 

Overall, though, there’s a lot of really interesting history that doesn’t get told very much in here, like early anti-vaccine hysteria (short version: early anti-vaxxers were mad that Black people invented the smallpox vaccine before they did), which I had only ever heard about very briefly because there’s a plaque about it on a bridge in Boston (the plaque leaves out the racism angle, unsurprisingly). And for a 500-page nonfiction work, it reads pretty quickly.