How to write a how-to on being antiracist

[bloodygranuaile]

 

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.