In Defence of Reading the Damn Book

You should actually read Ibram X. Kendi’s books instead of insulting him on Twitter…

Photo by Chiara F on Unsplash

In the wake of George Floyd’s death, the bookstore I worked at responded to massive market demand for books about antiracism. We increased our stock quantities of many already-popular books, and brought in fresh selection. This is normal — anytime a topic comes to the forefront of public conversation, whether it’s “hygge,” Trump, or a trendy new diet, bookstores respond to the market. Sometimes these fads fade fast, but antiracism stuck around through the end of 2020, when I quit working at the bookstore. That’s a reading trend with considerable endurance, for a topical, political subject.

One of the bestselling authors in this sphere is Ibram X. Kendi. Kendi dominated the category with three bestselling titles: his National Book Award-winning Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America; its young adult “remix” cowritten with Jason Reynolds, Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You; and his latest, How To Be an Antiracist. Actually, four titles, if we count his children’s book, Antiracist Baby.

All of Kendi’s books sold decently at my store and in the chain I worked for at large, but this man seems to generate outsized controversy on Twitter — where anyone who knows me knows I spend way, way too much time.

Judging by Twitter, How To Be an Antiracist is a very inflammatory book. A lot of my anti-woke or right-leaning mutuals treat the book and its author with derision. At first this didn’t trip too many alarm bells, because they get triggered by almost anything any non-right wing Black person says, and I have very little patience for the constant outrage and victimhood thriving in the online political right and centre.

As time went on, though, I started to wonder. The more I saw people insult Kendi as a “race grifter” or charlatan, the more I saw the same quotes shared over and over, without context but with increasing rage, the more I got the nagging suspicion that these critics had a gap in their understanding of Kendi’s work.

As in, they hadn’t read it. They hadn’t even attempted to read it. Many hadn’t even read any of Kendi’s op-eds that were posted to Twitter. They only responded to his tweets, or saved screenshots of quotes to post to their followers as an example of how awful this Kendi guy is. When I ask if they’ve read his work, they would either say they’d never read his work because they think his perspective is beyond the pale, or they would demand he engage in debate with either them or their favourite Black commentator who agrees with them, John McWhorter or Glenn Loury or Coleman Hughes or Thomas Sowell.

It’s beyond weird to me, why someone would think reading a writer’s book for themselves is somehow not the best way to engage with their ideas. Writers write books to express their ideas, and when someone publishes a book for the world to read, that book should be considered the optimal expression of their ideas. It should be the “steel man” you battle against. This is true of every author — if you’re a critic, you should be fully engaging with the work.

But this crowd merely responds to his tweets, or saves screenshots of quotes to post to their followers as an example of how awful this Kendi guy is.

And the quotes did sound kind of bad, taken on their face. Here’s one that makes the rounds with Kendi’s critics: “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.” It sounds like Kendi is advocating extreme affirmative action, even oppressing White people as revenge for the oppression done to Black people. But still, I couldn’t shake my suspicion at this quote appearing constantly without any further context clues.

So I read How To Be an Antiracist, and it turns out my suspicion was correct: very few of Kendi’s critics have read the book they’re criticizing. Reading Kendi’s book was like slowly brushing the dirt off the rest of the fossil.

Antiracism is Kendi’s main ideological export. He believes there’s no such thing as a non-racist policy, there is only racist or antiracist. This concept is often twisted and straw-manned to make it sound like Kendi thinks everything is either racist or antiracist — carrots, candlesticks, 1977 Volkswagon Rabbits. And sure, as a creative writing exercise, you can easily come up with ways in which those things can be racist. But that’s not what Ibram X. Kendi is talking about when he’s talking about antiracism.

Kendi’s antiracist ideology isn’t meant to be extrapolated onto any possible thing on Planet Earth. He’s very explicitly talking about policies and the ideas that saturate our everyday discourse. I was impressed with the way Kendi’s philosophy avoids blaming and shaming individuals. Over the past year or so, I’ve come to believe that our environments and external influences affect us far more than our own conscious mind. We are products more than we are agents. Kendi knows this, too, which is a breath of fresh air in an online sphere where most people think we’re perfectly atomized monoliths of independent thought and decision.

How to Be An Antiracist is part memoir, part polemic. In the last part of the book, Kendi details a period of the last few years of his life, where his wife, his mother, and he all had cancer. Kendi had stage four colon cancer, and he beat the odds with a 12% chance of survival. At the end of the book, he compares the way we treat cancer — locate, treat, observe effects, treat again if necessary — should be the way we fix racism in society. Trace racial inequities to their root in government or institutional policy, fix the policy, and observe the effect. Taking a precise, surgical approach to fix specific legal problems will be more effective than sweeping, broad, or personal approaches.

Some examples I can think of, off the top of my head, are reforming voter ID laws and expanding mail-in voting, possibly even moving to online voting. Ensuring that as many citizens as possible can vote as easily as possible will go a long way toward enfranchising minority populations, which will, in turn, transform the political landscape for the better. Those are the kinds of changes Kendi writes about in How To Be an Antiracist.

As I read the book, I encountered so many facts and further contexts for facts I knew previously that totally flipped what I thought I knew on its head. When I neared the end of the book, I realized I needed to keep track of those facts in order to properly write this review, so I spent over an hour flipping back through the pages and marking the things I learned that blew my mind. I don’t know quite how else to impart the knowledge I gained from the book, so why don’t we just do a bullet point list of cool shit I learned from Ibram X. Kendi? Quotes, principles, whatever. This is my Substack — I can do what I want.

Cool Shit That’s in Ibram X. Kendi’s Book:

• A study using National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data, from 1976 to 1989, found that young Black males engage in more violent crime than young White males. This is something people on the political right and in the centre know and propagate constantly. But the enlightening context they won’t talk about is that the study found that, when researchers compared only employed young males of both races, the differences in violent behaviour disappeared. Unemployed males commit more violent crime than employed males — this is what we really need to be talking about.
• “Every time someone racializes behaviour — describes something as “Black behaviour” — they are expressing a racist idea. To be an antiracist is to recognize there is no such thing as racial behaviour. To be an antiracist is to recognize there is no such thing as Black behaviour, let alone irresponsible Black behaviour.” Many conservative political commentators talk about the behaviour of Black people in a derisive way, as if their behaviour is what puts them into generational poverty and hampers their economic status. But there’s no such thing as racial behaviour. Many privileged, rich White people engage in the same behaviour as many Black people, with very different consequences.
• “The only thing wrong with White people is when they embrace racist ideas and policies and then deny their ideas and policies are racist. This is not to ignore that White people have massacred and enslaved millions of indigenous and African peoples, colonized and impoverished millions of people of colour around the globe as their nations grew rich, all the while producing racist ideas that blame the victims. This is to say their history of pillaging is not the result of the evil genes or culture of White people. There’s no such thing as White genes.” Kendi does not hate White people.
• “We must discern the difference between racist power (racist policymakers) and White people.” See? Kendi does not hate White people.
• “I thought only White people could be racist and that Black people could not be racist, because Black people did not have power. I thought Latinx, Asians, Middle Easterners, and Natives could not be racist, because they did not have power. … The powerless defense strips Black policymakers and managers of all their power. The powerless defense says the more than 154 African Americans who have served in Congress from 1870 to 2018 had no legislative power. It says none of the thousands of state and local Black politicians have any lawmaking power. It says U.S. Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas never had the power to put his vote to antiracist purposes.” The “powerless defence” is used by many social justice advocates, but Kendi doesn’t think it holds water. This would surprise a lot of his critics. He further says, “Ironically, the only way that White power can gain full control is by convincing us that White people already have all the power.” True!
• “Esimated losses from white-collar crimes are believed to be between $300-$600 billion per year, according to the FBI.” Yet still we stigmatize Black neighbourhoods as hotbeds of crime.
• Regarding segregated Black schools: “What really made the schools unequal were the dramatically unequal resources provided to them, not the mere fact of racial separation.” Since reading this book, I’ve done some deep dives into the way schools are funded in the U.S. and they way they’re funded where I live, in Canada. The difference is staggering. Black students don’t need to travel to majority White schools to get a good education — they just need better funding in their schools.
• Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t necessarily in favour of integration in schools: “‘I favour integration on buses and in all areas of public accommodation and travel. … I think intregration in our public schools is different,” King told two Black teachers in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1959. ‘White people view black people as inferior. … People with such a low view of the black race cannot be given free rein and put in charge of the intellectual care and development of our boys and girls.’”
• Right wingers and centrists often lament the state of Black single parenthood, viewing it as a symptom of the welfare state’s ravaging of the Black community. They’re wrong: “The increasing percentage of Black babies born into single-parent households was not due to single Black mothers having more children but to married Black women having fewer children over the course of the twentieth century. … Ma’s married paternal grandmother had sixteen children in the 1910s and 1920s. Ma’s married mother had six children in the 1940s and 1950s. My mother had two children in the early 1980s — as did two of her three married sisters.” This is a crucial point that I’ve never seen right wing social commentators acknowledge.
• “When we fail to open the closed-minded consumers of racist ideas, we blame their closed-mindedness instead of our foolish decision to waste time reviving closed minds from the dead. When our vicious attacks on open-minded consumers of racist ideas fail to transform them, we blame their hate rather than our impatient and alienating hate of them. When people fail to consume our convoluted antiracist ideas, we blame their stupidity rather than our lack of clarity.” This is a revolutionary idea. Kendi isn’t some dogmatic social justice warrior, yelling at people he sees as irredeemable bigots. His critics, if they took the time to read his damn book, would be absolutely shocked.
• “What if strategies and policy solutions stemmed not from ideologies but from problems?” Politics should be pragmatic. Kendi has more to say about that: “The most effective protests create an environment whereby changing the racist policy becomes in power’s self-interest, like desegregating business because the sit-ins are driving away customers.”
• “I thought of racism as an inanimate, invisible, immortal system, not as a living, recognizable, mortal disease of cancer cells that we could identify and treat and kill.” Kendi does not think racism is some invisible force, permeating the world like an evil force. It’s tangible. We can kill it.
• “The term ‘institutionally racist policies’ is more concrete than ‘institutional racism.’ The term ‘racist policies’ is more concrete than ‘institutionally racist policies,’ since ‘institutional’ and ‘policies’ are redundant: Policies are institutional.”
• “The history of racist ideas is the history of powerful policymakers erecting racist policies out of self-interest, then producing racist ideas to defend and rationalize the inequitable effects of their policies, while everyday people consume those racist ideas, which in turn sparks ignorance and hate.”

All of these quotes and concepts leapt off the page to me. Kendi isn’t the dogmatic, White-hating social justice warrior his critics desperately want him to be. I went into the book skeptical, but I emerged changed in the way the best books leave you. His prose is beautiful, and the way he combines the personal and the political is wonderful to behold. This book is not what Kendi’s critics think he is, and I highly recommend it. It’s given me leads on even more topics to investigate and write about. I’m so glad I read it.