Dancing Between the Nuance of Anti-Racist and Pro-Black
Real justice means to show Black people they are worthy of love all of the time.
“Loving Blackness as political resistance transforms our ways of looking and being, and thus creates the conditions necessary for us to move against the forces of domination and death and reclaim Black life.” — bell hooks
Bell hooks, the illustrious author, left this earth the same day that I started to write this piece.
Two months later, on the 14th of February, the whole world pauses to think about love. Pictures and videos of red roses, and people exchanging moments of affection flock to the internet. There is beauty in this, but there is also beauty in deconstructing the romantic expectations of love and exploring it from other angles, perhaps for its political relevance. bell hooks explored love in many ways, and in her quintessential collection of essays, Black Looks, which I finished that same day, she writes about loving blackness as a political act of resistance.
Following the murder of George Floyd, the phrase “anti-racist” began trending. Books like Dr. Ibram Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist shot up the bestsellers lists. Since then, we’ve seen the adoption of anti-racist language by pundits, political operatives, and policymakers. But in the context of the anti-Black capitalistic narratives that underpin the origin story of the United States, being anti-racist and being Pro-Black is different.
Instead of situating ‘anti-racism,’ and ‘pro-Black’ against each other, can we open a portal to a world where narratives of abundance and community are embraced? How can loving Blackness be the standard and not an act of political resistance?
Real justice must not only mean addressing the deep racial disparities apparent across different structures but a true understanding of what it means to show Black people they are worthy of love all of the time.
To be anti-racist also means endorsing race-conscious policy, such as reparations, which in the current American context, is a pro-Black policy, and reparations for Black Americans is arguably the ultimate form of loving Blackness and reclaiming Black life.
It is often hard to appreciate and accept nuance. Holding space for two things that might seem conflicting creates an uncomfortable feeling that, can make us believe that we must put ourselves against each other with our harm, borrowing adrienne maree brown’s words.
The art of virtue signalling
The integration of social media into our daily lives has led to the rise of social media activism and digital virtue-signalling. In a matter of seconds, a person can share a tweet, post an Instagram story, or reshare a Linkedin post that signals to their followers their awareness of racial injustice..
Perhaps no example is more apparent than the ‘Blackout Tuesday,’ effort that took over Instagram in June 2020 in what turned out to be a terrific case study for how false allyship can go viral. Millions of people across the globe posted a black square and made a promise not to post anything else that day. For many, this action wasn’t concerned with building collective power to fight back against the systemic barriers that fortify white supremacy. It was a way for non-black people to shed some of the guilt they might have been carrying.
In many ways, the phrase anti-racist and hashtag #BLM, have transformed into a similar concept as Blackout Tuesday. Across the digital landscape, well-meaning allies have adorned their profiles with these phrases while ignoring the more important work of organizing to built power and shift culture.
Real justice must not only mean addressing the deep racial disparities apparent across different structures but a true understanding of what it means to show Black people they are worthy of love all of the time.
Of the many directives that Kendi offers in How to Be an Antiracist, one that stands out is when he says “to be antiracist is to root the economic disparities between the equal race-classes in policies, not people.” In other words, racial economic disparities exist because of past (and current) racist policies, not because there is something inherently wrong with black people or people of color.
Kendi says states that the label “not a racist,” signifies neutrality: “I am not a racist, but neither am I aggressively against racism.” But, just because you are “anti,” something doesn’t necessarily mean that you are building collective power to dismantle it. Individuals, particularly those who hold spaces of various privilege throughout society, do not relinquish the power that they hold for simply stating that they are anti-racist.
Take for instance the growing list of Republicans that have publicly denounced former President Trump for his racism, sexism, xenophobia, and corruption, but not aligning with former President Trump does prevent these denouncers from acting in similar, if not the exact same, ways.
For example, Senator Tom Cotton publicly derailed Trump for his efforts to undermine the 2020 Presidential election, and according to Vanity Fair manoeuvred to “marginalize those Republicans who were abetting him.” But, a year later, in a similar fashion to an executive order the former president signed, Cotton introduced a bill that would “prohibit the United States Armed Forces from promoting racist theories, most notably Critical Race Theory.”Identifying as anti-Trump does not automatically classify a person as anti-racist, and it most certainly does not classify them as pro-Black.
Being aggressively against an issue is also a limiting framing strategy. A frame is a select aspect of a story that is communicated in a specific way to promote a particular problem, solution, or moral evaluation. If taken literally, to be “anti,” something, means to be against it or to suppress it. To be “pro,” something means in favor of, denoting a forward motion. A space for social justice is one where anti-racism and being pro-black can coexist.
To hold the complexities of racism and white supremacy and understand that much of it is grounded in anti-Blackness means that we do not rely solely on a deficit framing.
Holding Space for Multitudes
Many of our discussions happen on a binary spectrum. We’re pushed to pick our favorite color, food, or sport from a very young age, removing the possibility of holding the complexity of what it means to be human.
A person either believes racial disparities are rooted in cultural and behavioral differences or that these disparities exist because of power and policy– these are the key difference between being a racist and an anti-racist according to Kendi. “One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist,” Kendi states.
Kendi presumably would be a supporter of reparations for Black Americans. In How to be an Antiracist, he states that “if discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist.”
Though it is important to note that reparations or other reparative policies like affirmative action are not forms of discrimination. The whole essence of reparations is to ensure a wound has been completely healed. “Someone reproducing inequity through permanently assisting an overrepresented racial group into wealth and power is entirely different than someone challenging that inequity by temporarily assisting an underrepresented racial group into relative wealth and power until equity is reached,” Kendi states.
It is commonly misunderstood that reparations seek to reposition the harmed community to take the place of the community that caused the harm. A pro-Black reparations policy seeks to restore Black communities to have autonomy over their productive capacity within society. This is not discriminatory, but rather a moral obligation to right centuries worth of racial harm. To be truly anti-racist must mean an embrace of a pro-Black reparations policy, because as Kendi notes “the construct of race neutrality actually feeds white nationalist victimhood by positing the notion that any policy protecting or advancing non-white Americans toward equity is “reverse discrimination.”
To truly unravel the racism that is embedded within society, racially-explicit policies that seek to undo the effects of centuries of anti-Black legislation are needed.
“The progress is healing the wound that the blow made.” Malcom X
In an interview about a year before he was assassinated, Malcolm X was asked about whether he could appreciate the progress that the United States had made toward race relations, in which he said “if you stick a knife in my back nine inches and pull it out six inches, there’s no progress. If you pull it all the way out, that’s not progress.
The progress is healing the wound that the blow made.” Kendi argues that we should view racism as cancer and treat it through anti-racist policies. But, what if we could center a love for Blackness in those policies? Because, as bell hooks states, it is only through this act and practice that we are “able to reach out and embrace the world without destructive bitterness.”
