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Probably the most widely quoted passage from Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist is this one:
What’s the problem with being “not racist”? It is a claim that signifies neutrality: “I am not a racist, but neither am I aggressively against racism.” But there is no neutrality in the racism struggle. The opposite of “racist” isn’t “not racist.” It is “antiracist.” What’s the difference? One endorses either the idea of a racial hierarchy as a racist, or racial equality as an antiracist. One either believes problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of problems in power and policies, as an antiracist. One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an anti-racist. There is no in-between safe space of “not racist.” The claim of “not racist” neutrality is a mask for racism. (9)
Let us suppose that one goes into reading this paragraph believing – as I do, as most people used to, as most people quite possibly still do – that it is indeed possible to be neutral, to be simply not racist. What reason does this passage then provide to believe anything different? What argument is being made for the claim that one cannot be neutral, beyond the bare assertion, beyond the equivalent of stomping one’s shoe on the table? As far as I can tell, there is none. You just get the assertion that “‘not racist’ neutrality is a mask for racism”, and you’re expected to swallow it whole without any criticism.
So from this book I get no reason to believe that it is impossible to be not racist. Rather, I get reason to believe the contrary, that it is possible. After all, Kendi admits that
Race and racism are power constructs of the modern world. For roughly two hundred thousand years, before race and racism were constructed in the fifteenth century, humans saw color but did not group the colors into continental races, did not commonly attach negative and positive characteristics to those colors and rank the races to justify racial inequity, to reinforce racist power and policy. Racism is not even six hundred years old. (238)
So let’s consider the people of the world six hundred years ago. Clearly, on the acccount of this paragraph, they did not “endorse the idea of a racial hierarchy” as racists; they did not have the concept of a racial hierarchy available to endorse. But they also could not have endorsed the idea of racial equality! For if the concept of race had not been constructed, there was nothing that could have been equal or unequal. Six hundred years ago, when race and racism did not exist, it was not possible for the people of this world, on Kendi’s own account, to be either racist or anti-racist. Therefore, they could only have been – not racist.
Therefore, on Kendi’s own account of world history, the “in-between safe space of ‘not racist'” must be at least conceptually possible. That safe space existed in the past – and it can be imagined in the future. In BU’s newsletter Kendi himself said:
it was very difficult for people to believe that slavery, 45 years later, would be no more, just as I think there are many people today who can’t imagine that there could be a nation without racism and inequality.
Kendi implies that he himself can imagine a nation without racism. But that implies that it must also be possible to be not racist at that point in the future. For it makes no sense to be antiracist if there is no racism left to be anti! So the claim that “There is no in-between safe space of ‘not racist'” must refer only to the current situation, in which racism and racial inequities exist. And therefore in order for the claim to make any sense, one must qualify it as something like: “as long as racial inequities exist, one either allows them to persevere, as a racist, or confronts them as an antiracist.”
But we don’t have good reason to believe even that qualified claim. The implication of excluding the “not racist” middle here is that, by not confronting racial inequalities as an antiracist, one is thereby “allowing them to persevere”, and that implies that one is a racist. It is effectively an application of the common aphorism that “if you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem.” The aphorism does not merely deny the possibility of a neutral stance: it also claims that it’s not enough to take a stance against the problem, one must actually be part of the solution, actively work to solve the problem – or else one is a part of it.
But is this aphorism really accurate? Racism is a problem today, I’ll agree with Kendi on that. But as I write this, there is also a civil war raging in the Sudan that has killed tens of thousands and displaced millions. That too is a problem. I am not confronting that problem, and as far as I know, neither is Kendi. But Kendi’s logic in this passage is that those who do not confront a problem thereby allow it to persevere, and thereby are effectively supporting that problem.
Therefore, by Kendi’s logic, he and I are “allowing” the war in Sudan to “persevere” – and we are therefore supporters of that war. We are not confronting the persecution of Rohingya refugees in Burma; therefore, we are allowing it to persevere, and we are therefore supporters of that persecution. We are not part of any of these solutions – and therefore, by Kendi’s “no safe space” logic, we are part of all of these problems. One must be a part of the solution to any and all problems in the world, including climate change, gun violence, famine, emerging diseases, biodiversity loss, nuclear proliferation, desertification, AIDS, cyberbullying, sexual harassment, human trafficking, terrorism, inflation, water scarcity, peak oil, cancer, heart disease, traffic accidents, the teen mental health crisis, soil erosion, acid rain, and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – or else one is a part of each of them. For one who does not confront them allows them to persevere, and by that inaction supports them.
Theoretically, Kendi could resist this conclusion by naming something special about racism as a problem, something that means one must actively be a part of the solution to that specific problem, in a way that one does not need to be a part of the solution to any of the others. But remarkably, he never does this. He talks rarely if ever about issues other than social inequality, so there’s no comparison with those other issues to be made. Rather, all he does is make a specific rhetorical move – the racist/antiracist division – that privileges racism over all other problems. It tars neutral people with the serious accusation of racism, an accusation that can get you ostracized or fired. The implication is: “If you’re not a part of the racism solution, you’re part of the racism problem – but you’re free to not be a part of the solution to any other problem. This is the one that matters.” “You can’t be not racist” follows Nathan Robinson’s unjustified conceit that everyone must be an activist – and makes it worse by specifying further that everyone must be an activist for this specific cause. The effect of the “can’t be not racist” rhetoric, on people who haven’t thought about it, is to make them think, without reason, that they must put racism first: they must prioritize that problem over climate change, over economic inequality, over gun violence, over everything else.
Because of course we can’t actually be working to solve every possible problem the world has. There are people who try to do so: they’re called burnouts. If one is to be an effective activist for the causes one cares about most, one must be active in one’s support of those specific causes. One must focus, one must pick one’s battles. An anti-racist activist can be against climate change and nuclear proliferation and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, but if she tries to confront all of those different issues, she will weaken her own anti-racist activism. So likewise, a climate activist or an activist for socialism needs to focus on those causes, not on actively confronting racism. By Kendi’s standards, that makes them racists.
Kendi tries to defend that conclusion, in part, by claiming that “racist” is a merely descriptive term, not a pejorative. I’ll address what’s wrong with that view next time.
Kendi’s comment is along the lines of: “there are no atheists in foxholes” or “If you are not for us, you are against us”.
It is rhetoric, not argument.
That description applies to most of the book, really. What we really need is a sociological study of just how this vacuous piece of rhetoric reached the level of influence that it did. Including the fact that people who should have pointed out its absence of argument never did.
Ibram X. Kendi, the Mutant Philosopher of the 21st century.
The risk of being ‘anti-racist’, as opposed to being ‘not-racist’, – and thus neutral – is, to smear all other races (Caucasian, Asian, Hispanics, etc.) as being rank racists simply for not believing that being of black human descendants matters in the hierarchy of life.
By smearing a racial segment of society as ‘not-sufficiently-anti-racist’, we vacate the possibility of having an academic discussion on why black athletes dominate certain professional sports; And one would think such discussions would matter to ‘mutant philosophers’; But since they are intellectually bankrupt they demonstrate their utility by displaying their value as an engagement in futility.
In other words: Idiots
I think I commented on this subject a few days ago. Don’t know if you saw that. Anyway, my assessment is racist motive; sex discrimination and harassment; age discrimination; ethnically motivated maltreatment, religious persecution and a few other forms of *different treatment* are bound up under the umbrella of bigotry. Humans have been doing these things towards each other for a very long time. So long, in fact, they scarcely notice, until others take them to task and devise laws or rules intended to discourage the offensive behavior. Much of the behavior is related to absence of consciousness, born of custom, habit and tradition…much of that, insidious and resistant to change. People treated others badly;differently; unfairly; miserably, because they could do so with impugnity (or, pugnacity). Laws and rules are, unfortunately, not subject to universal enforcement. Where people have been corrupted, bigotry prevails.
Some degree of bigotry – unjust prejudice and discrimination – seems pretty universal throughout human history, corruption or no, especially in the form of xenophobia. (Many tribes give themselves a name that simply means “the people”.)
What’s not universal is racism – the pseudo-biological division of humans in a way influenced by both colonialism and the development of biology, which has had more pernicious consequences than most (but probably not all) other forms of bigotry. If we can get rid of race, we won’t be rid of xenophobia and related bigotry, but we will be rid of racism, and that will be a win.
Your point is well-made and well-takeh. I am both pessimistic and skeptical, however. Some anthropological logic at least implies that eventual homogenization of the races is inevitable. An evolutionary probability, ar least. To that, I will argue this is all well and good, but, evolutionary change is excruciating slow and the human clock is always already into its’ eighth day. Yes, that characterization is metaphor. As conscious beings, we live and breathe metaphor as symbolic of the possible, rather than the improbable. That potentiality, hope vs. despair, is how we roll: it gets us up in the morning, in the face of long odds and devastating hurricanes. So, believe and carry on, Mr. Lele. I WILL lNOT argue a healthy portion of optimism. I, myself, will try to do better. Thanks.
I doubt that “homogenization of the races” is a good synonym for what Amod means by “getting rid of race”. For racial antirealists (which I take to include Amod in some sense), the end of race is about people ceasing to act as if race is real; in other words, the end of race is the end of racialization. The end of race may be far in the future, but not because it is the homogenization of races. For racial antirealists, races were never real, although racialization has real effects, so there are no things to homogenize. It’s more like increased cognitive differentiation of people, as in the title of Ellen Langer’s 1985 paper “Decreasing prejudice by increasing discrimination” (where “discrimination” means differentiation, not bigotry). There are racial realists who would have a completely different view, but I don’t think Amod is among them.
Amod,
I agree with (and thoroughly enjoyed) your take-down of Kendi’s Manichean worldview. Your points were new to me and quite effective, I thought – both that Kendi himself acknowledges a time in the past when non-racism must have been possible, because racism itself didn’t exist and that applying Kendi’s imperative to other problems would make it unworkable.
I’ve only read a few journalistic pieces comparing our anti-racism fever (which has now broken, I think) to Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Stalin’s purges or Christian witch-hunts. I don’t know if a serious book-length comparative study has been written or is in the works, but I would love to read one.
On an unrelated topic, I don’t know if you take requests. If you do, I would love to get your reaction to a book I just finished – Noah Feldman, To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People. I learned a lot and appreciated Feldman’s open-minded, undogmatic tone. I bet you’d like it.
Thanks, David. I appreciate that; I’m glad I’m not just beating a dead horse here. I actually don’t think those comparisons you list are the most apt ones to make, because those all involved actual murders. The only actual deaths that I am aware of from the woke movement have been suicides – which, while certainly horrifying, are in a very different category. I think the fever is much more accurately compared to McCarthyism, which also destroyed many careers and livelihoods and dreams but did not directly kill anyone.
As for taking requests… it’s unusual and depends on the circumstances, so not a categorical no in the general case, but I am going to decline this one. I’m quite busy with a lot of other commitments right now (including another unfinished book review), and also… the past ten years have taught me to wait until the fever breaks before taking stands on the most hot-button topic of the day. Whatever one’s position on Israel and Palestine one way or the other, I think it’s clear to both sides that that particular fever has definitely not broken, and so I’m intentionally avoiding the topic for at least the near future – though not for lack of interest.
Just a few thoughts to follow up on your response –
You’re certainly right that the comparative cases I listed were orders of magnitude worse than wokeism. No question. However, I think some of the dynamics and targets may be similar. McCarthyism is not something I know well, but I seem to remember that the witch-hunters were primarily focused on ostensible communists’ memberships and activities (“are you now, or have you ever been, a member of…..?”). I don’t think they policed speech, not to mention thought. (But maybe I’m wrong about that….) In the three cases I mentioned, speech and thought were targets of investigation. And the same, it seems to me, applies to wokeism.
Re: your excellent point about Kendi’s either-or thinking being impossible to apply across the board. I was reminded of another injunction that foundered on similar problems: Dick Cheney’s “1% doctrine.” As you may remember, in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion (and perhaps in connection with the terrorist-and-a-ticking-bomb scenario), the then-VP promoted the idea that a mere 1% likelihood of a catastrophic outcome justified all means necessary to prevent said catastrophe. But if one took that as a general doctrine, one would have to apply all means necessary to prevent a giant asteroid from destroying life on earth, a plague from wiping us out, AI from wiping us out, the sixth great extinction, etc. etc. Our means would never suffice. I wonder what a good term would be to describe both Kendi’s either-or and Cheney’s 1% doctrine, which suffer from such similar flaws? Perhaps tunnel-vision maximalism? Hedgehogism?
Re: Feldman’s book. While it does address the Israel-Palestine issue, this is not its focus by any means. I don’t think the book falls in the hot-button category. It’s much deeper and more capacious and more interesting than that. But if and when you feel ready to review it, I look forward to hearing your thoughts.
p.s. By “website,” what do you mean?
“Website” (in the comments) is a place you can put a clickable link for people to find out who you are (especially if you have your own blog, Substack, etc.) The option dates back to before social media was ubiquitous, but it can be used for social media (like a LinkedIn or Facebook page) if you like. It’s entirely optional.
That is a good point that McCarthyism tended to police association more than ideas – though <a href="https://www.newsweek.com/youtuber-contrapoints-attacked-after-including-controversial-buck-angel-video-1466757"the woke movement does police association some of the time too. But, I think the other cases you mention also involved associations, social status and other characteristics as much as ideas.