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Consider what happens when you call someone an introvert. They may agree or disagree with you, but they will probably not feel particularly flattered or offended. That’s because, functionally, “introvert” is a merely descriptive term. We sometimes value extroversion more than introversion, but we get that introversion can be valuable in its own way and we don’t think it’s morally wrong.

Next, consider what happens when you call someone a liar. They are only likely to agree with you if you have caught them red-handed, and that agreement is going to be painful for them and have social consequences. More likely, they are going to deny it, and understandably so, because the act of lying is generally a bad thing, and to be a liar – being the kind of person who lies – is to have a moral character flaw.

Now consider in turn what happens when you call someone a racist. Are they going to react the way they do when you call them an introvert, or the way they do when you call them a liar?

They will react the way they do when you call them a liar, of course. As they should. Because we widely agree that being a racist, like being a liar but unlike being an introvert, is a moral failing. Racism is very bad. To call someone a racist is to seriously malign their moral character. Given all the disastrous harm that racism has caused over the centuries, you wouldn’t think that anyone would dispute that point. But it turns out that someone does, and that someone is Ibram X. Kendi.

Kendi tells us:

it’s important at the outset that we apply one of the core principles of antiracism, which is to return the word “racist” itself back to its proper usage. “Racist” is not—as Richard Spencer argues—a pejorative. It is not the worst word in the English language; it is not the equivalent of a slur. It is descriptive, and the only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it—and then dismantle it. The attempt to turn this usefully descriptive term into an almost unusable slur is, of course, designed to do the opposite: to freeze us into inaction. (9)

Ibram X. Kendi at Oregon State University, photo by Stephen Voss. CC BY-SA.

Despite his training as a historian, Kendi provides us with no reason to believe that a descriptive usage of “racism” is the original meaning – that there’s anything to be returned to. The first recorded usage of the term in the OED, from 1903, is in the sentence “Association of races and classes is necessary in order to destroy racism and classism”: here, “racism” was not a merely descriptive term, it was already something to be destroyed. To be racist was always something bad, it was not something you would want to be called. It was a pejorative. And that is how the term remains in everyday usage.

Of course people feel insulted when you call them a racist and seek to deny it – just like they would feel insulted and deny it if you call them a liar. The way “racist” functions in everyday discourse, just as the way “liar” functions, is as a serious accusation, an implication that there is something deeply wrong with the target’s moral character. It describes some specific pattern of actions or beliefs, but also implies that that pattern of actions or beliefs is morally wrong.

The term “racist” therefore comes with the social sanction attached to morally wrong actions. If people believe that you are a liar, they are not going to trust you, and you will face social consequences for that. And if they believe that you are a racist, they are also not going to trust you, and you will face social consequences for that. You might well lose your job over that belief – and indeed, in the Kendi era, several have. Which is to say that, to the extent that “racist” is not a slur, it’s because it’s something worse. I’d much, much rather be called a Paki than called a racist! If someone at work calls me a Paki, I can sic HR on them to make them lose their job. But if they call me a racist, now I’m afraid of losing my job.

Now you can argue that “racism” shouldn’t function that way. But at a bare minimum you would have to actually argue that – and even if you do argue it, you still have to recognize that most people in society are still going to be operating according to a more accepted and standard meaning of the term. I happen to think that people who attend conferences should be called “attenders”, because logically “attendees” means people who are attended by the conference – but that doesn’t mean I get to act like everybody else who says “attendee” claims the conference is attending them.

Kendi barely even attempts to justify his claim that “racist” should be considered descriptive. Mainly he provides the fallacy of guilt by association: Richard Spencer says racism is a pejorative term (9). And you wouldn’t want to be like Richard Spencer, would you? But the problems with deploying that fallacy should be obvious. Spencer also believes, just like Kendi, that people should be more race-conscious than they are; when Nell Irvin Painter tells her audience to capitalize “White” – as Kendi does – she explicitly proclaims that they should be following the example of “white nationalists, Ku Klux Klansmen and their ilk.” If guilt by association with white supremacists were sufficient to discredit an idea, then Kendi should not be capitalizing “White” the way that they do.

There are of course so many definitions of racism that widespread agreement on a definition is unlikely to happen. But there is agreement across a wide spectrum – from conservatives to socialists – on one major point: racism is bad. Therefore, when you call someone a racist, of course they’re going to be insulted. If you say that someone is bad in any given way, of course they’re going to react poorly, and probably deny it. That will happen if you call them stupid, it will happen if you call them ugly, it will happen if you call them a liar, and it will happen if you call them a racist. It doesn’t matter how loudly you insist that “stupid” is a descriptive term, “not a pejorative, not the equivalent of a slur” – you have not changed the fact that, in the English language as it exists and as it is used, “stupid” is an insult, recognized as such by the vast majority of the language’s speakers. “Racist” is no different in that regard. Some people actually do have very limited intellectual capacities, and can therefore be accurately described as stupid, but it is considered polite not to call them that because it’s recognized as an insult. In order to fight racism it likely is important to acknowledge when people are being racist – but with a recognition that that acknowledgement remains an insult.

From reading the rest of the book, it seems to me that Kendi knows this, in a way that belies his claim of descriptive meaning. Consider the ways in which Kendi himself deploys the words “racism” and “racist”. Kendi looks back on a speech he gave at seventeen which he now considers to be racist. He looks at it and says “when I recall the racist speech I gave, I flush with shame.” (6) Here are some other ways he speaks of racism: “Internalized racism is the real Black on Black crime.” (8) “Racist ideas piled up before me like trash at a landfill…. oftentimes twelve hours a day for three horrifically long years, I waded through this trash, consumed this trash, absorbed its toxicity…” (225) “Racist ideas fooled me nearly my whole life. I refused to allow them to continue making a fool out of me, a chump out of me, a slave out of me.” (227) Does that sound to you like Kendi is using “racist” as a merely descriptive term?

Kendi’s last pages make the analogy between racism and cancer. If Kendi were ever to bother (as he does not) to justify his claim that “racism” is a descriptive term, he could turn to that comparison: you could claim that “cancer” also functions as a descriptive term even though it’s something known to be bad. But here’s the thing: to make that case stick, you would still have to avoid any moral condemnation of racism. “Cancer” is indeed a purely descriptive term even though it describes something recognized to be bad – but that very descriptiveness restricts any moral sense of its badness. That is: when, faced with someone who has lung cancer and still continues to smoke, we can meaningfully look at that person and shrug and say “Well, I wouldn’t do that, but it’s your life.” The cancer is bad for that person and those who care about them, but any condemnation we might have of the person is prudential and not moral.

But nowhere does Kendi leave open that option with respect to racism. For unlike Martin Luther King, who insisted that racism poisons white men’s souls, Kendi regularly claims that racism is in the self-interest of the powerful. Unlike smoking for someone with cancer, Kendi thinks that racism is prudentially good for the powerful. But if it is prudentially good for them, if it is in their self-interest, then the only reason it’s wrong for them to be racists would be moral. If racism is not a moral term – if it is merely descriptive – and it is in their self-interest, then we no longer have any grounds on which to condemn their racism. Their racism is not bad for them prudentially, and it is not bad morally. We just happen to dislike it, but hey, different strokes for different folks. That – the inability to condemn the racism of the powerful – is what the claim of racism as a descriptive term would actually imply. And Kendi is not prepared to go there.

Nor should he be. The whole idea of a descriptive and not normative concept is that it is something that, at least theoretically, could be good as well as bad. If it is something inherently bad, the concept is ipso facto partially normative; if the concept is not normative, then it is not something inherently bad, it could be good. If we really were going to use the concept of “racism” in a merely descriptive way, we’d have to be prepared to say that maybe racism can be a good thing. Kendi is of course not prepared to do that. He knows that racism is a morally bad thing, and that racism is therefore not merely a descriptive concept. To claim otherwise is merely to excuse your insulting people – and even endangering them – by pretending you’re not doing it.