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)
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.
Tge term is clearly multiply ambiguous, and nowadays many aligned with Kendi have replaced the previously accepted meaning that MLK et al. meant with structural racism. do you want to OK bag a paper towel and wheelchair? There is a phenomenon involving belief that there are racial differences ,analogous to the belief that there are sexual differences, which can be based on population statistics, which may be described as a purely descriptive form of racism, which, if it entails no beliefs about differences in rights or treatment, appears not to violate normative standards, despite emotional reactions to the contrary. But Kendi is not using the term that way either.
Right. If “racism” by Kendi’s definition were indeed to be purely descriptive, then it should be totally okay to say “I’ve studied the biology of the racial groups, I see that they are naturally unequal to each other in their capabilities, and since I believe in meritocracy I therefore think that their outcomes should be unequal: therefore, I’m a racist and I don’t apologize for that.” Kendi would not accept that conclusion in a million years, of course. But the terms he’s set out – his definition of racism in terms of promoting unequal outcomes and his claim that it’s merely descriptive – imply it.
Hi Amod – It’s been a while! I’ve been lurking here and there, but sadly too busy to philosophize much these days.
I’m curious about a couple things though. The first is, does Kendi not distinguish between institutional racism (something more descriptive and pervasive) and overt racism (the kind coming from certain politicians and white-supremacist groups)?
He seems to be focusing on the first sense, while your example of being called one and sent to HR evokes the second sense. That might help tease out why Kendi wouldn’t accept your hypothetical racist’s conclusion, or perhaps Kendi would simply want to know what kind of inequalities different races should have – perhaps he’d be okay with saying that different races might want to go to different barber shops, but that there’s no reasonable biological difference that would justify mandating different drinking fountains. Or maybe he’d say the whole claim is nonsense, not just the conclusion.
Second, I’ve read that Kendi says something to the extent that, “racist is an adjective, not a noun.” It seems that part of his project isn’t to completely remove the normative dimension of “racist” and instead to pragmatically create a distance between the term and our normative judgments, thus allowing a more open conversation about ways that we all might engage in racism. I’m not sure that he does that in a philosophically rigorous manner; his ideas have been critiqued heavily on such grounds.
But maybe a good example of moving something considered normative toward descriptive would be the term “obese,” which could be used these days on the school playground to deride someone as a pejorative or it could be drawn back into medical discussions about a condition affecting nearly half of adult Americans. By moving it into a scientific or historical context and discussing how we all might play a part in obesity in ourselves and/or others, we could be moving the term from a pejorative use toward a descriptive one in the way Kendi is trying to steer the conversation about racist. Of course, if a coworker calls you obese with a derisive tone, it’s meant pejoratively–but a doctor might say this use of “obese” is incorrect as she seeks to educate us on the descriptive meaning and social conditions of obesity around us.
Hi Justin – great to see you around! First of all, as far as I can tell, no, Kendi does not distinguish between institutional racism and overt racism. For him, they’re all in the same bucket. So are what are typically called microaggressions – a term he explicitly rejects, saying he prefers to call them “racist abuse”. (But that’s just a descriptive term, of course.)
For my part, the point about being sent to HR is not even remotely about the kind of racism “coming from certain politicians and white-supremacist groups”. When a professor of Chinese can get suspended for saying a Chinese word that sounds like the N-word, it puts the rest of us on notice that we need to fear any deployment of the idea of racism, no matter how obviously innocuous our action. After all, the slogan is “it’s about impact, not intent” – which refuses any distinction between overt racism and anything more subtle.
As far as the obesity example: again, it is part of the idea of a merely descriptive term that it can at least theoretically be good. It was a good thing to be obese in April 2021 – it was something you wanted to be, because it was one of the conditions that could allow you to get a COVID shot. The day I hear Kendi say “under circumstance X, racism can be good” is the day I will believe him that it’s a descriptive term. Until then, I will continue to call bullshit.
I haven’t thought this through, but the first thing that comes to mind after reading this are the words “violent” and “violence”. I’m wondering how they compare to “racist” and “racism”. The Cure Violence organization takes an epidemiological and public health approach to violence prevention and reduction, which shows that there’s an epidemiological sense in which “violent” is descriptive, just like “cancerous”, even though we often moralize violence in a way that we don’t moralize cancer. The word “violent” could also be used in rhetoric in a pejorative way, like “cancerous” is sometimes used.
I don’t have an argument, but this comparison suggests to me a problem with Amod’s claim, “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.” The comparison to violence shows the problem: someone’s use of violence can be in their self-interest, but from a public health perspective, if many people pursue violence out of self-interest, it can be a public health problem: it causes quality of life to decrease for the population in general, even if we don’t moralize violence as wrong. It sounds like Kendi is trying to give something like an epidemiological perspective on racism, but he lapses into moralizing?
I’m not sure it can really be described as a lapse – moralism is an integral part of the project, as far as I can tell. The contrast to “violence” is quite instructive here: as is normal for descriptive terms, most of us straightforwardly understand that violence can be good, at least for certain purposes and in relevant contexts. There are pacifists who advocate complete nonviolence, of course, but they’re in a distinct minority. If you tell a Ukrainian soldier he is being violent against Russian soldiers, he will say something to the effect of “so what’s your point?”
The “racism is a merely descriptive term” claim would therefore be more persuasive from someone who was willing to claim that, say, affirmative action is a form of racism – and advocate it anyway. “Racism is when you discriminate between people on the basis of their race, which sometimes we need to do”: that’s a coherent usage of “racism” as a descriptive term. But as far as I can tell, the whole point of defining structural inequalities as “racism” – rather than just using the genuinely descriptive term “inequality” – is to condemn those inequalities, to moralize. Kendi doesn’t say that that’s his reason for defining “racism” structurally, but that’s because he provides no reason for the point whatsoever – as with most of the book, you’re just supposed to take it on blind faith. But that’s the usual reason to refer to “structural racism” – you refer to racism as structural in order to make it clear, normatively, that the problem, the thing-to-be-fought-against, is not prejudice and discrimination (as per the normal and dictionary definition of racism) but structural inequalities.
Rating: 85/100
Analysis:
The writing is strong in its argumentation and clarity. It effectively dissects the concept of “racism” as presented by Ibram X. Kendi, highlighting the inherent contradiction in his argument that it should be purely descriptive. The author successfully challenges Kendi’s claims, demonstrating a nuanced understanding of the subject matter.
Strengths:
Clear and Concise Argumentation: The essay meticulously lays out its argument, presenting various viewpoints and counterarguments in a logical and organized manner. The structure is easy to follow.
Strong Examples and Counter-examples: The author uses examples from Kendi’s work and the broader context of racism to illustrate his points, making the argument more compelling.
Effective Use of Language: The vocabulary is precise and appropriate for the topic, and the writing style is engaging. The use of rhetorical questions and contrasting examples keeps the reader engaged.
Logical Reasoning: The essay presents a well-reasoned argument, drawing logical conclusions from premises and demonstrating an awareness of potential flaws in other positions.
Weaknesses:
Potentially Overly Aggressive Tone: While not overtly aggressive, the phrasing at times is strong and assertive, which may alienate some readers. The language might be interpreted as being less conciliatory or open to alternative views than necessary. Statements like “Kendi barely even attempts to justify…” are forceful and might be softened without sacrificing the argument’s impact.
Overreliance on Personal Opinion: The author occasionally inserts personal opinions, which, while adding a personal touch, could be perceived as weakening the objectivity of the argument. For example, the statement “I happen to think that people who attend conferences should be called ‘attenders’…” could be reworded to retain the point while minimizing the personal opinion aspect.
Potential for Misinterpretation: Some readers might misinterpret the nuanced argument as a generalized condemnation of all who disagree with the author’s position on the subject of racism. The author would benefit from acknowledging that there may be nuances to Kendi’s perspective beyond the argument laid out in this essay.
Suggestions for Improvement:
Softening the tone: While the passion is understandable, the essay could benefit from more measured language. Finding a balance between strong conviction and respectful engagement with alternative perspectives is essential.
Strengthening the neutrality: The essay would be even more persuasive if it could present Kendi’s perspective more objectively. Paraphrasing key passages instead of directly quoting, and using “Kendi argues…” and “Kendi claims…” as more neutral introductions to those statements.
Expanding on potential nuances in Kendi’s thought: Acknowledging areas where Kendi’s argument may have internal complexities or potential counterpoints would deepen the analysis.
Weakening the personal opinion segments: Replacing statements of personal opinion with stronger evidence would enhance the argument’s objectivity and overall persuasiveness.
Overall, the essay is a well-written and insightful analysis of Kendi’s perspective. By addressing the weaknesses and refining the tone, it could be made even more compelling and persuasive.
So, it seems fairly clear to me what this comment is: an AI-written spam comment, designed to drive traffic to the website linked from the “author’s” name, deriving from a “Grade this essay” kind of prompt. (luzi, if you happen to be a real person, I’d be delighted to have you prove that point wrong.)
I don’t usually approve spam comments, but I’m kind of fascinated by the approach this one takes, which, thanks to AI, is far more sophisticated than the majority we usually get. If I start getting more like this I don’t expect to be approving them, but I’m leaving this one up for the record as an example: I think it gives us a glimpse of what the coming AI-filled world is likely to look like.