Part memoir, part tract, this is an engaging read about combating racism. It touches on themes that open up thoughts I’ve never even considered. I chose to read this book because I want to form an idea of the shape of different discourses on racism in different countries. This is the book I chose to represent to take part of an African-American perspective. Another I’ve chosen is a book by British-Ghanaian scholar Kwame Anthony Appiah. Books on the same topic that I’ve recently read include works by Moroccan author Tahar Ben Jelloun and one by Swedish racism scholar Tobias Hübinette. A French candidate I’m considering is La Force du préjugé – essai sur le racisme et ses doubles by Pierre-André Taguieff. (Close to this topic is the topic of identity, an old-hat theme, but I envisage a shallow dive in that pool as well. Books I consider are works by Albert Memmi, Amin Maalouf, Leon Wieseltier, Amartya Sen, Alain Finkielkraut and possibly the recently deceased Nathan Glazer. An interesting point about these topics is that the conversation changes so quickly, and arguments and books quickly become dated.)
Kendi’s book reminds me of the Ta-Nehisi Coates book I read two years ago. It dawns on me that I’ve been “keeping up” with Black America mainly through rap music and Spike Lee films – a realisation which makes me feel quite uneasy.
This book is structured in 18 chapters, each delving into a theme, e.g. “power”, “biology”, “survival”. The chapter goes back and forth between a personal anecdote and historical facts, putting Kendi’s personal experiences in a broader context. It starts off with Kendi reminiscing over his participation in a debating contest at his school where the content of the speech is that African-Americans don’t take themselves seriously enough. It is generally well-received by the mostly Black audience. Kendi was proud of his speech at the time, but now looks back on it and regrets it. Now older and more learned, he won’t accept putting the blame on African-Americans for something that was done to them by others. The book goes in and out of themes like that, blacks complaining on other blacks, so-called “black-on-black crime”, racism against Africans by African-Americans (as witnessed in Kendi’s childhood movie “Prince of Africa” with actor Eddie Murphy). These are topics I’ve not really thought all that much about, but find interesting. It is an insight into how a young black man (Kendi is born 1982) becomes aware of his own place in the racial imaginary of post-boom America. He mentions the apt expression “racial puberty” and describes his foray into Pan-Africanist thinking and the whole area of “Black Psychoanalysis”. In the book he describes it thusly:
“My journey to being an antiracist first recognized the intersectionality of my ethnic racism, and then my bodily racism, and then my cultural racism, and then my color racism, and then my class racism, and, when I entered graduate school, my gender racism and queer racism.”
He goes through all of these in due course. He makes a variation on W.E.B. DuBois famous concept of “Double consciousness” but calls it “dueling consciousnesses”, which captures an as of yet quite unacknowledged aspect of the doubleness. Another expression that he tweaks is structural or systemic racism. He suggests rather to call it clearly just racist, as in “a racist policy”, instead of “structural racism informs these policies”. A lot of ideas are contained within this book, and it really exposed me to unfamiliar areas of thinking. I was fascinated to read that in 1988 an African-American medical researcher suggested Black Americans suffer unevenly from high blood pressure because their ancestors suffered through enslavement. Another highlight was the work of researcher Ellyn Kaschak, who made a study of racism among people of color who are blind.
All in all, a laudable effort by Ibram X. Kendi. He tries to launch a new conception of racism which I suspect differs a bit from the common one.
Kinship of all Species 