How to Be an Antiracist
Listen, there is *so much* info and analysis out there about Ibram X. Kendi’s book How to Be an Antiracist. There’s praise, there’s criticism…you can find (and then digest) that all for yourself. What I want to talk about, though, is how skilled Kendi is at presenting a new idea, albeit one that *seems* so subtle that you might think he’s merely parsing words.
New idea? Good lord, I feel like our society is often totally bereft of “new ideas.” Narrative and folklore become conflated with popular opinion and, basically, any complex idea gets whittled down to its basest bullet points and then gets parroted overandoverandoverandover. Kendi’s thesis is really just a slight “turning on the head” of one of those ideas. (“When we’re all ‘kind’ to each other, ‘racism’ does not exist.”) (Btw, can we agree that “kindness” has become the hollow phrase du jour?) If you’ve read/heard anything about this book, you know that Kendi argues that there’s an important difference between being “not racist” and being “anti-racist.” It’s a big difference but it almost seems so simple due to narrative that our society has come to rely on. Kendi uses memoir and autobiography to help readers understand his own journey to uncovering this distinction. But there’s also over 60 pages of notes; the research is extensive.
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This is important work. The truth is, though, that his method should be used for a bevy of prickly topics that we can’t seem to untangle. At its core, the “new idea” is that sometimes the most revolutionary changes to our thinking result from simply shedding the notions that society (particularly in politics!) gives us – and then dismantling them.
I think what I most want to say about this book is that it’s “revolutionary” in its ability to tackle assumptions that, at least from where I stand, are repeated mainstays to our national (and global?) conversation. Take a deep breath, empty your brain for a moment, and then take a fresh start and fill it up again.
originally published on instagram