Here to Learn Book Club: Education on Race in America discussion
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How to Be an Antiracist
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Great stuff Carly - I’m behind on my reading but your remarks inspire me to catch up! I don’t think I learned this in The New Jim Crow but I was surprised to learn that the welfare queen that Ronald Reagan made famous was white. That showed me some of the assumptions I was making.
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Looking forward to hearing your thoughts Linda!
It was helpful for me to hear the perspective of how black teens have been shamed for losing the fight for civil rights after all Dr King did toward gaining them. I never thought of Clinton as the first black president but I did see that he had some understanding of the injustice of people of color. I wonder how much he could have understood of the harm done with 3 strikes. I am quite sure there are people of color who identified the failures of the bill/law at the time but I wonder if we didn't listen or they were not viewed as credible. Does anyone know more about this to fill in some of the questions about this? I will do some research about what Jessie Jackson and Al Sharpton were saying around this. I also will check into Dick Gregory as he is from St Louis and was a voice of the reason. He wrote a good book in 2017 called Defining Moments in Black History that was very good.
One of Kendi's precise description as one of racisms harms is the way it falls on unexceptional black person who is asked to be extraordinary just to survive - and even worse, the black screw up who faces the abyss after 1 error while the white screw up is handed a second chance and sympathy. This is one of the awakenings I have had. I have learned how one person can grow up with trust and faith in the police while another grows up in with fear and trauma based on their respective experiences.
Kendi notes this shouldn't be surprising - but i have to admit it still is surprising to me. I do acknowledge it but i have to try and pull up all the assumptions that have created my view of the world as fair and think about whether it is if i were a person of color.
I agree that this book is so full of helpful information to challenge racism that it is well titled and worth a second read to try and make the most of all of the inequities identified and to stive to become an anti racist.
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I agree - the way Kendi describes how the burden of racism falls so intensely on the "unexceptional" black person totally changed the way I think as well. There is a judgment of black people generally that either you are a credit or a discredit to your race, but it always assumes race - in the place of humanity. You cannot simply be a human, which... what else is there, you know? Racism gets at the root of people this way, ensuring black people are not allowed, societally speaking, to escape from being "a black person" with all its connotations. It strikes me that that's how the wheel of racism keeps turning after so many centuries.
Kendi takes so many of the basic ideas that pervade American society in regard to race: biology, behavior, culture, class, etc. And he challenges the assumptions around these ideas one by one. It's brutal. Everything that's hidden comes to light. There's nowhere to hide any racist assumption you might hold. And that's why I loved this book and why I feel like I need to read it again - to let Kendi clearly identify and attack my deeply held racist assumptions so they have a chance at being killed off for good.
For instance, Kendi's words about so-called black crime. This is a subject I've always had problems with, and I haven't been able to find a satisfying perspective until this book. Our first book, The New Jim Crow, got really close by showing that white people and black people commit many crimes at similar rates but are incarcerated at greatly disparate rates and by clearly showing how the prison system keeps black people disenfranchised and disempowered. But still, in my home community in New Orleans at the time, I saw what I thought was a clear link between crime and black skin. I was around a lot of crime that seemed to be mostly committed by black people, and it bothered me. Was this proof that black people are more prone to crime? If so, what does that mean for my desire to be antiracist, for the idea of antiracism as a whole?
Kendi's words are thus: "We, the young Black super-predators, were apparently being raised with an unprecedented inclination toward violence - in a nation that presumably did not raise White slaveholders, lynchers, mass incarcerators, police officers, corporate officials, venture capitalists, financiers, drunk drivers, and war hawks to be violent."
Damn. How much white crime was around me that I somehow failed to recognize? I knew a guy who used to steal from the cash register at my work. White. I knew tons of people who smoked weed and did other drugs. White. The drunk guy who plowed his truck into 28 people at a Mardi gras parade? White. Crime was everywhere in America in every race, but I wasn't paying attention. I also wonder how many other crimes I had only assumed were committed by black people. How many times had a black person come to my mind when I actually did not know the race of the perpetrator? And how many of the crimes committed by white people are simply hidden because they might be white collar? And how many deaths result from these, including from the majority white government officials who make racist policies?
This brings up another of Kendi's assertions - that violent crime is a function of poverty instead of race. New Orleans has a lot of poverty, and because of the massive amount of gentrification since Hurricane Katrina (of which I was a part), both the city's poverty and crime are witnessed now by a lot of white people like me. There was poverty around where I lived, so there was crime. And when you're used to thinking of black people as criminals, it's much easier to conceive of it as purely racial and exclude this evidence to the contrary. Also I should mention that when I lived there, New Orleans was about 60% African American, 30% white, and 10% "other". So even without poverty, if there was crime in the city, and it looked like black people were committing most of them, well, statistically that's simply proportional and would not necessarily signify anything else.
Kendi's central premise is also a really useful tool of perspective. He claims, as Ta-nehisi Coates does, that the word "racist" has been misused and dramatically twisted to be basically the worst insult you can lob at someone, when really it is simply a descriptive term. People, he claims, can be racist one minute and antiracist the next. And that goes for all people - black, white or any other race. This is certainly an effective way to offload the crippling shame that many of us, especially white people, feel around race. That one awfully misguided thing I said years ago doesn't have define my entire identity; I can take into account the antiracist things I've said, too, and continually strive to make those my norm. I think that shame is the source of a lot of inaction and negative reaction in our society (although I do think a bit of shame can help correct behavior as well), and thinking of racism and antiracism in this way evens the playing field so to speak because we all have both capacities within us.
A few other things in this book rang so true for me that I physically shouted "YES!" at the pages. One such idea is this: "What if economic, political, or cultural self-interest drives racist policymakers, not hateful immorality, not ignorance?" I deeply believe this to be true on the most basic level, as I've witnessed a lot of racism from people who I wouldn't describe necessarily as ignorant or hateful - including myself! But they are self-interested, like all of us to some extent or other. And if we don't admit this, we risk misdiagnosing so much of our society's ailments and the way it works generally, which means we will never be able to treat the ailments properly. We will never be able to heal.
I'm really looking forward to exploring this book further. There's so much more to talk about. What stood out to you? What basic assumptions have you questioned while reading this book? Have Kendi's words changed the way you think about race in any way?
I'll be sure to post with other thoughts after reading number two!