Humainologie creative dialogue Antiracism and Personal Growth this coming Wednesday March 10

"Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?" [Alice asked the Cheshire Cat]

"That depends a good deal on where you want to get to," said the Cat.

"I don't much care where--" said Alice.

"Then it doesn't matter which way you go," said the Cat.

This coming Wednesday March 10, just for fun, let’s connect our theme for the month, Personal Growth, with the topic for the week, Antiracism (and related issues).

The Cheshire Cat emphasized the importance of knowing where we want to go. The author of the book How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi, describes a destination for us, with directions for how to get there. I’ve appended my synopsis of his book herewith. The book helped me with personal growth. That’s because it both gave me a glimpse of an avenue toward greater mental freedom; and made clear how challenging the obstacles along that avenue can be, if I want to take that route.

I’ll send you some good questions soon, probably tomorrow, along with the Zoom link. The questions will make reference to the contents of the book, so a careful reading of the book synopsis will help you prepare for our creative dialogue.

Just for fun,

Arthur

Book: (Ibram X. Kendi) How to Be an Antiracist (2019)

Ibram X. Kendi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibram_X._Kendi has been the founding director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University; a professor of history and international relations; and a columnist at The Atlantic. In 2020, he became director of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University.

In this #1 New York Times Bestseller, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_OXMgA0Fwsk he presents an actionable way of thinking about antiracism. Implicit in his book is the message: Get to work! Or, as Gandhi put it, “You must be the change you want to see in the world.”

My understanding of the author’s vision and purpose in writing the book is a world in which human beings are valued for who they are as human beings, and their differences are cherished, rather than being perceived as marks of inferior or superior. The way to get there is through policies that move us toward equity. In his chapter on “Class,” the author calls racism and capitalism “conjoined twins.” “Capitalism is essentially racist; racism is essentially capitalist.” In the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., which he quotes: “It means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated.” The author also writes, “Class racism is as ripe among White Americans – who castigate poor Whites as ‘White trash’ – as it is in Black America, where racist Blacks degrade poor Blacks as ‘them niggers’ who live in the ghetto.”

All but three of the eighteen chapters begin with two definitions. The first is the definition of what a racist version of that chapter’s topic looks like; and the second is the definition of what the antiracist version of that chapter’s topic looks like. In each chapter he then clarifies the hidden racism and the possibility of antiracism for that chapter’s topic. In Chapter 8, “Behavior,” for example, he defines a “behavioral racist” as “One who is making individuals responsible for the perceived behavior of racial groups and making racial groups responsible for the behavior of individuals.” A “behavioral antiracist” is “One who is making racial group behavior fictional and individual behavior real.” In that chapter, he explains that he was irresponsible in high school. “How do we think about my young self, the C or D student, in antiracist terms? … I should be critiqued as a student …, a bad student. But I shouldn’t be critiqued as a bad Black student. I did not represent my race any more than my irresponsible White classmates represented their race.”

In Chapter 18, “Survival,” the author describes how his own way of thinking was “upended” when, while witnessing his wife Sadiqa’s battle with invasive breast cancer, he researched the history of racist ideas. He makes the point that if you only treat the symptoms of cancer while ignoring the cause of those symptoms, the cancer will spread. Similarly, if you treat only the symptoms of racism while failing to establish policies that treat the root causes, the racism will get worse. “Watching Sadiqa’s courage… inspired me to accept the source of racist ideas I found while researching their entire history.… My research kept pointing me to the same answer: The source of racist ideas was not ignorance and hate, but self-interest…. The history of racist ideas is the history of powerful policy-makers erecting racist policies out of self-interest, then producing racist ideas to defend and rationalize the inequitable effects of their policies, while everyday people consume those racist ideas, which in turn sparks ignorance and hate.”

A policy can produce greater equality or greater inequality. Inequality is a root cause of racism. Furthermore, the policy maker responsible for a policy that leads to inequality (and racism) can be identified as easily as the person responsible for bombing a Black church. A racist idea is one that blames the victim. It is racist to see Black people as lazy or violent, rather than to look for the policies that lead to hopelessness and anger. This racism afflicts non-Whites as well as Whites. An evidence-based look at crime in low-income neighborhoods, shows that unemployment rates correlate with crime rates in neighborhoods regardless of the predominant racial or ethnic group in that neighborhood. Therefore, if you want to be antiracist, you must aim to reduce unemployment rates. Accordingly, Kendi’s definition of a racist is “one who is supporting a racist policy through their actions or inaction or expressing a racist idea” and his definition of an antiracist is “one who is supporting an antiracist policy through their actions or expressing an antiracist idea” (such as the evidence-based conclusion just mentioned).

The author emphasizes the importance of defining what we mean and where we want to go: “If we don’t do the basic work of defining the kind of people we want to be in language that is stable and consistent, we can’t work toward stable, consistent goals. Some of my most consequential steps toward being an antiracist have been the moments when I arrived at basic definitions.” Defining a “racist idea,” for example, enhances self-awareness in an antiracist. In fact, in this book the author presents himself as an example of someone who had grown up unwittingly expressing racist ideas, thus making the problem worse.

Many influential American Blacks have accepted personal responsibility for their own success or failure. Responsibility and critical self-awareness are important. However, in this context, it may be counterproductive to emphasize them. By implicitly or explicitly suggesting that Blacks are themselves the source of the problem, an influential Black person can make the problem worse. “The impulses of my bigoted past constantly threatened to take me back to the plantation of racist power.” As he realized this, Kendi underwent a difficult change in his way of thinking. “Antiracists can be as doctrinaire in their view of racism as racists can be in their view of not-racism. How can antiracists ask racists to open their minds and change when we are close-minded and unwilling to change? I ignored my own hypocrisy, as people customarily do when it means giving up what they hold dear. Giving up my conception of racism meant giving up my view of the world and myself. …I would lash out at anyone who ‘attacked’ me with new ideas, unless I feared and respected them….” Eventually, he underwent the difficult change, emphasizing racist policies as the root cause of the problem. Even then, people were challenging him with the question: Yes, but what are you doing to change racist policies?

In 2017, he moved to American University in Washington, DC, “to found and direct the Antiracist Research and Policy Center.” His research had shown how racist policy could be replaced by antiracist policy. He developed a plan of “bringing to Washington dream teams of scholars, policy experts, journalists, and advocates, who would be assisted by classrooms of students from the nation’s most politically active student body. The teams would focus on the most critical and seemingly intractable racial inequities. They would investigate the racist policies causing racial inequity, innovate antiracist policy correctives, broadcast the research and policy correctives, and engage in campaigns of change that work with antiracist power in locales to institute and test those policy correctives before rolling them out nationally and internationally.

“These teams would model some of the steps we can all take to eliminate racial inequity in our spaces.” The author then provides a list of eleven objectives, beginning with “Admit racial inequity is a problem of bad policy, not bad people” and including “Invent or find antiracist policy that can eliminate racial inequity. ...Work… to institute the antiracist policy.”

In September 2017, as he began presenting this plan, he also began experiencing early symptoms of colonic cancer. The day of his diagnostic procedure, his wife Sadiqa, a medical professional, sat with him and his mother and encouraged them. They could deal with it. Next day the news came. “I had metastatic colon cancer. Stage 4. Maybe we won’t be able to deal with it.” Kendi cites a 12% chance of longer than 5-year survival for stage 4. He began to focus on what might happen if he beat the odds. As he did so he integrated his thinking about his illness with his thinking about the cancer of racism. He had life-threatening cancer, but he might beat the odds. Our society has life-threatening racism, but it might beat the odds. After six months of optimism, chemotherapy and surgery, the news was that the doctors could no longer find any cancer in him.

Emphasizing the deadly spread of racist cancer worldwide and the apparent hopelessness at this moment, his closing words in the book are these: “Once we lose hope, we are guaranteed to lose. But if we ignore the odds and fight to create an antiracist world, then we give humanity a chance to one day survive, a chance to live in communion, a chance to be forever free.”