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# 2024-03-10 - How To Be An Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
Recently a friend recommended this book. I have heard of it before,
and have intended to read it. I finally decided to check it out from
the local library. I truly enjoyed the clarity of the writing. I
normally post extensive notes, but this time i will try to make a
shorter post.
As the author noted, racism feels like a very big problem. I feel
powerless against it. At the collective level it requires a will to
change, a will that i do not believe we possess, as evident from the
not-so-slow-motion climate horror. At the individual level, it
involves unconscious conditioning from early age. Big things to
wrestle with.
Going into the book i hoped to gain insight around this feeling of
powerlessness. I didn't get much around that.
One thought that comes to mind is all or nothing mentality. Having a
perfectionist mentality makes it easier to fail.
For example, ages ago i discussed land reparations with someone who
argued that White people have a moral obligation to "give" the land
back to the original inhabitants, but that "we" lack the means and
the will to do so. We both assumed that it would be all of the land,
all at once.
Since then i've read about the idea of starting smaller, for example
turning over a national park to tribal administration. Privatizing
national parks seems to be a recurring theme. I love the idea of
turning to tribal administration instead.
Below i will summarize a few important points i took away from this
book.
Racism is not a social construct, it is a power construct. Racism is
a marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produce and
normalize racial inequities.
Racist policy creates racist people, not the other way around.
Blaming people is an ineffective and misguided strategy that actually
makes racism worse. A collective problem requires a collective
solution.
By treating the word "racist" as a pejorative on the same terms as a
slur, it becomes taboo to talk about racism, which removes
accountability, which benefits racist power.
The word "racist" is not an identity. It is descriptive of one's
behavior and expressions. A person can be a racist in one moment,
and an anti-racist in another moment.
The word "race" was first put in a dictionary in 1606. From the very
beginning it spoke of hierarchies and division. It is divisive by
design. There is no such thing as "not racist"; no neutral ground.
Your actions, expressions, and complicit lack of action or
expression, either escalate or de-escalate racism. You can be racist
or anti-racist.
Anyone can be a racist, both the oppressor and the oppressed. The
oppressed can oppress other groups in turn. The oppressed can also
internalize the racism and think less of themselves because of their
racial group. Internalized racism makes the oppressor think more of
themselves because of their racial group. Being internalized means
that it is automatic and unconscious.
The author writes that the primary and most powerful privilege of
being White is to be normal, standard, and legal. Only if you are
White is it safe to be authentic, empowered, or to just be yourself.
In practice, it's not even legal to be these things if you are not
White. There is a double standard and even when it is explicitly
described, it can still be difficult for some people see it.
Below are salient quotes from the book.
> This is the consistent function of racist ideas--and any kind of
> bigotry more broadly: to manipulate us into seeing people as the
> problem, instead of the policies that ensnare them.
> The good news is that racist and antiracist are not fixed identities.
> We can be a racist one minute and an antiracist the next. What we
> say about race, what we do about race, in each moment, determines
> what--not who--we are.
> This book is ultimately about the basic struggle we're all in, the
> struggle to be fully human and to see that others are fully human.
> Racist: One who is supporting a racist policy through their action
> or inaction or expressing a racist idea.
>
> Antiracist: One who is supporting an antiracist policy through their
> action or inaction or expressing an antiracist idea.
> Racial inequity is when two or more racial groups are not standing on
> approximately equal footing.
>
> A racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial
> inequality...
>
> An antiracist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial
> equity...
>
> By policy, I mean written and unwritten laws, rules, procedures,
> processes, regulations, and guidelines that govern people.
> A racist idea is any idea that suggests one racial group is inferior
> or superior to another racial group in any way.
>
> An antiracist idea is any idea that suggests the racial groups are
> equals in all their apparent differences--that there is nothing right
> or wrong with any racial group. Antiracist ideas argue that racist
> policies are the cause of racial inequities.
> Americans have long been trained to see the deficiencies of people
> rather than policy. It's a pretty easy mistake to make: People are
> in our faces. Policies are distant. We are particularly poor at
> seeing the policies lurking behind the struggles of people.
> Race: a power construct or merged difference that lives socially.
> Every time someone racializes behavior--describing something as
> "Black behavior"--they are expressing a racist idea. Black behavior
> is as fictitious as Black genes. There is no "Black gene." No one
> has ever scientifically established a single "Black behavioral
> trait."
> Anti-White racist: One who is classifying people of European descent
> as biologically, culturally, or behaviorally inferior or conflating
> the entire race of White people with racial power.
> I use "anticapitalist" because conservative defenders of capitalism
> regularly say their liberal and socialist opponents are against
> capitalism. They say efforts to provide a safety net for all people
> are "anticapitalist." They say attempts to prevent monopolies are
> "anticapitalist." They say that efforts to strengthen weak unions
> and weaken exploitative owners are "anticapitalist." They say that
> plans to normalize worker ownership and regulations protecting
> consumers, workers, and environments from big businesses are
> "anticapitalist." They say laws taxing the richest more than the
> middle class, redistributing pilfered wealth, and guaranteeing basic
> incomes are "anticapitalist." They say wars to end poverty are
> "anticapitalist." They say campaigns to remove the profit motive
> from essential life sectors like education, utilities, mass media,
> and incarceration are "anticapitalist."
>
> In doing so, these conservative defenders are defining capitalism.
> They define capitalism as the freedom to exploit people into economic
> ruin; the freedom to assassinate unions; the freedom to prey on
> unprotected consumers, workers, and environments; the freedom to
> value quarterly profits over climate change; the freedom to undermine
> small businesses and cushion corporations; the freedom from
> competition; the freedom not to pay taxes; the freedom to heave the
> tax burden onto the middle and lower classes; the freedom to
> commodify everything and everyone; the freedom to keep poor people
> poor and middle-income people struggling to stay middle-income, and
> make rich people richer. The history of capitalism--of world
> warring, classing, slave trading, enslaving, colonizing, depressing
> wages, and dispossessing land and labor and resources and
> rights--bears out the conservative definition of capitalism.
>
> Liberals who are "capitalist to the bone," as U.S. senator Elizabeth
> Warren identifies herself, present a different definition of
> capitalism. But if Warren succeeds, then the new economic system
> will operate in a fundamentally different way than it has ever
> operated before in American history. Either the new economic system
> will not be capitalism or the old system it replaced was not
> capitalism. They cannot both be capitalism.
> The idea that capitalism is merely free markets, competition, free
> trade, supplying and demanding, and private ownership is as whimsical
> and ahistorical as the White-supremacist idea that calling something
> racism is the primary form of racism. Popular definitions of
> capitalism, like popular racist ideas, do not live in historical or
> material reality. Capitalism is essentially racism; racism is
> essentially capitalism. They were birthed together from the same
> unnatural causes; and they shall one day die together from unnatural
> causes.
> Activist: One who has a record of power or policy change.
> What if no group in history has gained their freedom through
> appealing to the moral conscience of their oppressors, to paraphrase
> Assata Shakur? What if economic, political, or cultural
> self-interest drives racist policymakers, not hateful immorality, not
> ignorance?
>
> As early as 1946, top State Department official Dean Acheson warned
> the Truman administration that the "existence of discrimination
> against minority groups in this country has an adverse effect on our
> relations with" decolonizing Asian and African and Latin American
> nations. The Truman administration repeatedly debriefed the U.S.
> Supreme Court on these adverse effects during desegregation cases in
> the late 1940s and early 1950s, as historian Mary L. Dudziak
> documents.
>
> Racist power started civil-rights legislation out of self-interest.
> Racist power stopped out of self-interest when enough African and
> Asian and Latin nations were inside the American sphere of influence,
> when a rebranded Jim Crow no longer adversely affected American
> foreign policy, when Black people started demanding and gaining what
> power rarely gives up: power.
>
> Critiquing racism is not activism. Changing minds is not activism.
> An activist produces power and policy change, not mental change.
author: Kendi, Ibram X.
detail: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/How_to_Be_an_Antiracist
LOC: E184.A1 K344
tags: book,non-fiction,political,race
title: How To Be An Antiracist
# Tags
book
non-fiction
political
race
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