“Well, this should be popular…
I think it’s fair to point out that I got about 20% of the way through this book before I quit. I told my impressions so far to a trusted friend, asked if the rest of the book was basically the same, and they confirmed.
So I’m tapping out.
Let’s start here:
1. None of you read this, right?
Did any of you fuckers actually read this book? Because I don’t think this book was accurately represented to me.
I thought this was mostly going to be about a different way of looking at racism/antiracism/whathaveyou, but most of what I read was memoir about Kendi’s familial experiences from before he was born and his personal experiences. One of which was a groan-er.
Okay, that sequence where Lil’ Ibram, who’s like 7, is at a school and asking, in a very adult and 2020’s way, why there aren’t more Black teachers? That’s some definite r/ThatHappened fodder.
2. Since the dawn of time…
Oh my christ, why do so many books on racism endeavor to give readers THE ENTIRE HISTORY OF RACISM as proof that racism is real and is a problem?
Hear me out for a few lines:
I voluntarily picked up a book called How to Be an Antiracist because I thought it might provide some ideas and insight.
How likely is it that the person who picks up this book is someone who needs to be convinced that racism is a thing? Why would I pick up a guide to antiracism if I didn’t think racism was a thing and a problem? To “own the libs”?
Honeys, I’m not reading an entire fucking book to own the libs. I won’t even bother to sign onto Twitter to own the libs, you think I’m putting in the effort of book reading?
Business books do this too, and I lambaste them the same way. I don’t need to know the history of accounting in ancient Egypt to understand lean management.
It makes better use of the reader’s time if you spend the majority of your book talking about the new, interesting ideas you’re bringing to the table, and maybe we don’t all need to take the entire journey that brought you to those ideas.
When a middle schooler starts an essay with “Since the dawn of time…” you know they’re padding it out. When a modern intellectual does it…
But for real, the antiracism concept, as I understand it, isn’t that complicated: In many life situations, when you’re presented with a choice, you can make a selection that’s more or less racist or antiracist. Making antiracist choices is good. Making racist choices is bad.
I don’t think that’s a new idea, and what Kendi brings to the table is the idea that a person isn’t racist or antiracist, they do things that are racist or antiracist.
There, I just saved you a good chunk of time. Use it to live your life.
3: It’s boring
Iâm sorry, everyone, but this book is boring.
Look, Kendi is a college professor, he comes from an academic background, and this feels like a super long class lecture.
Iâm sure for some people who like school, that works. For me, who hates school, who finished school mostly so he’d NEVER have to sit in school again, it doesnât.
4. The examples are not contemporary, and theyâre not great
Kendi namechecks Gunnar Myrdal, who won a Nobel in 1944, but then Kendi uses a quote from W.E.B. DuBois that he says makes a point similar to Myrdalâs regarding assimilation.
Why is Myrdal quoted at all? Oh, right, because we can be like, âThis racist mofo won a Nobel!?â
What even with this structure?
Itâs another aspect that makes it feel like a report for school: Youâve gotta quote 20 sources, so letâs throw Myrdal in there, in the middle of a completely different source, and check the box.
Hereâs a summary of what Myrdalâs work was about from Wikipedia:
“Gunnar Myrdal headed a comprehensive study of sociological, economic, anthropological and legal data on race relations in the United States funded by the Carnegie Corporation, starting in 1938. The result of the effort was Gunnar Myrdal’s best-known work, An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy, published in 1944, written with the collaboration of R. M. E. Sterner and Arnold Rose.[10] He characterized the problem of race relations as a dilemma because of a perceived conflict between high ideals, embodied in what he called the “American Creed,” on the one hand and poor performance on the other. In the generations since the Civil War, the U.S. had been unable to put its human rights ideals into practice for the African-American tenth of its population.[11] This book was cited by the U.S. Supreme Court in its 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education, which outlawed racial segregation in public schools. Myrdal planned on doing a similar study on gender inequality, but he could not find funding for this project and never completed it.”
For the record, in the Brown V. Board of Education case, Myrdal’s book was cited by the good guys and used as an example of why schools should be integrated.
Iâm confused. This book, to me, soundsâ¦anti-racist? Iâm sure that it poses some things and contains language we wouldnât accept now, butâ¦canât Kendi find better examples of racist assholes than a book that helped provide the foundation for the landmark court case that integrated American schools?
A lot of the other cited examples just donât speak to me, and I feel theyâre presented in confusing ways, and whatâs even more confusing about them is that itâs not hard to find legit examples of racism.
I think itâs weird to talk so much about W.E.B. DuBois, who was living in a very different time and had very different options. I think, were he alive today, he may feel and say very different things. It seems extremely unfair to judge the ideas of DuBois by today’s standards. BTW, for those who don’t know, DuBois was Black and a prominent figure in Black literature and rights activism. He was VERY progressive for his time, which doesn’t look as progressive today, but so it goes…
Or citing stuff David Hume wrote in the 1750s? Just dropping it in there but conveniently leaving out the fact that the quote is almost 500 fucking years old!?
Dude, câmon. This shit does not speak to people today. You gotta give us something that makes sense today. Nobodyâs going home to tear down their David Hume posters after reading that he was a racist. Nobody’s seriously reevaluating their ideas of racism based on the David Hume truth bombs here.
The problem with trying to use more modern examples is that, in general, the only people whoâd say these heinous, shocking things are fringe weirdos who nobody but other fringe weirdos will claim.
5. The modern lens problem
Looking at the past through the lens of the present is uninteresting, and it’s easy, and I’m pretty over it.
I’ll give you an example: I was talking to someone the other day, and they were discussing Ruby Bridges:
Person A: “But, like, why did Ruby Bridges have to go to a White school? Why couldn’t the White teachers go to the Black School?”
Person B: “Because they were racists.”
Integrating schools by putting that much on the shoulders of a little girl is very not cool. Acknowledged.
However.
I think this sort of backwards-looking, Monday-morning-quarterback thinking comes from the idea that, secretly, people think if they had lived 70 years ago, they would feel and behave as they do today. That they would be as progressive and as radical as they are today.
They would get it right.
I think that’s highly unlikely. I’m a believer that our morality is probably more nurture than nature, and if you were nurtured by someone in the 50’s, you’d probably have values more like theirs than like the ones you have now.
And on the other end, in the modern day, it’s terribly arrogant to tell the past what was done wrong. Because when we say what someone should have done in the 50’s, we’re assuming that the way we do things today is right, or the views we hold are right, even if those views aren’t reflected by the world at large.
There are really only 3 possible ways people in the future will perceive the views from today:
The most likely one is that they will see our views as being archaic and barbaric, much as we do the views from 70 years ago. The future is always progressive. There has never been a time when we’d look at the mainstream views from 50 years ago as MORE progressive than the views of today.
The next-most likely one is that we’d revert to a less progressive state, and people would perceive the views of today as being soft. This is far less likely as it’d be pretty much unprecedented, but it’s possible.
The least likely scenario is that people from 50 years in the future would see our views as perfection. They would think and act like us because we, in 2022, had it right.
And although that’s the least likely scenario, it seems to be the one that the largest number of people believe, deep in their hearts. They think that they will not go down in history as monstrous for the same reasons every past generation has gone down as monstrous.
My point is that in these discussions and in Kendi’s book, it’s very easy to look at the past and say, “What would’ve been better is this…”
And I don’t really need help in doing that.
I’m very capable at looking at what Ruby Bridges went through and saying “That’s not right, I wish it had been different.” I don’t need a book to tell me that.
And I don’t know that I need a book to guide how I would’ve preferred it look different.
6. The past
How to Be Antiracist is truly obsessed with this reexamination of the past, a racist-hunting expedition done via intellectual DeLorean, and Kendi has gone on to talk about how figures like DuBois, Barack Obama, Lincoln, and many prominent abolitionists were so, so racist.
I’m sorry, but I just can’t hang with that. I get where he’s coming from, I understand the point he’s making, but looking through everything William Lloyd Garrison, who was the editor of an anti-slavery newspaper and staunch abolitionist in the 19th century, founder of The American Anti-Slavery Society–looking through everything that dude said the way people will look through a comedian’s tweets from the last decade to find a way to wedge him into a definition of racism? Like…why?
Is that really the problem? Is William Lloyd Garrison, who most people don’t know and most would probably see as pretty damn antiracist, is finding a way to declare him a racist really helping anyone?
Is that version of revisionist history the kind of insight people are paying Kendi tens of thousands of dollars to speak on?
Because if so, I’m prepared to undercut Kendi, and for the low, low price of $5,000 I will give a one hour speech about how racist William Lloyd Garrison really was.
Just hope there’s nobody in the audience who actually knows who Garrison was…”