Handbook for being human

In recent years I’ve read books from our public libraries that analyze race and class. White Trash, by LSU professor Nancy Isenberg, goes back to England prior to the 13 colonies, when the aristocracy kept workers down for its own benefit. Imbeciles, by Adam Cohen, examines the eugenics movement in America, how it prefigured strict immigration laws and was adapted by Hitler as the core of Nazism. Ozark expert Brooks Blevins wrote Arkansas/Arkansaw about how our state received its reputation as a backwards home for gap-toothed hillbillies. Award-winning author Ta-Nehisi Coates explains the perspective of an American Black man in the 21st Century.

In this vein, but different, is How to be an Anti-Racist, by Ibram X. Kendi. Born to middle-class Black parents in New York, Kendi went to school down South hoping to become a sports journalist. Cultivating a social conscience, he moves to the Philadelphia ghetto for an African-American Studies graduate program, where he meets actual Africans, Black feminists and queers, and begins dissecting his own prejudices, of race, ethnicity, color, sexual identity, class, geography, culture…

This is an unusual how-to book, neither preachy nor polemical, but a record of one person’s observations and how these may be generalized to the nation at large—and how each thinking person may re-examine our own history to see where we fit in this roiling, disunited states in 2020. (It was published before the current conflagration of pandemic, economic confusion, and social justice marches.)

Kendi uses language precisely: a racist supports racist policies through action, inaction, or expression of ideas; anti-racists support anti-racist policies the same. Sometimes his discussions require the reader to pause and digest the argument. But he explains his thought processes through his own epiphanies.

His upbringing taught him to avoid particular neighborhoods as dangerous because they were inhabited by Blacks, a racist idea. Dangerous individuals did live there, but he understood later he should avoid them not because they were Black, but because they were criminals, just as he would stay away from White, Latinx, Asian, immigrant or Native American criminals. But it is absolutely mistaken to blame an entire race for its skin color, ethnicity, culture, or birthplace as it is wrong to consider straight men naturally superior to women and LGBTQs.

Kendi calls capitalism and racism “conjoined twins,” because following the lead of Prince Henry the Navigator, during the so-called Age of Exploration, Europeans conquered and colonized Africa, Asia, and the Americas for their resources (precious metals, new plants such as coffee, tea, tobacco, spices, timber) at the expense of native peoples. In the human hierarchy, Whites were the zenith, with successively darker skins, types of hair, lifestyles, personality traits descending to Black Africans at the base.

I would like to see Kendi explore other forms of racism and bigotry; in Asia, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and others have superiority complexes over one another, expressed as genocide over centuries. In South Asia, Hindus and Muslims fight over territory, and in Myanmar the Buddhists (whom we view as pacifists) have driven out the Muslim Rohingya. What we call the Holy Land has been a battleground since the Old Testament. As the late Dick Gregory said, “Catholics fight Protestants in Ireland, Jews fight Arabs in Israel—what makes the atheists act like they are so damn holy?”

The value of Kendi’s book is that it asks readers to look in a mirror. I was raised, like many White Americans, to say I am color blind, I belong to the human race. As observed at last week’s Republican Convention, these statements prove nothing; Kendi says they perpetuate racism, because people say this, often sincerely, although they support policies that condemn non-White people to poor neighborhoods, deficient schools and health care, low-paying jobs, dirty air and toxic water. The same goes for poor Whites and many women.

The solution is to truly accept each person as who they are, and work to change policies that keep us separate and unequal, missing the opportunities that I enjoyed as a White man. There but for fortune go I—why should not others share my good fortune?

Kirk Ashworth