Have any of you seen the movie Austin Powers: Goldmember? If you have, great. If you haven’t, this next little bit might not make sense to you. I think back on the ‘Moley Moley Mole’ scene where Austin Powers meets the ‘mole’, meaning the spy, inside of Dr. Evil’s organization. When Austin meets this ‘mole’, the mole also happens to have a large mole on his face, and Austin can’t take his focus off the mole and keeps saying the words “mole” and “moley” as an automated response to the site of the mole on his face. It’s one of the funniest scenes in the movie. This is how I imagine Kendi is with black Republicans or any black person who doesn’t subscribe to his rigid ideology. He just stares at them as they effectively talk to him in a foreign language and Kendi is just saying “blacky blacky black.” He is in such disbelief that black people can believe different things unless, of course, they are internalizing their own racism. Here we go again. Kendi starts out the chapter by defining the term Powerless Defense.

“POWERLESS DEFENSE: The illusory, concealing, disempowering, and racist idea that Black people can’t be racist because Black people don’t have power.”

I think it’s a good thing Kendi recognizes that people of all colors can be racist, but the definition above still implies there is a power component needed for racism. This is a huge misunderstanding when it comes to racism. The redefinition of racism, which explicitly says the only way racism is effective is if there is a power imbalance, conflates the idea of real racism, which is the prejudgment of someone solely based on race and no other evidence, with the effectiveness of racism. This assumes judging each other based on race might not be racist if it isn’t effective. We all understand there are gradations of racism, meaning, racist acts can scale from not effective to extremely damaging. Telling ‘black jokes’ aren’t typically harmful, depending on the context, even though the joke itself might be disgusting. On the other end of the scale is slavery, something that was racist and extremely harmful. It is true that the more power one holds the more effective their racist acts or intentions will be, but that doesn’t mean a non-harmful act can’t be racist. The problem with defining racism that way is if we don’t condemn the behavior of racism as a whole, we risk normalizing racist behavior and increase the power behind the behavior due to the volume of people who no longer find it problematic. We see this today in the Black Lives Matter movement. This is a group that brands themselves as a group forwarding a virtuous cause but uses racist tactics to forward other parts of their agenda, and now a majority of people don’t find this behavior an issue. Kendi also seems to be more insulted by the assumption black Americans can’t or don’t hold any power, which I agree with him there, but misses the point when it comes to the dynamics of racism and how power should not be a factor when condemning the behavior.

“A whopping 60 percent of Black people had joined with the 83 percent of White people that year [2013] who found explanations other than racism to explain persisting racial inequities. The internalizing of racist ideas was likely the reason.”

The reason I quoted this statement is because it highlights the assumptions needed to build a false narrative. Kendi makes no good-faith attempt at understanding people who don’t think like him, so he labels them as racist. Throughout this chapter, Kendi goes back and forth by claiming black Americans should be seen as individuals and they should also all vote and think the same way. You can’t honestly hold these two positions at once, but he finds a way.

“This means that people of color are powerless to roll back racist policies and close racial inequities even in their own spheres of influence, the places where they actually do have some power to effect change. The powerless defense shields people of color from charges of racism even when they are reproducing racist policies and justifying them with the same racist ideas as the White people they call racist. The powerless defense shields its believers from the history of White people empowering people of color to oppress people of color and of people of color using their limited power to oppress people of color for their own personal gain.”

Kendi is now fully explaining the way he defines the powerless defense. He admits that non-whites have limited power and should not rely on the powerless defense as an excuse to not act. I think this is a useful message, but the bad racist actors of today refuse to use it. I’ve talked at length with Truman of @ReturnToReason (EP podcasts 16-19) on how the people who say they are fighting against the powerful often hold all the power. You think BLM isn’t the most powerful group in America today? They have all of academia, entertainment, and the media behind them, yet they still claim they are standing up against the powerful. Their claims are mostly directed at President Trump and the Republicans, but again, I think BLM holds more power than any politician today. I wonder if Kendi would agree with me here.

“Black people call them Uncle Toms, sellouts, Oreos, puppets – everything but the right thing: racist. Black people need to do more than revoke their ‘Black card,” as we call it. We need to paste the racist card to their foreheads for all the world to see.”

Kendi was talking about the black Ohio Secretary of State, Ken Blackwell, and how he helped suppress the black vote in Ohio during the 2004 election. I’m not going to go through his claims of voter suppression because it was just another way to call President Bush a racist. What I wanted to highlight here is the call to slander any black person who goes off narrative. I’m not sure if Kendi truly means black people should stop calling other black people Uncle Tom, sellout, or any of the other names he listed, but his final message was just as bad. We used to reserve the term racist for the worst among us, but now we just use it when someone doesn’t agree with us. It’s just like how we used to term Nazi to describe people who wanted to kill Jews and create a white ethno-state, but now we use it to describe people who point out grammatical errors (grammar-Nazi). The behavior Kendi is advocating for here is just plain disgusting and fits the real definition of racist. It also stays on theme where Kendi plays the “black people are individuals” card followed up by playing the “black people must all think alike” card in the most intellectually dishonest game of race poker I’ve even witnessed.

Kendi finishes the chapter by telling the story of black people in American history who tried to hurt the progress of other black people. Some of these people did really hurt progress, like William Hannibal Thomas, but some of his examples were just an attempt to slander black people who don’t think like him, like Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. There are of course black people throughout history who were racist against other black people, and we see it today as well… cough, cough. But what Kendi tries to do here, through very obvious deception, is to equate the real racists of the past to present day black people who don’t forward his narrative. This is how you keep racism alive. As Thomas Sowell famously said, “Racism is not dead, but it is on life support — kept alive by politicians, race hustlers and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as ‘racists’.”

Thanks for reading my rant style review of the eleventh chapter of How to be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi. Please let me know if you find this useful. My goal here is to explain each chapter enough and in a somewhat objective way so others don’t waste their time and money on investigating this material themselves. I know this kind of goes against the logic of investigation where you want to read the source material yourself and build your own conclusions, but this is a very shallow read that does not strain the mind, in any positive way at least, like any proper academic book should. Please leave a comment with your thoughts.

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