Chapter 12 Review - PART 1
I’m going to start by saying this: If you have to choose one chapter review of this book to read, my Chapter 12 review should be the one you choose. This one is going to be long, but I promise you, it’s worth every minute. Kendi has for the first time brought up capitalism’s role in racism. Economics doesn’t tend to be a strong subject for most critical theorists, and they rely on the reader’s ignorance on the subject to play to their advantage. To be fair, economics isn’t the easiest subject to understand because it isn’t something you can hold in your hand, yet it has its own personality and a somewhat erratic behavior. Something I want to make clear from the beginning, because most of what I write involves the study of economics, I don’t often refer to capitalism by that given name, but refer to it by the more accurate title of free markets. Other than a free market being a more accurate descriptor, it also eliminates the need to use terms often seen as pejoratives like capitalism, socialism, and communism. Instead, I’ll be using fixed markets to refer to the socialist and communist side of the spectrum. By using free markets and fixed markets you create a spectrum of economic behaviors that better describe how an economy acts and how it’s managed by the associated government. I hope my snobbish corrections on economic terms hasn’t turned you away from this review already, but I want to make sure we are all speaking the same language. Kendi starts out the chapter by defining Class Racist and Antiracist Anticapitalist.

“CLASS RACIST: One who is racializing the classes, supporting policies of racial capitalism against those race-classes, and justifying them by racist ideas about those race-classes.
ANTIRACIST ANTICAPITALIST: One who is opposing racial capitalism.”

I can already tell this chapter is not going to get a glowing review from me. First, class racist is a real term that has nothing to do with racial capitalism but has to do with real racism. It’s simply just breaking races into classes of people. Markets can be then fixed to benefit certain classes, as we’ve seen with economic fascist movements and communism, but free markets are not geared toward creating class. Class breakdown is a qualitative breakdown of groups based on relative wealth standing. Wealth is accumulated through the marketplace, but class can only be dictated in a fixed market where inputs and outputs are regulated and controlled. A free market inherently has no control over inputs and outputs but rather puts that control into the hands of the consumer and producer. This doesn’t mean a free market always acts morally or creates its own moral systems, something disputed by the more Ayn Randian school of economics, but it doesn’t selectively create classes of people. Secondly, he defines the term antiracist anticapitalist without defining racial capitalist but defines it juxtaposed to class racist. This seems to imply antiracist anticapitalist is good and class racist is bad, something I would categorize as both being bad. He also leaves no room for an antiracist capitalist category, something I’m sure he did on purpose to set the narrative. This follows the logic I described in my chapter 4 review about the Orwellian newspeak strategy of changing language by reducing the dictionary down to the words only the ones in power want you to use.

“The combination of government welfare – in the form of subsides, highway construction, and loan guarantees – along with the often racist developers opened new wealth-building urban and suburban homes to the fleeing Whites, while largely confining Black natives and new Black immigrants to the so-called ghettos, now overcrowded and designed to extract wealth from their residents.”

To someone who graduated with an African American studies degree, as he highlights in the first sentence of the chapter, he may not understand how government welfare helps to fix markets. It controls inputs, or at least subsidizes them. If Kendi and I agree that this fix is a bad thing, then we can rationalize each other’s position, but I don’t think that’s the point Kendi was making or even understands. “Racist developers” are racist if they reject employment or consumers based on race, but if they are serving a demand by the consumers in that area, I don’t think we can call them racist in good faith. The design to “extract wealth” is a bit confusing when Kendi implies the people in these communities don’t have wealth in the first place. Maybe he is referring to a fleeing high tax base, but he claimed government welfare was a problem. If he is referring to the relatively low employment opportunities, then we should look at what causes those low opportunities. There is no reason a free market wouldn’t enter an underserved community unless businesses found the risk of crime and theft wasn’t worth the reward. If you assume crime is high because of no employment opportunities, then maybe our responses to the looting and rioting we see today shouldn’t be, “but they have insurance.”

“[I]f the elite race-classes are judging the poor race-classes by their own cultural and behavioral norms, then the poor race-classes appear inferior. Whoever creates the norm creates the hierarchy and positions their own race-class at the top of the hierarchy.”

Again, this is a complete misread about the influence of a free marketplace. A free marketplace creates a culture incentives and disincentives that establish what behaviors benefit most in that marketplace. As a consumer or producer, I don’t get to arbitrarily dictate what we ought to value, unless it’s a fixed market. What Kendi doesn’t understand is the collective demand for something will influence the supply of that thing. That’s the hierarchy. The iPhone isn’t the ‘white man’s phone’, it’s the phone that’s in the highest demand and Apple can produce the supply for that demand. No race-classes are inferior, but some behaviors are inferior when it comes to producing a healthy society. If we can’t agree on standards of behavior, then we can’t coexist. Kendi isn’t denying standards, he is creating a counter-standards.

Kendi goes on to several authors and politicians who believe in a “culture of poverty,” meaning, people are in a cycle of poverty because the culture they subscribe to promotes it. He of course does not believe in this idea, but really struggles to find ways to disprove it. He cites people like author Kenneth Clark who “presented the hidden hand of racism activating the culture of poverty, or what he called ‘pathology’.” Kendi uses the term pathology often to disassociate culture and behavior but doesn’t really succeed at escaping cultural influences. Pathology describes the typical behavior of a disease, but because Kendi believes there is no such thing as a bad culture, or at least bad aspects of a culture, he doesn’t believe that cultural phenomena can be a disease itself. Kendi continues the chapter by exploring alternative reasons for racial economic disparities but then openly disproves those theories as he moves along. This is a confusing setup for his next point which contains one of the most destructive bits of revisionist history at-large today.

“I saw poor Blacks as the product of racism and not capitalism, largely because I thought I knew racism but did not know capitalism. But it is impossible to know racism without understanding its intersection with capitalism.”
“Capitalism emerged during the what world-systems theorists term the ‘long sixteenth century,’ a cradling period that begins around 1450 with Portugal (and Spain) sailing into the unknown Atlantic. Prince Henry’s Portugal birthed conjoined twins – capitalism and racism – when it initiated the transatlantic slave trade of African people. These newborns looked up with tender eyes to their ancient siblings of sexism, imperialism, ethnocentrism, and homophobia.”

There is a popular phrase that I took a liking to that perfectly describes critical theorists: You have to have a PhD to be this stupid. You literally have to invent this sophisticated intellectual theory in your head that is so intricate that it makes you feel smarter than everyone else just as a mental exercise to make pure BS sound interesting. I know I should start my critique now, but I have to get this out of my system. In the great words of the competition judge at the end of Billy Madison: “Mr. [Kendi], what you've just said is one of the most insanely idiotic things I've ever heard. At no point in your rambling, incoherent response was there anything that could even be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this room is now dumber for having listened to it. I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.”

Okay, I feel better now. Kendi starts out this waterfall of nonsense by defining the origins of capitalism through the lens of world-systems theory. Now, to those who don’t know what that is and may not have caught it, world-systems theory is “an approach to world history and social change that suggests there is a world economic system in which some countries benefit while others are exploited.” (definition given by study.com and confirmed by several other sources) Kendi starts out his understanding of the history of slavery the same way a Nazi would start out his understanding of the history of the Jews. If you start with the assumption that we are all playing a zero-sum game and, therefore, there must be someone taking advantage of someone else during every transaction, of course you’ll end up believing some silly stuff. Let’s take this part by part as a cite some more quotes from Kendi.