“Damn right we could go to prison! But I don’t care! We’re already in prison. That’s what America means: prison.” This is a quote from Kendi in this chapter when he was attempting to drum up support for a cause in 2006. The last sentence was taken from a Malcolm X speech in 1963 when he was talking about going to prison and reading an article about the Chinese Revolutionaries killing off all the “Uncle Tom Chinese” who supported the British. Malcolm X made it seem like an offhand comment to amuse the audience, but Kendi openly admits he used the line out of context to activate radical support for his cause. Kendi also admits this attempt to seem radical was a failure because it didn’t activate support for his cause, something I will get into at the end of this review, but the point I’m trying to make here is we should rethink what it means to bring in political activists like Kendi and Robin DiAngelo into corporate training sessions to teach us how to treat others with respect. I imagine those training sessions basically run like the Prison Mike skit in The Office. The worst part about being in the prison we know of as America was the Dementors. Kendi starts out the chapter by defining Activist.

“ACTIVIST: One who has a record of power and policy change.”

I can agree on the policy change but a little less with the power change with this definition. He might be conflating activist with anarchist on this one, but power is always the center of attention in critical theory. Kendi continues the chapter on the failures of antiracism.

“To understand why racism lives is to understand the history of antiracist failure – why people have failed to create antiracist societies. To understand the racial history of failure is to understand failed solutions and strategies. To understand failed solutions and strategies is to understand their cradles: failed racial ideologies.”

The term that immediately caught my eye here is failed “racial ideologies.” He doesn’t explicitly expand on this term, but he probably should. White supremacism and white nationalism are racial ideologies. I would argue critical race theory fits in that category as well, but I imagine Kendi would argue differently. He continues.

“Incorrect conceptions of race as a social construct (as opposed to a power construct), of racial history as a singular march of racial progress (as opposed to a duel of antiracist and racist progress), of the race problem as rooted in ignorance and hate (as opposed to powerful self-interest) – all come together to produce solutions bound to fail. Terms and sayings like ‘I’m not racist’ and ‘race neutral’ and ‘post-racial’ and ‘color-blind’ and ‘only one race, the human race’ and ‘only racists speak about race’ and ‘Black people can’t be racist’ and ‘White people are evil’ are bound to fail in identifying and eliminating racist power and policy. Stratagems flouting intersectionality are bound to fail the most degraded racial groups. Civilizing programs will fail since all racial groups are already on the same cultural level. Behavioral-enrichment programs, like mentoring and educational programs, can help individuals but are bound to fail racial groups, which are held back by bad policies, not bad behavior. Healing symptoms instead of changing policies is bound to fail in healing society.”

To Kendi, our fight against racism has failed. I mean, no black man could ever write a book that would get on The New York Times Best Seller list. We haven’t progressed enough. To be fair, I don’t think Kendi would argue we haven’t progressed at all, mostly because he isn’t dumb enough to sell that false bag of goods, but he does think we have been using the wrong strategies. Kendi goes back to playing the “Culture versus Behavior” game he played in several chapters already. He denies race influences behavior, which it doesn’t, but cuts ties between race and culture. We know culture has a strong influence on behavior, something Kendi also denies, and there is no direct link between culture and race, but there is an indirect link connected by tribalism. Our tribalist nature to conform to cultures of people who look like us or people we look up to is undeniable. The easiest way to see this is genres of music disproportionately created by and listen to by certain races. This creates an indirect link between race and culture. I say indirect because there is no biological cause that makes someone of a certain race predestined to subscribe to a certain culture. The next part of this conversation is uncomfortable but very true – there is such a thing as an inferior culture. Maybe not all cultures are inferior or superior wholesale, but there are certainly aspects of every culture that are damaging to the people who subscribe to it. Kendi rejects this notion for two reasons: (1) he thinks of it as a racist dog whistle, and (2) he rejects the idea of cultural standards so there is no bar to determine what is inferior or superior. The complete elimination of cultural and behavioral standards might be the most important belief in critical race theory, and critical theory more generally, that holds the ideology together. The only standard important to Kendi is outcomes distributed in a way he finds satisfactory, and I imagine his standard of satisfaction will shift to help his future book sales.

“I felt the burden my whole Black life to be perfect before both White people and Black people judging whether I am representing the race well. The judges never let me just be, be myself, by my imperfect self.”

I don’t know if I’m reading a book written by a grown man or reading a diary entry from a girl on her first period (sorry to be graphic). What self-pity nonsense. If we consider setting higher standards for men on how to react from being judged as toxic masculinity, then we need to inject some toxic masculinity back into our culture. This is one of the worst misconceptions forwarded by people who focus on race. Acting as if they or other people represent their entire race. This idea is extremely harmful because it changes the narrative we tell ourselves. Every interaction must have some racial intent behind it. These are the thoughts of a paranoid schizophrenic. People are not representations of their race, they are individuals. Kendi continues this thought by stating he is his own autonomous person, and people shouldn’t just see him as a ‘black man’ but then repetitively talks about his blackness and Black life. It just seems like he is playing ping-pong with himself here bouncing back-and-forth on what message he wants to send.

Kendi then goes off on the “Party of Lincoln” claiming, “[a]fter winning the Civil War, racist Republicans (to distinguish from the less numerous antiracist Republicans) voted to establish the Freedom’s Bureau, reconstruct the South, and extend civil rights and voting privileges to create a loyal Southern Republican base and secure Black people in the South far away from northern Whites, who ‘want nothing to do with the negroes,’ as Illinois senator Lyman Trumbull, one of the law’s main sponsors, said.” Kendi claims the Republican party, and especially President Abraham Lincoln himself, did not care for black people, but would free the slaves just to “save the union.” As Kendi wrote in an article in Timeline in 2016 titled The Party of Lincoln? Yeah, that was Racist too, “Lincoln was neither for black lives nor against black lives. White lives and the life of the Union is what mattered to Lincoln and his party.” But according to Kendi’s own logic, intention has nothing to do with racism. It’s all about equity. President Lincoln’s emancipation of the slaves made a more equitable society for black Americans. So, by his own definition of racism, Lincoln’s intention is irrelevant considering his POLICY would be defined as antiracist as Kendi defines it. Kendi seemed to have forgotten his own redefinition of racism.

“The problem of race has always been at its core the problem of power, not the problem of immortality or ignorance.”
“Look at the soaring White support for desegregated schools and neighborhoods decades after the policies changed in the 1950s and 1960s. Look at the soaring White support for interracial marriage decades after the policy changed in 1967. Look at the soaring support for Obamacare after its passage in 2010. Racist policymakers drum up fear of antiracist policies through racist ideas, knowing if the policies are implemented, the fears they circulate will never come to pass. Once the fears do not come to pass, people will let down their guards as they enjoy the benefits. Once they clearly benefit, most Americans will support and become the defenders of the antiracist policies they once feared.”

Most of the policies Kendi lists are Civil Rights policies where trends were heading that direction anyways. As a general rule, creating policy before there is a positive social trend favoring that change does not end well. Kendi conveniently leaves out policies that had negative effects after implementation like the War on Drugs. Kendi would claim that policy is racist only because the results did not align with the policy objectives. It seems like failure in this case is just a synonym for racist. Kendi’s last few lines on policymakers drumming up fear to decrease support for policies they don’t like is a tactic used in politics forever. In fact, Kendi uses this tactic throughout his whole book. Creating an oppression narrative is to generate fear of the oppressors (Republicans, police, any white dude who drives a truck, etc.).

“The original problem of racism has not been solved by suasion. Knowledge is only power if knowledge is put to the struggle for power. Changing minds is not a movement. Critiquing racism is not activism. Changing minds is not activism. An activist produces power and policy change, not mental change. If a person has no record of power or policy change, then that person is not an activist.”

Kendi conflates many different ideas here. The power of knowledge does not need to be applied to some struggle for power in order to be considered powerful. Knowledge gives the beholder an advantage in any given situation or field they have knowledge in. Reducing knowledge to some sort of weapon in a power struggle is a bad way to teach younger (and more impressionable) people on how to gain and utilize knowledge. Kendi makes it seem like knowledge is more sinister than it is (like using it for blackmail). Changing minds is absolutely a movement and can also be considered activism. This idea is what justifies violence on behalf of rioters who consider themselves activists. Changing minds is not a worthwhile goal for them. Critiquing racism isn’t really activism but it is the first step in changing minds and is very powerful. Activism is subject to the goals of the movement. Not all forms of activism must result in a power or policy change.

Kendi ends the chapter by citing his own failure to get enough support for a cause he advocated for in 2006 (what I talked about at the beginning of this review). He tried to educate and win hearts and minds, but he failed to convince people to support his cause because they were scared of the consequences of their activism (jail time). Kendi first blamed his failure on the weak convictions of his target audience, but then blames himself for failing to be a real activist. Because he did not act, advocate for power, or pass any policy, he failed. The problem with his logic is he skipped a critical step he discounts earlier in the chapter: changing minds. He failed to change minds. This is the most critical part of activism because without it, no one will be activated.

Thanks for reading my rant style review of the sixteenth 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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