The Irony of Antiracism

As a high school student, I learned that racism or, as we called it then, racial discrimination, was a bad thing, in the eyes of God, our church, and all fair-minded people.  It was described as considering ourselves superior to Negroes or black people and denying them equality with us. 

As I grew older, I also learned that the list of people we were not to discriminate against included women (if we were men), those of other faiths, and foreign emigrants. Today’s list is longer, including LGBTQ, “people of color,” those in poverty, the disabled, and others deemed “different” from normal, healthy, white-skinned Americans, especially males. But in 1961 when I entered high school, racism was a term used to describe white people’s attitudes toward American Negroes. We were told to ignore skin color when judging people.

Therefore, I was intrigued to encounter a book published in 2019 by Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist. Why should I be antiracist instead of just nonracist?  My question is shared by many of my lighter-skinned “Caucasian” friends and relatives.

The first chapter of Kendi’s book, entitled “Definitions,” answered my question and several other important questions.  He first defines racism as not a matter of personal discrimination. Kendi says that “racism is a marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produce and normalize racial inequities.”

How do we get from racist ideas to “racist policy” or what we now call systemic or institutional racism? For Kendi, a racist policy is “any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups” the word “measure” refers to “written and unwritten rules, procedures, regulations, and guidelines that govern people.” Then he adds: “There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy.”

Well, that really got my attention! I tend to be emotionally somewhat centrist, believing that virtue, if not always truth “stands in the middle,” as an ancient Roman would say. So why can’t I be nonracist, opposed to discrimination aimed at people of any race? 

The reason I can’t be nonracist, according to Kendi, is that racism is really about inequality.  You can discriminate by making distinctions that are not “inherently racist.”  That might take the form, I assume, of a statement that more black than white people are susceptible to “sickle cell disorder.”  That is a medical fact, much like the statement that old men have prostate issues and older women are more likely to have breast cancer.

Racism, however, in Kendi’s argument, racism refers only to inequality, not rational distinctions.  Racial inequity “is when two or more racial groups are not standing on approximately equal footing.” As an example, he cites statistics showing that 71% of white families lived in owner-occupied homes in 2014 while only 41% of black families did.

And that is due, not to personal discrimination, but to racist policies, one of those “unwritten rules” or “guidelines” that allow bankers to refuse loans to blacks who want to move into white neighborhoods even when the applicants have adequate financial security.

That, then, is why I cannot be “value-neutral” (or nonracist). Either equality is my value or it is not.  There is no neutral ground here. And that is why Kendi also writes that “the only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.” Hence we have tried Affirmative Action policies.

There are also no “nonracist” ideas, but only ideas that are racist or anti-racist; an anti-racist idea is simply “any idea that suggests that racial groups are equal in all their apparent differences—that there is nothing right or wrong with any racial group.”

What has been learned (or, if I want to be gentle with myself, reinforced) by reading How to be an Antiracist is that racism has very little to do with biology, but a great deal to do with political power.

One of the ironies of racism and antiracism is that the races first identified for Europeans by Carl Linneaus in the18th century—White, Yellow, Red, and Black—in his famous book Systema Naturae—was not scientific from the start.  He listed Homo sapiens europaeus at the top and African, Homo sapiens afer, at the bottom of the racial hierarchy. The first were “vigorous and muscular” while the latter were “sluggish and lazy.”,

But the real irony here, and one of the virtues of Kendi’s book, is that he acknowledges that, even if race has been understood in biological terms when it is really, in the words of a former African-American colleague, really just “color consciousness,” we must accept racial distinctions we make as political realities, for “race creates new forms of power, the power to categorize and judge, elevate and downgrade, include and exclude.”

Even though race is in some ways not a very useful category, racism is a desperate reality in the lives of many of Americans. Therefore, antiracism has to be just as real.

Perhaps that is less ironic than paradoxical. I will leave that to the English majors.