How to Be an Antiracist (book note)

I started writing this months ago, but now I’m determined to wrap up my 2020 book reviews, such as they are, so I’m going to finish it. 

Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist was the book of the moment last summer, and I’m all about being of the moment, so I read it. It’s very good, and it made me think about things that white ladies don’t always like to think about. But too bad for us, because it’s long past time for us to be a little uncomfortable. 

Although How to Be often reads as a little dry and scholarly, it’s also very personal and very honest and very self-reflective. When he was a young boy in Queens, Dr. Kendi was riding a bus home from school when a bully and his friends began to taunt and threaten a classmate. “I did nothing,” he writes. He doesn’t spare himself an inch. He doesn’t say “I was young and thoughtless and so I did nothing,” and he doesn’t say “I was outnumbered and scared and so I did nothing.” He doesn’t excuse himself for failing to defend his classmate, even though the incident happened when he was very young. 

He’s also honest about his own racism, against White people and against other Black people. As a high school student, Dr. Kendi won an oratory contest, with a speech that was highly critical of other Black teenagers. By exploiting negative stereotypes about Black youth and so-called “hip-hop culture,” he won the approval of authority figures, both Black and White. As in the bus incident, Dr. Kendi doesn’t excuse himself for this, though he could easily have fallen back on his youth and inexperience, or the prevailing thought at that time. 

*****

Both Black and White are capitalized throughout the book. This is a change from standard practice of just a few years ago, but most writers now are capitalizing Black and White as they apply to race, and I think that this change will be formalized soon enough. I would have chosen “anti-racist” rather than “antiracist,” and I’m not clear if the latter is just a preference against the hyphen with the anti prefix or a statement that antiracist should be a word of its own and not just an opposite of racist. 

These are pretty minor style considerations. But there’s another style choice that was a stumbling block for me, at least for a while. Dr. Kendi often refers to Black people as “Black bodies.” He also uses the word “people,” but more often he writes about Black bodies, living in the world. Part of me gets the distinction. The body is what’s visible. It’s like the old Eddie Murphy joke about Stevie Wonder: How does he even know he’s Black? Black people, like Asian people and Latinx people and Arab people, are targets for racism and discrimination firstly because they look different from the White people who have always had the most power. 

But again, as Dr. Kendi emphasizes, racism is not solely the provenance of White people. We’re just the ones who have gained the most from it. More and more of us acknowledge this now. Even a year ago, most White people I know bristled at the idea of “white privilege.” Now more of us get that white privilege doesn’t mean that our lives are easy. It just means that our lives, easy or hard, are not made harder by the color of our skin.  

People can learn. That’s actually the most hopeful message in a book that I think is pretty full of hopeful messages. Racist isn't necessarily a permanent state; it’s a thing that we can change. Racism is a state of mind that we can choose to recognize and resist and overcome. People are racist or antiracist based on what they do or say or believe in a given moment. They can change. We can always change. 

*****

Still, I kept stumbling over the references to “Black bodies.” A person is a thing separate and distinct from a body. A body is just the physical container for a person. It’s the outer packaging. Referring to people only as bodies, I thought, diminishes their humanity, makes them less than they are. 

And then, at the end of the book, I finally got it. After his young wife, a newly graduated M.D., recovered from breast cancer, Dr. Kendi himself was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer. Breast cancer and colon cancer are both rare for people in their thirties; it’s extraordinarily rare (and unfair) for a married couple of that age to suffer breast cancer and colon cancer back to back. This is why Dr. Kendi writes about “Black bodies.”  Racism corrodes the body as well as the mind. It doesn’t just give rise to violence; it is violence. A lot of the impacts and effects of racism, from slavery to lynching to segregated spaces to police violence are physical. They cause physical harm; they damage or kill the body. 

Leave it to a clueless white person not to get that until someone beats her over the head with it. But I do get it now. I can still learn.