★★★★★ 5
Painful but excellent exploration of racist ideas in American history
Format: Kindle
Professor Kendi's fine study, which deservedly won a National Book Award, illuminates in a new way the history of racism in the US. Focusing on ideas rather than government policy, he documents the tenacity of an outlook that has stained the 400 year history of the American people. He begins with a simple, and I think unimpeachable, definition of racism: any argument or idea that attributes to an entire ethnic group intellectual or moral superiority or inferiority. Racists invariably explain these differences between ethnic groups as a product of biology, in an effort to shelter behind a scientific patina ideas that cannot survive rigorous scientific investigation.
He organizes the book around five American thinkers, Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Dubois, and Angela Davis. In each section, he also discusses the ideas of contemporaries of these individuals, dividing people into one of three groups: segregationists (racists who blamed blacks for their own plight); assimilationists (whites and even some blacks who attributed inequality partially to environment but still accepted the racist idea that all blacks shared some responsibility for discrimination); antiracists, who rejected the notion that any type of inferiority could be associated with all African Americans.
Kendi has written an angry book, as would any author sensitive to the devastating impact of America's original sin. He shows how racist ideas, like the villain in contemporary horror movies, never suffer a final defeat. As soon as one explanation for alleged racial differences falls out of favor, a different one emerges from the (so far) undrainable swamp of prejudice to take its place. This resiliency demonstrates that racism does not stem from ignorance, but reflects the self-interest of those who benefit from the privileges conferred by supression of ethnic equality.
The author's anger does not target any specific group. Few of his subjects (including himself) escape unscathed from his sharp analysis. Probably the most surprising revelation of this book is the extent to which even fierce defenders of black equality sometimes accepted some of the insidious ideas of racism and blamed African Americans for the discrimination they experienced. Thus the real target of Professor Kendi's anger is racism itself, the pervasiveness of which does not exempt even black Americans from its influence.
Even this fine work of scholarship is not, in my opinion, free of flaws. In his evaluation of historical figures, he seems to judge them by their conformity to our values and standards. To judge Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass for their failure to measure up to this generation's views of racism may accurately pinpoint some of the shortcomings especially in Lincoln's attitudes. But to criticize a 19th century president, caught in the impossible pressures of a savage civil war for having mixed motives in his emancipation policy displays a willful refusal to evaluate his behavior according to the context of the times in which he lived. (Absurd comments to the effect that Lincoln was "scared to death" when Lee threatened Washington during his invasion of the north in 1862 reveal more about Kendi than they do about the president.)
But even if I have correctly identified flaws in the book, this is an important and exceptionally fine work of scholarship, which anyone concerned about the future of race relations in the US should read.
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Reviewed in the United States on August 8, 2017
