[Libs-Or] Ibram X. Kendi Has a Cure for America’s ‘Metastatic Racism’

[Max Macias]

 [FYI]
Ibram X. Kendi Has a Cure for America’s ‘Metastatic Racism’

In 2016, he was a surprise National Book Award winner for a sweeping
history of ever-mutating American racism. Now, he’s back with a new book
that outlines how to fight it.
[image: Ibram X. Kendi, the author of “How to Be an
Antiracist,” argues that there are not “not racist”
ideas, policies or people, only racist and antiracist ones.]
Ibram X. Kendi, the author of “How to Be an Antiracist,” argues that there
are not “not racist” ideas, policies or people, only racist and antiracist
ones.CreditCreditEmma Howells for The New York Times
[image: Jennifer Schuessler]
<https://www.nytimes.com/by/jennifer-schuessler>

By Jennifer Schuessler <https://www.nytimes.com/by/jennifer-schuessler>

   - Aug. 6, 2019
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WASHINGTON — Three years ago, when Ibram X. Kendi was up for the National
Book Award, he thought he had no chance.

He was a little-known assistant professor at the University of Florida. His
book, “Stamped From the Beginning,”
<https://www.nationalbook.org/books/stamped-from-the-beginning-the-definitive-history-of-racist-ideas-in-america/>
 a sweeping history of nearly five centuries of racist thought in America,
had received admiring but sparse reviews.

“Before we walked over to the dinner, my wife asked me if I had written a
speech,” Dr. Kendi recalled in an interview last month. “I hadn’t, but I
wrote out a few notes just in case. When they called my name, I was
shocked.”

It was barely a week after the 2016 election, and Dr. Kendi — at 34, among
the youngest ever to win the nonfiction award — made his way onstage to
deliver an eloquent speech nodding at the man just elected president, and
paying tribute to “the human beauty in the resistance to racism.”

Since then, he has given a lot more speeches — 46 so far this year alone.
He has become one of the country’s most in-demand commentators on racism,
and leads the new Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American
University, which recruited him as a full professor after the award.

It’s been a wild and fast ride to the top of his profession, with one
terrifying detour thrown in. Midway through writing his new book, “How to
Be an Antiracist,” out on Aug. 13, Dr. Kendi received a diagnosis of Stage
4 colon cancer, which has a five-year survival rate of about 12 percent.

A recent scan, taken a year after he completed both chemotherapy and
surgery, came back all clear. But Dr. Kendi — who turns 37 on publication
day — isn’t taking anything for granted.

“I was pretty disciplined and determined before the diagnosis, but now I’ve
taken it to a whole other level of seriousness,” he said. “Even though I’m
young, I can’t imagine I have so much time. It forced me, compelled me, to
take risks.”


[image: Dr. Kendi’s book “Stamped From the Beginning,” a sprawling history
of nearly five centuries of racist ideas, won the 2016 National Book Award
for nonfiction.]
Dr. Kendi’s book “Stamped From the Beginning,” a sprawling history of
nearly five centuries of racist ideas, won the 2016 National Book Award for
nonfiction.CreditEmma Howells for The New York Times

One of those risks is the center, which is still in the ramping-up stage.
On a recent visit, it was a pristine but sparsely decorated warren of
cubicles, but Dr. Kendi envisions it as a place that will not just study
racist ideas, but develop public programs aimed at dismantling them.

Another is “How to Be an Antiracist,” published by One World, an imprint of
Random House. Part memoir, part social analysis, part polemic, it’s a book
that, like its predecessor, seems to be arriving at exactly the right
moment, as President Trump’s verbal attacks on lawmakers of color and on
the city of Baltimore have spurred both intense outrage and debate on how
to respond.

But it’s also a book that directs some of its most unstinting criticism at
the author himself, and what he sees as his own racist ideas.

Dr. Kendi defines racist ideas expansively: any idea that there is
something inherently better or worse about any racial group. There is no
such thing as “not racist” ideas, policies or people, he argues, only
racist and antiracist ones.

Among the most painful personal episodes he revisited, he said, is the one
that opens the book: a speech he gave in a high school oratory contest
named for Martin Luther King Jr., in which he assailed African-American
youth for its supposed failures.

The thunderous applause from the mostly black audience gave him the
confidence, he writes, that he could succeed in college, despite mediocre
grades and test scores. The speech, which he listened to over and over, was
also, in his view, deeply racist.

“Every time I listened I felt embarrassed and ashamed, both personally and
because of the spectacle I created, with thousands of people cheering on
these racist ideas,” he said. “To think back about how I gained confidence
by stepping conceptually on the heads of black people is still jarring to
me.”

Dr. Kendi might seem to have been anointed as the latest in a line of
charismatic
(and usually male) African-American public intellectuals, stretching from
W.E.B. Du Bois and Alain Locke to Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cornel West.

[image: Dr. Kendi is the founding director of the Antiracist Research and
Policy Center at American University, which takes an activist approach to
scholarship.]
Dr. Kendi is the founding director of the Antiracist Research and Policy
Center at American University, which takes an activist approach to
scholarship.CreditEmma Howells for The New York Times

But he is also emblematic of a new generation of young black historians who
are working collaboratively to create new institutions, and find new ways
of reaching the public.

His work “reflects the collective desire to produce innovative research
that will not simply meet tenure requirements but transform the world,” said
 Keisha N. Blain
<https://www.publicbooks.org/public-thinker-keisha-n-blain-on-black-womens-intellectual-history/>,
an associate professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh and
president of the African-American Intellectual History Society
<https://www.aaihs.org/#>, a 5-year-old group to which Dr. Kendi belongs.

Dr. Kendi was born Ibram Rogers in New York, to parents, both later
ordained as ministers, who were deeply influenced by liberation theology
and the Black Power movement. (He took the middle name Xolani, meaning
“peace” in Zulu, and the shared surname Kendi, meaning “loved one” in Meru,
in 2013, when he married Sadiqa Kendi, a pediatric emergency room
physician.)

At Stonewall Jackson High School in Manassas, Va., where the family moved
when he was 15, he felt stranded academically, and lived down to the low
expectations he thought his teachers and mainly white and Asian classmates
had for him. “I was even saying I hate reading,” Dr. Kendi recalled. “I
think I did read a few books on basketball, but for class I would typically
get the CliffsNotes.”

He studied journalism at Florida A&M University, a historically black
institution, and initially planned to be a sportswriter. After a few
internships at newspapers, he enrolled in the graduate program in
African-American studies at Temple University. His doctoral dissertation,
published in 2012 as “The Black Campus Movement,” is a study of the 1960s
student activism that led to the creation of the first black studies
programs.
Image
[image: Dr. Kendi at his graduation from Florida A&M University in
2004.]
Dr. Kendi at his graduation from Florida A&M University in 2004.Creditvia
Carol Rogers
Image
[image: And, with his brother Akil Rogers, left, and his parents, Carol and
Larry Rogers in 2000.]
And, with his brother Akil Rogers, left, and his parents, Carol and Larry
Rogers in 2000.Creditvia Carol Rogers

Temple’s department was, and still is, led by Molefi Kete Asante, a leading
theorist of Afrocentricism
<https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/05/07/molefi-kete-asante-why-afrocentricity>.
That influence, Dr. Kendi says, was crucial to his own work, which
classifies what he calls “assimilationist” ideas — the belief that
African-American people and spaces should strive toward a standardized
white norm — as inherently racist.

And he credits his dissertation adviser, Ama Mazama
<https://liberalarts.temple.edu/academics/faculty/mazama-ama>, a
Guadeloupe-born scholar of African and Caribbean culture, with providing a
model of what an “intellectual combatant” could be.

“She was just a master at being able to speak very softly while saying some
of the most powerful things,” he said. “She loved intellectual struggle and
never backed down.”

Dr. Kendi — tall and trim, with long dreadlocks he wears pulled back and a
fondness for West African cloth pocket squares — also speaks softly and
carries enormous ambition.

After “The Black Campus Movement,” he planned to write a history of black
studies. Instead, what was intended to be the first chapter, about the
history of scientific racism, morphed into “Stamped From the Beginning.”

Writing a sprawling narrative history rather than a narrower monograph —
and publishing it with a trade press, Nation Books, and not an academic one
— was a risky move for a junior scholar without tenure.

Also risky was the subtitle, “The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in
America,” which was suggested by his publisher, to his initial resistance.
“I thought it was arrogant,” Dr. Kendi said. (At least one scholarly
reviewer agreed
<https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/700230?journalCode=jaah>
.)

But today, he embraces it as a way of boldly claiming space in a field —
the intellectual history of race — that has been overwhelmingly dominated
by white men.

[image: Dr. Kendi at the 2016 National Book Awards ceremony in New York.]
Dr. Kendi at the 2016 National Book Awards ceremony in New York. CreditBeowulf
Sheehan via National Book Foundation

“I was writing this history as someone critical of racist ideas,” he said.
“And one of the more prevailing racist ideas within scholarship was this
idea that black people do not write definitive texts.”

Some scholars have questioned <https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/2165> Dr.
Kendi’s broad definition of racist ideas, which seems to ensnare just about
everyone in American history, including Frederick Douglass, Du Bois and
Barack Obama. (Mr. Obama’s celebrated 2008 speech on race, Dr. Kendi
writes, mixed antiracist and assimilationist ideas).

But others have welcomed “Stamped” as a broad, accessible history that
directly and unapologetically engages with the present.

“Once it existed, it was clear that we could use this kind of big-picture
synthesis, which we haven’t had in a long time,” said Martha S. Jones
<https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/19/arts/the-history-behind-the-birthright-citizenship-battle.html?module=inline>,
a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University. “I think of Ibram as
someone who really gives us not only the big historical signposts, but the
deep rationale for why we should call racism racism.”

In keeping with his activist approach to scholarship, Dr. Kendi organized
the inaugural Antiracist Book Festival, held last April, which drew
roughly 3,000
people to hear a mix of junior and senior scholars, along with activists,
novelists, poets, Y.A. authors, educators and publishing professionals.

In the final chapter of “How to Be an Antiracist,” Dr. Kendi connects his
own cancer with the “metastatic racism” afflicting America. To cure it, he
says, we must actively combat it, rather than taking comfort in the false
neutrality of being “not racist.”

“Racial inequalities are pervasive and persistent in every sector of
society,” he said. “If a person does nothing in the face of racial
inequities that are pervasive, if they don’t challenge them, what are they
doing?”

Source
<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/arts/ibram-x-kendi-antiracism.html>
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