Recently I finished “How to be an Antiracist” By Ibram X. Kendi and I also recently put the finished stamp on “Conversations in Black.” I think both of these books were extremely necessary, especially for the time that we currently find ourselves in. America, at least for me, is at a standstill, and the only thing that seems to really still be working and permeating the fabric of this country is the very thing that it was built on: systemic racism.
First I’d like to talk about the books and then I’d like to talk about some convos that these ideas sparked. Ibram X. Kendi’s book is really, really good in its ability to put up a fence around an otherwise broad topic. He generally gives the reader a dichotomy with which to view racism and its corresponding policies and viewpoints. Even though I find anything that is limited to a dichotomous, dualistic existence to be restricting: good and evil, black and white, them and us–I found it really easy to understand why he might think we needed to draw these lines. Without clearly defined lines being drawn systemic racism is able to do what it does best: hide. That is not to say that racism is not overt at times, as Kendi takes the time to drive home with quotes from the late great Kwame Toure and Charles Hamilton, it’s just the type we’re talking about (institutional racism) is covert and much more difficult to identify in terms of specific individuals committing specific acts.
Where I found Kendi to be limited I found Ed Gordon’s “Conversations in Black” to actually extend. To provide a larger fence to allow multiple perspectives on a wide range of topics that were directly affecting the community. The really awesome thing about this book was it made space for the conversations to continue in each of its chapters creating the idea that these conversations had to be continued, that these people weren’t going to be the only ones involved in bringing the changes to policy that were necessary and that they most certainly weren’t going to be the ones completely responsible with attempting to change hearts and minds–a feat that Kendi says can only be done through the change of policy because the history of racist ideas is the history of powerful policy-makers erecting racist policies out of self-interest, then producing racist ideas to defend and rationalize the inequitable effects of their policies, which are then consumed by everyday people and then turned into ignorance and hate.
Recently Van Jones contributed an op-ed piece to CNN in which he said that if we are going to beat the statistics regarding African Americans and COVID-19 then we are going to have to make changes in both our public systems and our personal lives (regarding diet, fitness, and choices). Kendi disagreed and said that to say this is to imply that white people make better health choices than black people (in so many words) and that to say that black people are partially responsible is to say that both racism and black behavior are both to blame when in his eyes it is simply racism. What do you guys think? Another issue that arose when I expressed my opinion was that Van Jones’ wife is white which absolves him of having the ability to weigh in on this. What do you guys think about that?
