Two of 2020’s best-sellers were published in 2018 and 2019, respectively: White Fragility, by Robin DiAngelo, and How to Be an Antiracist, by Ibram X. Kendi. (DiAngelo, a consultant, is white; Kendi, a professor who recently left American University for Boston University, is black.) It’s strange for books to achieve their greatest commercial success a year or more after publication, but this year’s circumstances are even stranger. In America’s reckoning over race, catalyzed by George Floyd’s death while under arrest in Minneapolis, journalists, entertainers, professional athletes, and corporations have embraced a social justice dogma. DiAngelo and Kendi’s books provide many of its core principles, which distinguish acceptable thoughts and attitudes about race from unacceptable ones.
The resulting framework’s first attribute is an unwavering focus on socioeconomic disparities that leave black Americans worse off than whites. Racial inequalities, as Reuters reports, “have proven immune to decades of laws and policies meant to address them.” As a result, blacks have “less education, less wealth, poorer health and shorter lifespans.” White adults, for example, are significantly more likely than blacks to have a four-year college degree. (Actually, blacks have made impressive progress in educational attainment. From 1995 to 2018, the proportion of black Americans over 25 years of age who had earned at least a bachelor’s degree nearly doubled, from 13.3% to 25.6%. Only because whites are getting more education, too—38.8% of white adults had bachelor’s degrees in 2018, compared to 25.4% in 1995—does this particular black-white gap persist. If closing it is of the highest urgency, then the crucial need is for white “allies” to stop sending their own kids to college.)
What and how are we to think about these disparities? Kendi and DiAngelo’s answer is that: 1) All disparities disadvantageous to blacks are entirely and solely the result of racism. 2) This means considering the possibility that choices, habits, dispositions, or abilities explain even a sliver of the disparities between blacks and whites is intolerably racist, an exercise in blaming the victim. 3) Rather than give any thought to how some blacks might improve their situation through different conduct, all whites sincerely opposed to racism must engage in an unsparing, never-ending quest to realize the enormity of their own culpability for black disadvantage.
“As an anti-racist,” writes Kendi, “when I see racial disparities, I see racism.” The only other possible explanation for these disparities, he insists, is “black inferiority.” Accordingly, “The opposite of ‘racist’ isn’t ‘not-racist.’ It is ‘anti-racist.’…. The claim of ‘not racist’ neutrality is a mask for racism.”
Read Full Article »