Ibram Kendi has written a coming-of-age memoir somewhat prematurely. The opening of How to Be an Antiracist highlights Kendi’s epiphany at age seven upon seeing the world through the prism of race. The occasion was his introduction to a new school and new teacher, upon which occasion he wondered bewilderingly why the teacher was not black.
From that moment Kendi advances through the typical stages of maturation with race always at the center of his view of himself and the world. His experiences were always laden with that prismatic to such an extent that he was oblivious to the other determining events of his life. The most important of those events goes unremarked (and probably unnoticed) in terms of its likely most significant relation to himself. When his parents relocated from the hood in Brooklyn to the Confederate groves of Manassas, Virginia (of which he was keenly aware), they were likely rescuing him from the continuing influence and probable dangers of his “friends” like Smurf, described as an emerging thug or gangster.
Kendi’s committed prismatic of race obscured all such environmental awareness and appreciation of the protective attentiveness of his parents (though he was acutely conscious of their aspirations for his academic and athletic development). He did not develop academic aspirations until late in his young adulthood, and his athletic aspirations did not crystallize into notable performance. Nevertheless, he crossed the necessary threshold of matriculation into university education at Florida A&M, a Historically Black University, at which he continued the embedded reflex of decoding racial experience.
Kendi’s labors eventuated in a healthy release from seeing race as a primary referent. He provides frequent and important references to his liberation from race denigration (his seventh- grade, award-winning oratorical performance), color prejudice, and race-exclusive socialization. Such liberation resulted in observations like “Internalized racism is the real black on black crime” and “when we believe that an individual’s seeming success or failure redounds to an entire group we’ve accepted a racist idea” and “[t]o be antiracist is to never conflate racist people with White people, knowing there are antiracist Whites and racist non-Whites.”.
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