If you do a search for a most-preferred book by advocates of critical race theory (CRT), after Robin DiAngelo, and Delgado and Stefancic’s books, next is Ibram X. Kendi’s “How to be an Antiracist.”(1) Numerous copies are in circulation, and thousands of “the woke” have imbibed Kendi, perhaps unaware that his New York Times Best-Seller on how to be an antiracist is more likely to incite its readers into racism.
It is likely that although neither you nor I are racists, we could not qualify as antiracists according to Kendi’s definition, since Kendi tells us, “We cannot be antiracist if we are homophobic or transphobic.” (2)
My guess would be that most of you, like myself, do not dislike homosexual people as a group, but that you disagree with the normalcy and the morality of those who engage in that sexual practice. Likewise, we probably do not particularly dislike transsexual people but we disagree that substantive change from one sex to another is possible, and disagree that it is possible to be born into the wrong body. No matter how friendly or fair-minded, our most gentle disagreements would likely be labeled homophobic and transphobic, because anything short of total consent and agreement is viewed as fill-in-the-blank-phobia. The woke are busily policing language and no dissent is allowed.
Kendi, like all the woke, is obsessed with language and definitions. Sixteen of his book’s 18 chapters begin with definition lists. Since woke theorists believe that reality is a socially constructed consensus, they are determined to control that consensus. So they suppress and censor those resisting their new definitions.
But that sets up a clash with we who believe that reality is created by a benevolent, all-knowing God who interacts with us on a person-to-person basis. He sets the moral bounds and we are born into the world that He made. But the woke viewpoint is that there is no transcendent Creator. In effect, humans are dangerous, non-transcendent beings, locked in the same room with each other, and everything is power relations; the only question is which gang is in present control.
Although there is little explicit mention of critical race theory in Kendi’s book, the standard CRT authors and concerns is present, with numerous references to white supremacy, hierarchy, intersectionality, and CRT authors like Kimberle Crenshaw and Angela Davis.
Kendi, whose name originally appeared on his birth certificate less exotically as Ibram Henry Rogers, tells us how his parents began as Christians, but “found themselves leaving the civilizing and conserving and racist church they realized they’d been part of. They were saved into Black liberation theology and joined the churchless church of the Black Power movement.”(3) As Kendi puts it, “They stopped thinking about saving Black people and started thinking about liberating Black people.”(4) In other words, they lost sight of their pilgrimage to the heavenly and refocused on the present, the material.
Kendi embraces their focus on the material. For example, with his definition of inequity: “Racial inequity is when two or more racial groups are not standing on approximately equal footing.”(5) This has become the major project today. It is not equality that is sought, that is, equality of opportunity, but equity, the removal of all inequalities. Why aren’t groups on approximately equal footing? The answer is Kendi’s simplistic one: there must be racism.
So let’s talk about racism. Kendi, like the rest of the woke, finds himself in that strange place where they want their movement to be seen as the continuation of antiracist progress. And yet, they are deeply opposed to what has been a key principle of that movement. I’m talking about the idea of “color-blindness.” I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating. In 1963 Martin Luther King saw the desired progress thus:
I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream. I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal.' I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.(6)
This is the idea of color-blindness, that the goal is to see people as individuals, because character is always an individual matter. In contrast to this comes critical race theory as espoused by Kendi and others. Kendi is determined to get rid of colorblindness.
Kendi says, “The language of color blindness--like the language of ‘not racist’--is a mask to hide racism.”(7) It creates passivism, and a color-blind constitution is “for a white supremacist America.”(8) To Kendi, it is essential to differentiate racial groups.
In order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently…. The most threatening racist movement is not the alt right’s unlikely drive for a White ethnostate, but the regular American’s drive for a ‘race-neutral’ one.(9)
King said his vision was “deeply rooted in the American dream.” Kendi quotes Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, saying America was founded “by White men for white men.”(10) But the Confederacy lost. And by insisting that we maintain a very alert color-awareness, Kendi’s approach runs in the opposite direction than 1960s activists.
Some have pointed out how Marxist and communist ideas seem to permeate CRT viewpoints. In that light, Kendi’s complaints offer many pages linking racism and capitalism. He notes that “Marx recognized the birth of the conjoined twins [racism and capitalism].”(11) Kendi prefers the term “racial capitalism.”(12)
Kendi claims that the conservative definition of capitalism is,
[T]he freedom to exploit people into economic ruin; the freedom to assassinate unions; the freedom to prey upon unprotected consumers, workers, and environments; the freedom to value quarterly profits over climate change; the freedom to undermine small businesses and cushion corporations; the freedom from competition; the freedom not to pay taxes; the freedom to heave the tax burden onto the middle and lower classes; the freedom to commodify everything and everyone; the freedom to keep poor people poor and middle-income people struggling to stay middle income, and to make rich people richer. The history of capitalism--of world warring, classing, slave trading, enslaving, colonizing, depressing wages, and dispossessing land and labor and resources and rights--bears out the conservative definition of capitalism.(13)
I’m not defending all of that, but I am left to wonder who, whether liberal or conservative, supports those practices and that definition. Do the middle and lower classes truly bear the tax burden? Outside of a small number of arms manufacturing corporations and politicians, who supports the idea of world warring? Who in the West supports the idea today of slave trading?
But Kendi rants on:
To love capitalism is to end up loving racism. To love racism is to end up loving capitalism. The conjoined twins are two sides of the same destructive body. The idea that capitalism is merely free markets, competition, free trade, supplying and demanding, and private ownership of the means of production operating for a profit is as whimsical and ahistorical as the White-supremacist idea that calling something racist is the primary form of racism. Popular definitions of capitalism, like popular racist ideas, do not live in historical or material reality. Capitalism is essentially racist; racism is essentially capitalist. The were birthed together from the same unnatural causes, and they shall one day die together from unnatural causes.”(14)
At every turn, whether it is feminism, gayness, lesbianism, racism, transgenderism, Kendi aligns with the new views all occupied with critiquing, deconstructing, revising, reenvisioning the important history and values which underwrite our civilization.
Kendi’s ideas are similar to other CRT writers. Unfortunately, instead of deracializing us, Kendi’s, like everything else CRT, will almost certainly increase racial division and emphasis on color rather than decreasing it.
I had thought this book was on the NAD’s recommended reading list I referred to in The Woke danger 5: White fragility, but the NAD recently retired that list.
If reality is socially constructed, it is not difficult for us to understand the frantic attempts to war against all other groups and try to get control of the civilizational steering wheel. Having abandoned Christian salvation for Black power, or any other color of power, it is ideology against competing ideology until some bloody victor emerges and enforces its very human power relations on everyone else. But if God gave us a good world, and humans rebelled against Him, and He has sent His son Jesus to restore all men to peace with one another, to “break down the middle wall of separation” (Ephesians 2:14), then we will find respect and uplifting for each other by treating each other with love and kindness apart from skin color, rather than by treating people according to some kind of emphasized color scheme.
Which is to say, if there is a problem on this question, Christianity already has the answer, and the philosophy of critical race theory is a superficial and destructive non-answer; we should zealously avoid it. It strengthens rather than reduces the woke danger.
Larry Kirkpatrick serves as pastor of the Muskegon and Fremont MI Seventh-day Adventist churches. His website is GreatControversy.org and YouTube channel is “Larry the guy from Michigan.” Every morning Larry publishes a new devotional video.
Notes
1. Ibram X. Kendi, How to be an Antiracist, One World, New York, (2019), 306 pp.
2. Ibid., p. 197.
3. Ibid., p. 16.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid., p. 18.
6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Luther_King_Jr.
7. Kendi, p. 10.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid., pp. 19-20.
10. Ibid., p. 33.
11. Ibid., p. 159.
12. Ibid., p. 160.
13. Ibid., p. 161.
14. Ibid., p. 163.
