Earth Day

Friday, September 11, 2020

Book Report: Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

 In the New York Times series, "1619," Matthew Desmond makes it clear just how important slavery was to the United States economy.  "[A]t the height of slavery," Desmond says, "the combined value of enslaved workers exceeded that of all the railroads and all the factories in the nation." (Episode 2:  The Economy that Slavery Built, 1619, The New York Times, August 30, 2019,  https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/30/podcasts/1619-slavery-cotton-capitalism.html?showTranscript=1) Slavery moved the United States economy from a fledgling nation to a money-making powerhouse.  

Our country's prosperity was built on a brutal economy that was too big to fail.  When cotton farmers experienced a crippling economic downturn, banks were right there to loan them money and prop up the system of slavery.  This is the point Dr. Kendi makes in his incredible book.  Slavery and racism were intentional choices made to increase profits and promote a whole system that constructed and maintained "race."  In turn, United States policy and practice made Black people non human beings.  Taught, codified, mythologized, and even celebrated, some huge African-American pillars of Black history "housed" this oppression and death by suggesting that African culture and Black people  were "less than" and would need to evolve before their total freedom could be given.

My family knows me to be the most unnerving movie critic to relate how movies are the storytellers and myth makers for our age.  Not so much I guess.  One after another, Kendi shared plainly how movies that became iconic for our nation were a retelling of our racist narrative.  How could I not see "King Kong" or "Planet of the Apes" as part of that narrative?  Under Kendi's pen, I saw it clearly.

Kendi states that racism was borne out of self-interest.  It must come to an end out of self-interest.  I know that reality all too well.  My racism with the Native community was transformed and continues to be transformed as I realized the goodness that flowed to me as Native people, with all of their vices and virtues, moved on me.  That so many Native people consider me a friend when I know the history . . . I break into tears.  I cannot comprehend that.  My personal racism is broken recognizing how bringing an end to it benefits me as a whole.  I wish I could say I was more courageous.  

This text is so daunting that it took me several days to even contemplate writing this book report.  Kendi is relentless in maintaining focus so that we cannot avert our eyes from our country's long history of maintaining Black people as non humans.  I certainly knew of the critique of one of my heroes, Abraham Lincoln.  Kendi makes it clear that Lincoln certainly did not see Black people as equals.  

He also, however, takes on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.   Kendi devoted a whole section to W. E. B. Du Bois, recognizing that as one of the wisdom-givers of Black people in the United States, he really was not an anti-racist until much later in his life.   I found myself blinking at the critical eye he leveled at Du Bois.  At the same time, that unflinching criticism (for good or ill) gave Kendi's prose an integrity that was in keeping with one of his main categories.

He was not telling us the story of "the extraordinary Negro."  He did not want us to think that racism will disappear if we just show any number of African American people who were beyond reproach.  The primary drive of anti-racism is to give African-American people a space where they might be known as full human beings--capable of great virtue and great vice.  He also related the intersectionality of gender and its interplay with racism.  He praised Ida B. Wells as an anti-racist who did not get the platform she deserved.  He also lifted up Zora Neale Hurston and my favorite novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God.  Kendi praised the book because it showed Black people as human beings--making mistakes, seeing beauty, and, I would say, finding love, sensuality, and heartache along the way.  

Though his categories may not be original to him, he has now lifted those categories in a way that will make them primary in the lexicon of racial discourse.  My only negative critique of the text was that although things like "moral suasion" have not created and will not create the necessary transformation around race, I believe we need to bring everything to the table to create the transformation.  I do think moral suasion has had some effect.  

Kendi is right though.  Race is defined by power.  So we will need, as he asserts, anti-racist people in power over a long period of time to create ongoing policy and practice that are anti-racist.  We have too long had virtue signaling toward race while keeping policy and practice in place.  Or leaders who seek to reach "middle ground" when one of the positions is that Black people are human beings.  There is no other side.  Black people are human beings.  Black lives matter.  

Kendi wants us to end racial discrimination in policy and practice.  We have the power to make that transformation.  Much like Abraham Lincoln ended slavery to save the Union, Kendi writes, we must now end racism out of our own self-interest.  I pray we are ready.  

I have just finished three different texts that discuss what it means to be a human being.  We need an incredible intersectional movement that seats people in power and demands of people in power that there is no compromise on that definition.  Jacob Blake's father kept repeating to us, "He's a human being!  He's a human being!"  He knows what so much State violence against the Black community means.  That it happens and we either ignore or sanction that violence means we do not understand Black people as human beings.  

Faith communities must make that a singular focus as they make meaning, critique power, and seek to do justice.  We must come to grips with that necessarily political endeavor.  And then rights must be extended to creation--animals, rivers, land--as subjects (acting on us) who are in relationship with us.  The Supreme Court made corporations human beings.   All they were doing was ratifying policies and practices we have long held in this country over and against peoples and planet.

Some of you know how angry I was at RBG for not affording asylum seekers equal protection under the law (in other words, they are not human beings).

Kendi keeps us focused in a text that is over 500 pages.  That is the power of this book.  My greatest prayer is that white folk will use this text to hold their own focus and work toward Kendi's counsel.

There are more poetic and certainly will be better histories told of race in our country.  Kendi's plain prose, however, has cultivated categories that will be the standards for time forward.  He has a lens that doesn't try to be groundbreaking so much as straightforward, truth-telling, and insistent.  As I read, I could almost recognize the voice of Dr. Kendi behind me, saying, "See?  Is it plain to you now?  This is inescapable."




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