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wrenreads2025 's review for:
How to Be an Antiracist
by Ibram X. Kendi
Dr. Kendi writes a book that blends sociology with memoir as he discusses 18 topics related to race. In each chapter, he describes his own experience as a black man in America and how his ideas and behaviors respond to the systemic racism of his country. He is an academic, but he also is an accessible story teller. I liked the dialectic between idea and personal narrative. They built on each other. His personal experience was retold with a lot of self-reflection and analysis, and his theories were explained with examples from his life, the life of his friends and family, and the history of African Americans.
There is also a dialectic within Kendi himself. He changes a lot over his 30 plus years of living, always living under the scrutiny black men face in the US. In this case, this intense gaze reminded me of the novel Invisible Man, a fictional account of how black men are scrutinized by the public and how this leads them to overly scrutinize themselves. I can't imagine the stress.
He drew on writings of people I have heard of before (Davis, Walker, Dubois, King). But he also described the work of a number of people I haven't heard of before. (Too many to name; I have a lot of reading to do! Because I have taught literature for years, I'm going to read an anthology about black women in fiction: Gloria Edim's Well-Read Black Girl.)
The night after I finished Kendi's book, I had a dream that I was in a college seminar on race in America, and I was woefully ill prepared--mainly because even though I read a lot, I primarily live in super white spaces (family, church, friends, work).
Here are his chapter titles, which start with key definitions for racist vs antiracist approaches to the declared topic. (Starting with defining terms displays how he draws on philosophy as one of the disciplines for his approach.)
My Racist Introduction
Ch 1: Definitions
Ch 2: Dueling Consciousness
Ch 3: Power
Ch 4: Biology
Ch 5: Ethnicity
Ch 6: Body
Ch 7: Culture
Ch 8: Behavior
Ch 9: Color
Ch 10: White
Ch 11: Black
Ch 12: Class
Ch 13: Space
Ch 14: Gender
Ch 15: Sexuality
Ch 16: Failure
Ch 17: Success
Ch 18: Survival
There is also a dialectic within Kendi himself. He changes a lot over his 30 plus years of living, always living under the scrutiny black men face in the US. In this case, this intense gaze reminded me of the novel Invisible Man, a fictional account of how black men are scrutinized by the public and how this leads them to overly scrutinize themselves. I can't imagine the stress.
He drew on writings of people I have heard of before (Davis, Walker, Dubois, King). But he also described the work of a number of people I haven't heard of before. (Too many to name; I have a lot of reading to do! Because I have taught literature for years, I'm going to read an anthology about black women in fiction: Gloria Edim's Well-Read Black Girl.)
The night after I finished Kendi's book, I had a dream that I was in a college seminar on race in America, and I was woefully ill prepared--mainly because even though I read a lot, I primarily live in super white spaces (family, church, friends, work).
Here are his chapter titles, which start with key definitions for racist vs antiracist approaches to the declared topic. (Starting with defining terms displays how he draws on philosophy as one of the disciplines for his approach.)
My Racist Introduction
Ch 1: Definitions
Ch 2: Dueling Consciousness
Ch 3: Power
Ch 4: Biology
Ch 5: Ethnicity
Ch 6: Body
Ch 7: Culture
Ch 8: Behavior
Ch 9: Color
Ch 10: White
Ch 11: Black
Ch 12: Class
Ch 13: Space
Ch 14: Gender
Ch 15: Sexuality
Ch 16: Failure
Ch 17: Success
Ch 18: Survival