The Counterpublic Papers vol. 5 no. 1

Back on the block after my usual summer hiatus.

In case you’ve forgotten my name is Lester Spence, and sometime within the last five years or so you subscribed to this newsletter, designed to be a particular afro-modern take on life, the universe, and everything.

This week?

Last night I was part of a discussion with Ibram Kendi, author of How to be an Anti-racist. When I picked up the book I wasn’t sure what I’d get—I knew Kendi’d won a National Book Award for Stamped from the Beginning, a historical account of racist ideas. But I figured that How to be would be something a bit different than a sequel.

Turns out, it’s in large part a memoir, one of several released over the past few years written by black male writers. Just off the top of my head I can list Baltimore’s own D. Watkins, Darnell Moore, Kiese Laymon, Mychal Denzel Smith, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. In as much as one of the claims Kendi makes is that we all routine engage in racism, starting with himself (an unlikely subject) felt like the best way for him to go.

I agree.

Because he wishes to analyze the different forms of racism at work in modern society, it is not just an account of his life. But in as much as he’s actually had a life—something that to be frank some of the recent memoir writers haven’t had—the work succeeds on his life account by itself. To become who he’s become, Kendi had to navigate a number of different spaces over the course of his life, from Queens to northern Virginia to FAMU to Temple. We see him in an early Jamaica Queens grade school interview ask his teacher why she’s the only one in the school. We see him wage a one kid sit-in in defense of a classmate facing racism.

But we also see him parrot the same line about black youth (they’re dysfunctional, and a threat to black life) generated by a cottage industry of pundits, scholars, policymakers, and politicians in order to win an MLK essay contest. We see him move to a working class neighborhood in Philadelphia in order to better experience the real black thing. We see him schooled by radical sisters in grad school. And near the end we see him, his wife, both struggle with cancer.

He folds into this account a rich examination of racism in its various forms (11 by his estimation, ranging from biological racism to queer racism), using how he and his African. American classmates used to routinely insult his Ghanaian American classmates about being from Africa to talk about ethnic racism, using his decision to basically gentrify a poor black Philadelphia neighborhood as a way to talk about spatial racism. And using his friendship with graduate students at Temple (including one woman—now Dr. Kaila Story-Jackson—whose father is largely responsible for me being an academic) to talk about his own queer racism.

Oh.

The How-to.

There is a how-to element to the book, but it comes in a bit late. Kendi provides an eight step plan for becoming anti-racist:

1. I stop using the I’m not a racist” defense.

2. I admit the definition of racist.

3. I confess the racist policies I support and the racist ideas I express.

4. I accept their source (my upbringing inside a nation making us racist).

5. I acknowledge the definition of antiracist.

6. I struggle for antiracist power and policy in my spaces.

7. I struggle to remain at the antiracist intersections where racism is mixed with other bigotries.

8. I struggle to think with antiracist ideas.

    It’s here and one other place I’d push him. I didn’t get a chance to talk too much about this in the hour or so we had before we opened the (packed) event up to q&a, but there’s an element to this that reads like part of a religious conversion project. One realizes that one is racist the same way one realizes one is a sinner. One struggles against racist ideas the way one struggles against sin.

    (So after the event, I’m at a local bar with a friend. While we’re drinking I recognize someone from the event—he’d asked a question about questions (what type of questions should researchers be asking given Kendi’s work). He tells us that he’s in the process of getting a PhD in inter-cultural leadership and his dissertation is on a form of statistical assessment that to an extent comes out of Kendi’s work.  He’s also a Christian and a budding minister. When he first started working in an Atlanta church his pastor (as an aside, he and his pastor are both white) told him that in order to continue to work at the church he had to read Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning. Meeting Kendi in person was like a godsend to him.)

    Although Kendi recognizers that racism is not about ignorance but rather is about a certain type of interest, the conversion process he talks about above seems to be more about education than anything else, and seems to require a certain type of educator guiding the process. Similarly while Kendi is deeply interested in politics and policy change, this conversion process doesn’t lead to the type of horizontal politics that come from people realizing they share a common interest and a common structural problem.

    Which kind of leads me to the second problem.

    For Kendi, being anti-racist means being anti-capitalist. I don’t agree. I think it’s a good political argument to make, one that I’d make personally. But empirically it doesn’t hold. One of the first things Kendi leads with in writing about racism and its effect is the idea of racial equity, the idea that races aren’t equal if they aren’t receiving equal benefits and resources from the state and civil society. If whites possess 20 times more wealth than blacks then, using the logic, we’d have equitable results if blacks possessed the same amount of wealth as whites. And I don’t think anyone would disagree that the wealth gap is a thing worth solving.

    But if we dealt with that gap, we’d still have a gap between those with wealth and those without—a gap produced by capitalism. The only difference is that there wouldn’t be a racial dynamic. To deal with the gap between the rich and poor itself requires another type of action. That’s not something that will naturally occur through antiracist struggle. In fact, Particularly if the anti-racist project is an individualized project of personal conversion.

…..

    If you’re around tonight and in Baltimore please stop by Red Emma’s. A group of friends are releasing their book Baltimore Revisited: Stories of Inequality and Resistance in a US City. I blurbed it for a reason.

    I’ll be in Detroit this weekend—my former father-in-law passed away. Gave a talk last week for a forum on black labor and talked about him the morning he passed. It’s no longer possible to raise a family on a postal worker’s salary and have enough saved up to consistently look after his kids and grandkids. RIP William Mason.

    So far this semester I’ve a talk at the Baltimore Museum of Art, and I’m scheduled to DJ a keynote lecture.

    (Yes. You read that right.)

    Plan to talk about that and other things (like me finally leaving facebook—I keep the account but no longer manually update it—attention matters!) over the upcoming year.

    Glad you’re along for the ride. As usual, lightly edited, slightly stirred.

    You’ve been missed.