Antiracist Strategy

Heard on the Old Mole Variety Hour (kboo.fm), April 30, 2018

Near the end of his recent book, Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, Ibram X. Kendi asks, “When will the day arrive when Black lives will matter to Americans? It depends,” he says, “on the strategies antiracists use to stamp out racist ideas.”

The whole 500-page, highly readable book demonstrates that previous strategies going back to the days of abolition in the early 19^th Century will not work. The white power structure benefits from racial disparities: those disparities impede working class solidarity and put a brake on wages. They create and maintain an underclass who can be counted on to work at low-status jobs for minimal wages. So there is no way that moral persuasion or education about the value of black lives will alter the racist policies still in effect. As Kendi writes,

Trying to educate these powerful producers or defenders or ignorers of American racism about its harmful effects is like trying to educate a group of business executives about how harmful their products are. They already know, and they don’t care enough to end the harm.

Racist policies were created out of self-interest” and have been rolled back only out of self-interest. “Politicians passed the civil and voting rights measures of the 1860s and the 1960s primarily out of political and economic self-interest—not an educational or moral awakening.”  Today, “There can be no doubt the producers and defenders and ignorers of racist policies know the facts. and yet they remain for the most part indifferent and unmoved…”

Protests, Kendi argues, are not a long-term solution, though they sometimes force elites to make some changes to avoid “the disruptive, disordered, politically harmful, and/or unprofitable conditions that antiracist protesters created.” But “if one generation of powerful Americans can …be pressured by protest to end racial discrimination, when the conditions and interests change, another generation could once again encourage racial discrimination. That’s why protesting against racist power has been a never-ending affair in America.”

“Lawmakers have the power today to stamp out racial discrimination, to create racial ‘equality as a fact’ …, if they want to. They have the ability to champion the antiracist cause of immediate equality.” They could “pass sweeping legislation completely overhauling the enslaving justice system;” they could “push initiatives like fighting crime with more and better jobs .They could “decriminalize drugs and find alternatives to prisons.” They could pass “grander legislation that re-envisions American race relations by fundamentally assuming that discrimination is behind the racial disparities (and not what’s wrong with Black folk), and by creating an agency that aggressively investigates the disparities and punishes the conscious and unconscious discriminators. This agency would also work toward equalizing the wealth and power of Black and White neighborhoods and their institutions, with a clear mission of repairing the inequities caused by discrimination.”

But law-makers beholden to the mostly White elite will not give such proposals the time of day, for the “people in the top economic and political brackets would fear that such a program would eliminate one of the most effective tools they have at their disposal to conquer and control and exploit not only non-Whites, but also both low-income and middle-income White people.”

So protest is not enough. Here are the last three paragraphs of the book:

Protesting against racist power…can never be mistaken for seizing power. Any effective solution to eradicating American racism must involve Americans committed to antiracist policies seizing and maintaining power over institutions, neighborhoods, counties, states, nations–the world. …. An antiracist America can only be guaranteed if principled antiracists are in power and, and then antiracist policies become the law of the land, and then antiracist ideas become the common sense of the people, and then the antiracist common sense of the people hold these antiracist leaders and policies accountable.

And that day is sure to come. No power lasts forever. There will come a time when Americans will realize that the only thing wrong with Black people is that they think something is wrong with Black people. There will come a time when racist ideas will no longer obstruct us from seeing the complete and utter abnormality of racial disparities. There will come a time when we will love humanity, when we will gain the courage to fight for an equitable society for our beloved humanity, knowing, intelligently, that when we fight for humanity, we are fighting for ourselves.

There will come a time. Maybe, just maybe, that time is now.