The Southern Strategy IV: Judging the Book
The Southern Strategy IV: Judging the Book
The bad-faith campaign against "antiracism".
This is Part IV of a series of pieces on the current and continued use of an old racist playbook. Part I is here. Part II is here. Part III is here.
This book is ultimately about the basic struggle we’re all in, the struggle to be fully human and to see that others are fully human.
-Ibram X. Kendi, How to Be an Antiracist
The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.
-John Ehrlichman (domestic affairs advisor to Richard Nixon)
You too know, that among us, white men have an equality resulting from a presence of the lower caste, which cannot exist where white men fill the position here occupied by the servile race.
-President of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis, “Speech Before the Mississippi Legislature”
As I said it’s an interesting sociopolitical theory (and I even enjoyed reading Kendi’s book) but when taught as fact/reality in public schools it’s indoctrination of personal political beliefs.
-SC “Freedom Caucus” Chair Adam Morgan (Twitter reply, February 19, 2022)
Before the SC “Freedom Caucus” sued Lexington One, before I met their chair, Representative Adam Morgan, before he told me that the ideas of antiracist author Ibram X. Kendi were “interesting” while suggesting without proof that teachers were “indoctrinating” students with those ideas, I started reading Kendi’s Stamped From the Beginning in 2020, along with several other books, including Angela Davis’ Are Prisons Obsolete, Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed and Alex Vitale’s The End of Policing, as well as many articles and think pieces with now-forgotten titles, which elucidated, discussed, explained, debated, and sometimes confused extremely relevant issues around racism, modern policing, mass incarceration. Like many other white Americans, 2020 was a year I was confronted with some of the realities of racism that I had been able to ignore, or unable to access, up to that point.
Some of these texts I finished. Others— like Stamped From the Beginning— I periodically return to, chipping away slowly. That’s the way I generally read nonfiction: chaotically, letting perspectives from different texts bounce off of one another, letting different voices compete for my attention. Maybe it comes from spending so many years reading multiple texts with different classes, reading student essay after student essay, having discussions on every topic under the sun with students from many backgrounds and with infinitely variable points of view.
That’s not necessarily a method of reading I would recommend for everyone, but it is a way for me to see texts as part of a larger conversation. It’s also a kind of reading that doesn’t exist in the dystopian fantasies of many book banners: as people who don’t seem to read much themselves, book banners seem to hold fast to a pre-modern understanding of learning as a process of dropping ideas into helpless, blank heads. Drop the wrong idea in there, and you have turned the defenseless brain inexorably toward Evil Thoughts, somehow changing it permanently. (This fantasy— which I don’t think many of censorship’s most effective proponents actually believe— suggests that there is only one solution to Wrong Ideas, and that solution is Right Ideas. This cosmology leaves little room for good-faith debate and little apparent purpose for learning to grapple with difficult, sometimes unsolvable questions.)
After the killings of Trayvon Martin, George Floyd, Tamir Rice, Breonna Taylor, and so many other people of color by police, and people appointing themselves as police, I was flailing around for some way to engage with the problem. For a lot of well-intentioned white people in 2020, particularly those of us who work with students who look like those victims, that involved reading, thinking, attending rallies, making social media posts. Was it enough? Obviously it was not. But this renewed interest by many white Americans in learning more about struggles that have impacted communities of color, along with the public success and growing power of movements like Black Lives Matter, also provided fuel to an always-present but now-revitalized white supremacist movement.
As they have since time immemorial, opportunist politicians and organizations have provided much of that fuel
. And just as they did in the 1960s, and many times before and since, they have found that one of the easiest ways to stoke populist fears is through a potent combination of scare tactics, scapegoating, and dog-whistle racism.One thing being an English teacher for a decade and a half has taught me is that you actually don’t have to finish books to learn something. And you certainly don’t have to agree with them: if that were the requirement, I would argue that English language arts instruction would be both useless and functionally dead. Why read at all if not to explore, contrast, and synthesize different and sometimes contradictory ideas to try to arrive closer to truth? As a teacher, I love it when students react passionately or critically to texts, and sometimes we learn more from disagreement than agreement.
However, I do believe you have to at least attempt to read texts, and ideally read them thoughtfully, in order to review them or to make grand proclamations about them. And in almost every case, I don’t think reading a text gives you a right to tell other people they can’t do so, or to interfere with the good-faith decisions of librarians and teachers to provide reading opportunities to students. There should be processes for selecting texts— and there are: believe me, there are plenty of hoops already to jump through to even purchase a text for a school, much less require that anyone read it— but those processes should not be carried out by mobs or for political gain. The courts generally agree with me.
When Jason Reynolds’ “remix” of Kendi’s Stamped became a major target of book-banners this school year, I read it. It is short, accessible, powerfully written, and it took me only a few days to read. It was available from my local library online; I checked it out on my phone. I strongly suggest that anyone who wants to understand what is being banned read it. There is no excuse for anyone who wants to attack the book not to take the time to read at least a representative sample.
But Kendi’s main lightning rod, for people who profit off of pretending to be aggrieved, and for people who are sincerely offended by what they think the book says, based on a talking points memo
, is his 2019 book How to Be an Antiracist. The Missouri Attorney General wrote a letter to the US Secretary of Education citing the book in 2021, which quoted a few sentences, including the one most of the book’s most prominent critics have read somewhere, although often pretty obviously not in the book, itself: “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination.” Of course, as I explained here, that sentence doesn’t mean, in context, what they want it to mean, and reading the book instead of a pull quote makes this plain.
My plan is to write a few pieces about How to Be an Antiracist as I go, trying to keep an open mind about what it says, what it doesn’t say, and how those things relate to what its critics— both the loud, opportunistic ones and the more sincere ones—claim it says. A few chapters in I’m finding it clear, direct, interesting, and thought-provoking. I believe anyone who is confident that they have a mind of their own can read it very easily and come to their own conclusions, without fear of being corrupted, indoctrinated, or brainwashed. Much of it makes sense to me, some of it will take longer to marinate, and probably some of it I will end up rejecting, but I’ll try to focus on my initial thoughts.
Below are some key quotes from the first part of the book, with reactions and connections:
“Definitions anchor us in principles. This is not a light point: If we don’t do the basic work of defining the kind of people we want to be in language that is stable and consistent, we can’t work toward stable, consistent goals” (Chapter 1). This really resonates for me as an English teacher. A central strategy of the anti-antiracists (people who are seeking to ban antiracist concepts and ideas under the guise of anti- “wokeness”) is to redefine words. “CRT” becomes an umbrella term for ideas that often contradict actual Critical Race Theorists— for example, the idea that race is an “inherent” category (most CRT scholars seem to believe race is a social construct). “Woke,” a term that means aware or on guard in the original AAVE context, and ready to act, in the context of movements for racial justice, becomes a derisive (and probably intentionally racially loaded) sneer at “social justice warriors”. Being against the fantasy of “colorblindness,” or the idea that pretending society does not make distinctions based on race is the same as believing that different races are equal, becomes being for racist discrimination. (The Missouri letter cites a statement that America is color blind, from the Plessy v Ferguson opinion, as if it were inscribed on a tablet handed down from heaven; meanwhile, to even consider Kendi’s ideas in school is to force children to believe them. And of course the letter also cites Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech— literally the only speech I have ever seen from King referenced in any of the anti-antiracist materials— out of context, ignoring its explicitly antiracist purpose and statements.)
Kendi cites evidence that “race” is not a biological reality, but a construct, but also stresses that this does not mean that construct doesn’t have power: “The gift of seeing myself as Black instead of being color-blind is that it allows me to clearly see myself historically and politically as being an antiracist, as a member of the interracial body striving to accept and equate and empower racial difference of all kinds” (Chapter 3). He writes (in Chapter 4), “Race is a mirage but one that humanity has organized itself around in very real ways. Imagining away the existence of races in a racist world is as conserving and harmful as imagining away classes in a capitalistic world—it allows the ruling races and classes to keep on ruling”.
This distinction seems obvious and important to me. The “Freedom Caucus” or anyone else, if they truly believe we live in a “colorblind society” (as they implicitly assert in their lawsuit
) should be able to support that argument without simply piling on Kendi, or any other writer. They should be able to explain, for example, how a person can both believe that race doesn’t matter in our systems, and simultaneously acknowledge that our justice system disproportionately imprisons people of color for drug offenses, even while those offenses are primarily committed by white people.Their argument, like Morgan’s relies on an intentionally undefined and incredibly elastic definition of indoctrination— is it coercion? teaching? brainwashing? discussion?— the result of which is that teachers and districts are now being intentionally frightened away from even discussing these ideas and perspectives. The result of this intentional chilling of speech is that it’s easier to talk to students about, say Hitler’s ideology, or Jefferson Davis’ ideology, because SC’s “Partisanship Curriculum” budget proviso explicitly allows discussion of “historical” racism and “past discrimination,” than it is to talk about Kendi’s ideas (which are often framed as somehow automatically indoctrination, so that to even consider or discuss or debate them is to coerce students into agreement), or the ideas of anyone under the broad umbrella of “wokeness”/ “antiracism”/ “CRT. But in any case, Kendi makes a compelling argument; if his critics have their own argument, they should make it. That many can’t or won’t says more about them than it does about the ideas they are criticizing.
“That is how racist power can call affirmative action policies that succeed in reducing racial inequities ‘race conscious’ and standardized tests that produce racial inequities ‘race neutral’” (Chapter 1). One of the fundamental arguments of the “Freedom Caucus” suit (which I discussed in more detail here) is that any acknowledgment of the idea that affirmative action (objectively a form of “discrimination,” as in “the act of making or perceiving a difference”) is necessary to address racism, is illegal because it violates the “Partisanship Curriculum” budget proviso. This is a bad-faith but brilliant rhetorical trick (which is how you know the “Freedom Caucus” borrowed it from the national organizations who are hawking all of this anti- “woke” stuff) because it, again, redefines terms, then uses the new definitions to redefine other terms, until nothing means anything anymore.
And as a teacher who has seen it both firsthand and in research, the reality that standardized tests produce inequities is hard to dispute. Making it more difficult to discuss and address this issue in school seems intentionally counterproductive, and designed to reinforce the existing status quo while promoting a narrative to children that their test scores are somehow both an objective assessment of their abilities and a fair ceiling for their achievement in the future.
“These are not permanent tattoos. No one becomes a racist or antiracist. We can only strive to be one or the other” (Chapter 1). How to Be an Antiracist was written before what we currently know as the anti- “CRT”/ anti- “woke” movement, but in the context of a long series of variations on the Southern Strategy and a growing consciousness of racist policies. Whether you agree with everything in the book or not, it is very clear from the beginning that Kendi is explicitly arguing against the idea that any individual “should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his race or sex” (in the words of the budget proviso and the Trump EO its language was copied from); like Kendi or not, the entire thesis of his book (at least throughout the early chapters) is that racism is bad no matter who does it, and that any support for racist ideas is bad.
He goes on to define an “antiracist” as “One who is expressing the idea that racial groups are equals and none needs developing, and is supporting policy that reduces racial inequity” (Chapter 2).
In the same Twitter conversation quoted at the top of this piece, Morgan claimed, “The ‘tenet’ [from one of the censorship bills being discussed at the time] discussing implicit bias and unconscious racism stems from the popular usage of ‘antiracism.’ It is the idea that certain racial groups are implicitly biased and unconsciously support oppressive and racist institutions unless they are actively being Antiracist.” He goes on to use Kendi as a supposed example of where this understanding of antiracism comes from, but Kendi explicitly contradicts his point: in Chapter 4, he writes, “But generalizing the behavior of racist White individuals to all White people is as perilous as generalizing the individual faults of people of color to entire races… An antiracist treats and remembers individuals as individuals”.
“Americans have long been trained to see the deficiencies of people rather than policy. It’s a pretty easy mistake to make: People are in our faces. Policies are distant. We are particularly poor at seeing the policies lurking behind the struggles of people” (Chapter 2). One feature of the book so far which is striking in light of the rhetoric around Kendi/ “CRT”/ “wokeness” (not that these terms are generally defined clearly or at all by critics, or that they actually refer to ideas which are interchangeable) is Kendi’s consistent empathy. He is a harsh critic of ideas, and intolerant of racist ideas, but generally understanding of the ways which all individuals fall short. His writing also just does not support many of the central claims of anti-antiracists, who seem almost universally focused on the feelings and behaviors of individuals, instead of systemic inequities (which they often dismiss, without evidence, as being made up). But everything I have read suggests the opposite: antiracists like Kendi and Critical Race Theorists like Kimberlé W. Crenshaw aren’t interested in individual behaviors, and seem to see discussions of individual feelings or ideas as a distraction from a more important discussion about racist policies and racist systems. Like Dr. King, they are seeking structural reforms
.“What other people call racial microaggressions I call racist abuse. And I call the zero-tolerance policies preventing and punishing these abusers what they are: antiracist. Only racists shy away from the R-word—racism is steeped in denial” (Chapter 4). This is a good example where Kendi differs from other scholars, even some antiracist scholars. I appreciate this directness, and the opportunity it provides to consider and reconsider more perspectives than just Kendi’s.
“Looking back, I wonder, if I had been one of her White kids would she have asked me: ‘What’s wrong?’ Would she have wondered if I was hurting? I wonder. I wonder if her racist ideas chalked up my resistance to my Blackness and therefore categorized it as misbehavior, not distress. With racist teachers, misbehaving kids of color do not receive inquiry and empathy and legitimacy. We receive orders and punishments and ‘no excuses,’ as if we are adults. The Black child is ill-treated like an adult, and the Black adult is ill-treated like a child” (Chapter 4). These are lines I believe every teacher should read. They made me do some deep self-reflection on my own teaching practice. It was not entirely comfortable, and one thing I really appreciate about Kendi’s book, so far, is that he is very open about his own evolution in thinking, never claiming he was born an “antiracist,” or even that he is always currently an “antiracist”. This fits with my own experience and philosophy of learning: if we use terms like “racist” and “antiracist,” as Kendi suggests, to describe behavior and thoughts, rather than as “dirty epithets” (to quote the Missouri letter), we can perhaps continue to evolve as people. That’s what learning is, and learning, by definition, requires us to leave our comfort zones, go exploring and attempt to be open-eyed about what we encounter.
“But there is no such thing as racial ancestry. Ethnic ancestry does exist. Camara Jones, a prominent medical researcher of health disparities, explained it this way to bioethics scholar Dorothy Roberts: ‘People are born with ancestry that comes from their parents but are assigned a race.” People from the same ethnic groups that are native to certain geographic regions typically share the same genetic profile. Geneticists call them ‘populations.’ When geneticists compare these ethnic populations, they find there is more genetic diversity between populations within Africa than between Africa and the rest of the world. Ethnic groups in Western Africa are more genetically similar to ethnic groups in Western Europe than to ethnic groups in Eastern Africa. Race is a genetic mirage” (Chapter 4). Again, it’s clear that what Kendi is saying about race is very nuanced: it is a socially or politically constructed category, not an objective, biological reality, and yet it is also real in the way it impacts groups and individuals.
I should say here that although I disagree with Adam Morgan on many things, I’ll give him this: he has been willing (at times) to engage with me in a (somewhat) good-faith debate about his ideas. And his argument seems to sometimes hinge on the idea that Kendi’s ideas aren’t what he wants to censor, but the “indoctrination” of children with those ideas. I don’t know that I agree with Kendi on everything in this book, but Kendi acknowledges frequently that there are differences of opinion even among scholars of race and among people who would call themselves “antiracist”. In the same way, Morgan presumably knows that there are many nuances and differences of opinion among actual scholars of Critical Race Theory. To “teach the controversy” (as proponents of teaching Biblical Creationism used to sometimes suggest) seems to be the opposite of indoctrination.
But, crucially, the “Freedom Caucus” and their allies aren’t actually banning “indoctrination”. They are banning books, concepts, and ideas. When they try to prohibit a specific kind of diversity training, as they are in Lexington One, they are preventing everyone in the district from receiving information, information the “Freedom Caucus” claims is based on Kendi’s idea of antiracism. If Morgan, the “Caucus,” or any other group truly objects to that idea— which Kendi repeatedly frames as the idea that people should strive to oppose racist ideas and policies against any group (an idea which even some of the admittedly self-contradictory language of the “Partisanship Curriculum” proviso explicitly states and requires) they should say so. They should say what they object to about the idea that it is good to oppose racism and bad to promote assimilationism or segregationism, or they should explain why their definitions of these terms differ from Kendi’s.
The idea that you are doing something racist should be uncomfortable to people with good intentions, and doubly so for people with good intentions who know they may be doing something racist.
While writing this, I came across this piece by Coleman Hughes, which engages with Kendi’s claims and uses Kendi’s actual words— both within the book and in interviews— to support its argument. I don’t necessarily agree with its thesis, but it demonstrates that if “Freedom Caucus” (or anyone else) wants to attack the book on its own merits, that’s doable. Anything can be attacked on its own merits; the danger is that by engaging in a real argument, you open yourself up to others attacking your argument, and to being put in a position where others will expect you to defend it. Book banners at large don’t seem interested in this process.
That process requires each person to read a book, then reflect on what the book says, and have honest conversations with themselves, and perhaps with one another, about what they really believe. One of the ways I know that “indoctrination” in schools is a fantasy is that I know how hard it is to get many students— a captive audience— to read, discuss, and reflect on even short pieces of literature.
One of Kendi’s main arguments— to which many anti-antiracists explicitly object— is that simply saying “I’m not racist” does not discourage or combat racist policies or ideas. Everything about my experience as a teacher and human being in America for the past four decades tells me this is true, and I can explain why. Would-be book banners likely aren’t trying to do the same because banning books, of course, is not about protecting anyone from indoctrination, but about ensuring that in what the courts call “the marketplace of ideas,” the book-banners have the monopoly on which ideas people can choose to believe or explore. If you have read Kendi’s book, I’d love to hear your reactions in the comments.
I plan to keep reading the book with an open mind, while it’s still easily available.
Further Reading:
Cineas, Fabiola. “Critical race theory, and Trump’s war on it, explained”. Vox. September 2020.
Coates, Ta-Nehisi. “What This Cruel War Was Over.” The Atlantic. June 2015.
Kendi, Ibram X. How to Be an Antiracist. Random House. 2019.
South Carolina Freedom Caucus v Lexington School District One. Case No. 2022CP3203931. Lexington, SC Court of Common Pleas. November 2022.
Erlichman is quoted in the article “Legalize It All,” by Dan Baum, which appeared in Harpers. A smaller part of this quote is cited in Chapter 2 of How to Be an Antiracist.
Another part ofJefferson Davis’ speech is quoted in “What This Cruel War Was Over,” an essay by Ta-Nehisi Coates written on the day of the removal of the Confederate flag in 2015, from the Capitol in my home state of South Carolina. By the logic of the “Freedom Caucus,” I may not be allowed to read this essay or even to discuss this topic with my students. The part of the speech I quote here seems like a great example of the greater purpose of racism that Kendi addresses in his book: to maintain a status quo that benefits certain people and groups. Davis suggests that a major benefit of slavery is that it gives oppressed white people a feeling that they are not at the bottom of the racial hierarchy, by creating an artificial distinction between themselves and enslaved Black Americans. This, to Kendi (and to me) is more significant than the “feelings” of individual “racism” which anti-antiracists focus on so frequently.
One example that springs to mind: in 1676, Nathaniel Bacon persuaded working class whites to rise up against the governor of the Jamestown Colony partly by scapegoating indigenous people. Bacon wrote, in a “Declaration” that included a list of grievances justifying the revolution, “For having protected, favored, and emboldened the Indians against his Majesty’s loyal subjects, never contriving, requiring, or appointing any due or proper means of satisfaction for their many invasions, robberies, and murders committed upon us.” (If I were to point out to students that 100 years later, in the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson would include a very similar grievance against the English crown— writing, “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions”— would that violate the budget proviso?)
As covered in this great ProPublica piece, anti- “woke” groups have shared “toolkits” with talking points opposing antiracism. For example, Tea Party Patriots shared this one, which early in the book cites a Ben Shapiro piece quoting the same page of Kendi’s book— the one about “antiracist discrimination”. The group “Parents Defending Education” uses the same quote in this explainer on “Understanding Woke Jargon, though they didn’t read the book— they’re citing that Coleman Hughes essay I share near the end of my piece. The also trot out the useful misrepresentation of Kendi’s words, writing, “In other words, supporting ‘antiracism’ actually means supporting racism — discriminating against people based on the color of their skin.” While it doesn’t explicitly mention Kendi, this “jargon” explainer from “Education Veritas” also gives a great example of the kind of misrepresentation at play. Moms 4 Liberty sites the same page (slightly different quote) in this guide. Clearly, much of the furor around books and content is shaped by a small number of voices— creating that very echo chamber the Missouri letter and the “Freedom Caucus” often pretend to despise.
The “Freedom Caucus” lawsuit reads, “What this law prohibits, in essence, is using state money to indoctrinate teachers and students in the theories of racial primacy, which ‘reject the philosophy of “colorblindness” as inherently racist’”
In his “I Have a Dream Speech,” King seems to be searching for a narrative around what could be called “antiracism” that will have a broad appeal. He went much further into the practicalities and need for fighting systemic injustice in other writings. But even here, he says things like “It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked insufficient funds.”