How to Be an Antiracist

How to be an Anti-Racist by Ibrahim X. Kendi

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The Post-Modern Mein Kampf.

I was not far along in reading this book when I had the oddest feeling that I had been down this road before. There was something about an author relying on his “lived experience” of oppression by racial enemies as unassailable evidence for his argument that was eerily familiar. Likewise, the endless coining of neologisms beginning with “race,” such as “race-gender,” “race-class,” and “race-sexualities,” put me in mind of terms like “race science” and “race traitors” to the point of nearly inducing nausea. When I got to the end of the book and author Ibrahim X. Kendi was describing “whiteness,” or “whites”- the terms were fairly interchangeable once the reader gets past a formulaic statement that he is not a racist, does not hold whites individually responsible for racism, and does not want his statements against “whiteness” to be considered racist – as a kind of “cancer” – two pages after saying the comparison was inappropriate – I was willing to throw in the towel, replace “white” with “Jew,” and declare “How to be an Anti-Racist” the finest updating of Mein Kampf in recent decades.

I get it. Kendi's wife had beaten off cancer and Kendi has always been obsessed with whites and their everlasting racism, whereas Hitler's mother died of breast cancer and was treated by a Jewish doctor with painful experimental drugs, perhaps kicking off his obsession with Jews. Some parallels are just too on the nose to ignore.

This is as toxic and hateful a book as the original German version. It speaks to the ignorance of our educated elites that they can't see the parallels to the race obsession of Nazi writers. They undoubtedly have never read Mein Kampf or anything by any Nazi. If they had, they would be able to spot the genre and tropes that Hitler pioneered.

Kendi's socialism – or anti-capitalism, which he calls “racial capitalism” in one of those endless, cloying, shallow neologism he favors – does not distinguish him from Hitler. Kendi writes:


Capitalism is essentially racist; racism is essentially capitalist. They were birthed together from the same unnatural causes, and they shall one day die together from unnatural causes. Or racial capitalism will live into another epoch of theft and rapacious inequity, especially if activists naïvely fight the conjoined twins independently, as if they are not the same. (Kendi, Ibram X.. How to Be an Antiracist (p. 163). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.)

But Hitler got there first. He explained that Marxism was deficient only in ignoring the significance of race:

The racial WELTANSCHAUUNG is fundamentally distinguished from the Marxist by reason of the fact that the former recognizes the significance of race and therefore also personal worth and has made these the pillars of its structure. These are the most important factors of its WELTANSCHAUUNG.(Hitler, Adolf. Mein Kampf: The Official 1939 Version (The Third Reich from Original Sources) (p. 251). Coda Books Ltd. Kindle Edition.)

It looks like Kendi has solved that problem.

Again, what struck me, as I think it would strike anyone who has read Mein Kampf, is the continuous biographical material. Just as Hitler wanted to say that although he grew into an anti-Semite because of his exposures to Jews in Vienna, he was still able as a precocious Volkisch child to discern something “off” about the only Jewish boy in his school, Kendi goes one better by having him as a third grader interrogate a white teacher about why there weren't more black teachers at his elementary school. All this while his parents stood by without embarrassment that their son was exposing that he had been raised in a race-obsessed household.

Allow me to voice some skepticism about Kendi's precociousness: I don't buy it. I can't imagine a nine-year-old thinking in this kind of cliched racist terms any more than I believe that Adolph Hitler was a burgeoning German nationalist at close to the same age. Obsessed people like to burnish stories about how precocious they were concerning their obsessions.

However, both men's invention/description of their journeys says a lot about where they mentally are at the time of their memoir. In Kendi's case – as in Hitler's – the racist is clearly seen. Kendi offers a lot to support this conclusion. In one of the more bizarre self-revelations, Kendi shares how he got interested in, and took seriously, the Nation of Islam's crazy weltanschauung that white people were a black scientists failed genetic experiment. This sets up a description of his conclusion as a college student based on reading occult race books – the same genre that would have been familiar to Hitler and to his circle - that white people are aliens:

“They are aliens,” I told Clarence, confidently resting on the doorframe, arms crossed. “I just saw this documentary that laid out the evidence. That's why they are so intent on White supremacy. That's why they seem to not have a conscience. They are aliens.” (Kendi, Ibram X.. How to Be an Antiracist (p. 134). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.)

Thank heaven, his roommate laughed at him, but Kendi went on to write an article for his college paper that included:

Wrapped in this tornado, I could not escape the fallacious idea that “Europeans are simply a different breed of human,” as I wrote, drawing on ideas in The Isis Papers. White people “make up only 10 percent of the world's population” and they “have recessive genes. Therefore they're facing extinction.” That's why they are trying to “destroy my people,” I concluded. “Europeans are trying to survive and I can't hate them for that.”(Kendi, Ibram X.. How to Be an Antiracist (p. 135). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.)

Kendi now says something about the idea is “fallacious,” but apparently the fallacy is that describing Europeans as a “different breed of human” is too simplistic. Even today, when Kendi is seemingly trying to show that he has moved beyond such simplistic racism, the structure of the relevant sentence indicates that he believes that Europeans are at least a “different bread of human,” but that there is certainly more than that which needs to be said.

This is nutty stuff. We might chalk it up to being a college student, but if, when I was in college, I had known a white student in college who obsessed about reading this kind of nonsense and writing papers like this, I would have considered that person to be a weird, ignorant racist. The fact that Kendi went off to a segregated Black Studies program which involved many of the same ideas wrapped up in academese do not convince me that he “got better.” You can see this in his defense of racial segregation on the grounds that protecting “black spaces” contributes to “racial equity.”

Another, a weird “tell” is how he describes his daughter as “my nearly two-year-old Black girl” (p. 235) It seems that in Kendi's world racial identity – black – most definitely takes precedence over her family relationship to him. He doesn't use the term daughter, which is the most intimate thing he can say about her. Instead, his daughter's blackness is enough. That is psychotically ideological, almost the polar opposite of Whittaker Chamber's rejection of Communism while holding his daughter in his arms and contemplating God's design of her ear.

There is also Kendi's name change. Kendi was born Ibrahim Henry Rogers. Clearly, sometime after college, he dumped the name his beloved parents had given to him for the purpose of being more authentically African. This is only a mild inference. Throughout the book, Kendi confesses his obsession with African authenticity to the extent of confessing his “color-racism” against lighter-skinned black women. This is the guy who white leftists are turning to for advice on how to be an anti-racist?

The final weirdness is Kendi's revival of the concept of “racial memory,” something which Nazi Ideologist in Chief called “Race Soul,” which is a neologism that Kendi missed. Kendi calls this “deep structure.” Deep structure seems to be something that is racially preserved somehow which pops out and restructures artificially imposed culture for an authentic African culture. Kendi explains:

“Those surface-sighted eyes have historically looked for traditional African religions, languages, foods, fashion, and customs to appear in the Americas just as they appear in Africa. When they did not find them, they assumed African cultures had been overwhelmed by the “stronger” European cultures. Surface-sighted people have no sense of what psychologist Wade Nobles calls “the deep structure of culture,” the philosophies and values that change outward physical forms. It is this “deep structure” that transforms European Christianity into a new African Christianity, with mounting spirits, calls and responses, and Holy Ghost worship; it changes English into Ebonics, European ingredients into soul food. The cultural African survived in the Americans, created a strong and complex culture with Western “outward” forms “while retaining inner [African] values,” anthropologist Melville Herskovits avowed in 1941. The same cultural African breathed life into the African American culture that raised me. (Kendi, Ibram X.. How to Be an Antiracist (p. 86). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.)

This discussion comes after Kendi's observations about African American culture:

“I HATED WHAT they called civilization, represented most immediately by school. I loved what they considered dysfunctional—African American culture, which defined my life outside school. My first taste of culture was the Black church. Hearing strangers identify as sister and brother. Listening to sermonic conversations, all those calls from preachers, responses from congregants. Bodies swaying in choirs like branches on a tree, following the winds and twists of a soloist. The Holy Ghost mounting women for wild shouts and basketball sprints up and down aisles. Flying hats covering the new wigs of old ladies who were keeping it fresh for Jee-susss-sa. Funerals livelier than weddings. Watching Ma dust off her African garb and Dad his dashikis for Kwanzaa celebrations livelier than funerals.” (Kendi, Ibram X.. How to Be an Antiracist (p. 85). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.)

So, dashikis for Kwanzaa and renaming oneself “Kendi” are really about a “deep structure” of black psychology, never mind that Kwanzaa was invented in the early 1970s.

Alfred Rosenberg would have agreed. He was concerned with the authentic Nordic racial soul and not with Catholic/Christian artificiality. Rosenberg wrote:

A racial soul instinct creates works of a gifted, uncaptivated kind. It takes a far reaching hold on its environment, and autocratically alters its lines of power. When Wotan was dying and we sought new forms, Rome appeared on the scene. When the Gothic had ended its lifeline, Roman law and humanist priests of art appeared who sought to cripple us by application of new standards of value. With the rediscovery of Platon and Aristoteles, with the first discoveries of Hellenic works of art, the Nordic spirit, during a time of searching, seized upon the newly found art but with it also its late Roman falsification. (Rosenberg, Alfred. The Myth of the Twentieth Century: The Myth of the 20th Century; Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts; An Evaluation of the Spiritual-Intellectual Confrontations of Our Age . . Kindle Edition.)

As I noted Kendi offers some formulas that white people can grab onto to reassure themselves that Kendi really is not racist. He defines “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.” (Kendi, Ibram X. How to Be an Antiracist (p. 24). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.) The definition of “racial groups” being “equals” does not mean “integrated” or “identical.”

The reader has to be careful with Kendi's use of words. Kendi takes words and twists them in ways that would have done justice to the efforts of Arian Christians trying to pass as Trinitarians without actually being Trinitarian. As with the ancient heretics, it takes some critical thinking to unspool what Kendi is hiding. For example, Kendi 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. “He acted that way because he is Black. She acted that way because she is Asian.” We often see and remember the race and not the individual. This is racist categorizing, this stuffing of our experiences with individuals into color-marked racial closets. An antiracist treats and remembers individuals as individuals. “She acted that way,” we should say, “because she is racist.” (Kendi, Ibram X. How to Be an Antiracist (p. 44). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.)

This seems promising but it really isn't. Kendi repeatedly generalizes individual faults to an entire race, so long as the race is white. This is what Kendi is doing when he writes:

“THE DUELING WHITE consciousness has, from its position of relative power, shaped the struggle within Black consciousness. Despite the cold truth that America was founded “by white men for white men,” as segregationist Jefferson Davis said on the floor of the U.S. Senate in 1860, Black people have often expressed a desire to be American and have been encouraged in this by America's undeniable history of antiracist progress, away from chattel slavery and Jim Crow. (Kendi, Ibram X.. How to Be an Antiracist (p. 33). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.)

It sure looks like Kendi is taking the behavior of an individual white man – Jefferson Davis (who lost a war to determine how American culture would be shaped) - and is attributing that man's statements to the entire white race.

Kendi does this repeatedly. For example:

“But the statue attracted a middle-aged, brown-haired, overweight White guy. Clearly drunk, he climbed onto the tiny stage and started fondling Buddha before his laughing audience of drunk friends at a nearby table. I had learned a long time ago to tune out the antics of drunk White people doing things that could get a Black person arrested. Harmless White fun is Black lawlessness.” (Kendi, Ibram X. How to Be an Antiracist (p. 203). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.)

Really? Always? Everywhere? And doesn't that look like generalizing the behavior of white individuals to all whites?

Likewise, he writes:

“At Oneonta, Whiteness surrounded me like clouds from a plane's window, which didn't mean I found no White colleagues who were genial and caring.”(Kendi, Ibram X. How to Be an Antiracist (p. 217). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.)

That seems very similar to what people have traditionally called “stereotyping” or “racial bigotry.”

Here's another one:

“Racist Americans stigmatize entire Black neighborhoods as places of homicide and mortal violence but don't similarly connect White neighborhoods to the disproportionate number of White males who engage in mass shootings.” (Kendi, Ibram X.. How to Be an Antiracist (p. 169). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.)

This is a lie, incidentally, if you are using the same metric used to argue that “more” blacks are killed by cops than whites, i.e., as compared to their proportion of the population. You can look it up. Black mass shooters make up 21 of 121 mass shooters between 1982 and 2021, which makes the black proportion (17%) more than their percentage of the population (13%.) Whites are underrepresented (52% of the total.) But the fact that it is a lie does not stop Kendi from trading in stereotypes, despite his claims to the contrary.

Kendi's definition of “antiracist” is absurdly question-begging. He actually incorporates the word to be defined into the definition. He writes:

“So let's set some definitions. What is racism? Racism is a marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities. Okay, so what are racist policies and ideas? We have to define them separately to understand why they are married and why they interact so well together. In fact, let's take one step back and consider the definition of another important phrase: racial inequity. (Kendi, Ibram X.. How to Be an Antiracist (p. 17). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.)
Racial inequity is when two or more racial groups are not standing on approximately equal footing. Here's an example of racial inequity: 71 percent of White families lived in owner-occupied homes in 2014, compared to 45 percent of Latinx families and 41 percent of Black families. Racial equity is when two or more racial groups are standing on a relatively equal footing. An example of racial equity would be if there were relatively equitable percentages of all three racial groups living in owner-occupied homes in the forties, seventies, or, better, nineties.
A racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups. An antiracist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial equity between racial groups. By policy, I mean written and unwritten laws, rules, procedures, processes, regulations, and guidelines that govern people. There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy. Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity between racial groups.” (Kendi, Ibram X.. How to Be an Antiracist (p. 18). Random House Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

A policy is racist simply because it produces a racially inequitable result. A racist is simply someone who does not object to racially inequitable results. Seriously, what does this mean?

This is inane and suggests that Americans are not getting their money's worth from Black Studies majors. Kendi cannot really be serious about his definition. Let's take the example of professional sports. Blacks are overrepresented in professional football and basketball. If we take Kendi seriously, our silence on this racial inequity makes us racists. In fact, since Kendi is silent on this inequity, he is a racist.