Friday, October 23, 2020

Review: How to be an Antiracist

How to be an Antiracist by Ibram Kendi was one of those books I felt like I had already read, even though I had not. Now that I actually have read it, I feel like I was right about his central thesis. I still learned a few things along the way.

I've seen people blame Kendi for California's new racial quota for the boards of publicly traded companies, saying it's an example of people taking his ideas and foolishly running with them. But if you read his book, this is exactly the type of thing he argues for: present discrimination to combat past discrimination. It's obvious that these critics have not read his book. I just want to grab their shoulders and shout "He's not Marting Luther King Junior, okay? He is transparent in his arguments for something more aggressive!"

The best criticism of the book is from Coleman Hughes. I am going to try to be more charitable.

I'm going to break my review into the parts where I agree, with some criticism; the parts I think he gets wrong; and finally the overall issue I have with this movement.

The Good

"To be antiracist is to recognize the reality of biological equality, that skin color is as meaningless to our underlying humanity as the clothes we wear over that skin... To be antiracist is to also recognize the living, breathing reality of this racial mirage, which makes our skin colors more meaningful than our individuality To be antiracist is to focus on ending the racism that shapes the mirages, not to ignore the mirages that shape people's lives."

"Singular-race makers push for the end of categorizing and identifying by race. They wag their fingers at people like me identifying as Black -- but the unfortunate truth is that their well-meaning post racial strategy makes no sense in our racist world. 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 ruling races and classes to keep on ruling."


I thing there is a general misunderstanding in certain circles about the idea of color blindness. I agree with Kendi that you can never not see color. But when people talk about being color blind, I think they just mean they strive to see past it. 

The way Kendi describes race is like Plato's allegory of the cave. Yes, we know those shadows on the wall are not reality. But if everyone lives as if they are real, we have to work within that framework.

The first bolded part references an earlier part of the chapter dealing with the Human Genome Project, which determined that all humans are 99 percent the same. He later states that "[Assimilationists] fail to realize that if we stop using racial categories, then we will not be able to identify racial inequity."

I think he's right that, even if we could become color blind, it would do nothing to repair the harm done by past racist policies. But here it sounds like Kendi is saying that since humans of all races are nearly biologically identical, there should be no inequity in a world without these racist policies. The problem with that, as I see it, is that culture still matters. And as long as America is a multicultural society, there will be different outcomes among our numerous cultures, which can map pretty well onto race.

Why are Asian Americans among the most successful ethnic groups? We know it can't be race, and unless you can identify racial policies that uphold Asian Supremacy, you're stuck with the only other answer: culture. And when research shows that Asians do things like spending 15 percent of their income on additional educational services when the average household spends only 2 percent, or this New York Times story about how many Asian students "come from families that have scrimped on essentials like food to pay for test prep," you start to come to the conclusion: you can either have ethnic equality or you can have multiculturalism.

Immigration

I was always dubious of Coleman Hughes' writing here:

"The second natural experiment involves comparing the outcomes of black immigrants on the whole with the outcomes of American blacks (i.e., blacks descended from American slaves.) Although black immigrants (and especially their children, who are indistinguishable from American blacks) presumably experience the same ongoing systemic biases that black descendants of American slaves do, nearly all black immigrant groups out-earn American blacks, and many—including Ghanaians, Nigerians, Barbadians, and Trinidadians & Tobagonians—out-earn the national average. Moreover, black immigrants are overrepresented in the Ivy Leagues."

 Kendi comments on this same phenomenon, writing:

"studies studies showing Black immigrants are, on average, the most educated group of immigrants in the united states.... 
"Not all individuals migrate, but those who do ... are typically individuals with an exceptional ineral drive for material success and/or they possess exceptional resources."

Indeed, now I have my answer. It's selection bias. Kendi seems to suggest that when you control for variables, African immigrants do worse than non-black immigrants. I'd have to look at the data set, but he might be right.


Language

Kendi spends a chapter talking about ebonics and how America teaches that it is the wrong way to speak and to be civilized one needs to learn they way white people speak, or Standard Written English, an idea he believes is racist. I think Standard Written English was developed as a way of signaling one's highly-educated status, rather than race. But I think it provides a different and important value today.

In that sense, I both agree and disagree with Kendi. David Foster Wallace described the phenomena of language and dialect best:

"there are all sorts of cultural/geographical dialects ... with their own highly developed and internally consistent grammars, and that some of these dialects' usage norms actually make more linguistic/aesthetic sense than do their Standard counterparts...
"When I'm talking to RMers (Rural Midwestern) I tend to use constructions like 'Where's it at?' for 'Where is it?'and sometimes 'He don't' for 'He doesn't.' Part of this is a naked desire to fit in and not get rejected."

Regional dialect is incredibly important to social development and should not be discouraged or thought of as uncivilized. However, especially in a multicultural society, having a "standard" for language is incredibly important for communicating with people outside one's specific culture.

As someone who grew up in the Northeast and spent years living in the Appalachians of Virginia, I can tell you that there is no one way white people speak. When I talked to my family and my Virginia co-workers talked to their families, it was very different from the way my co-workers and I talked with one another at work. Knowing a standard, universal grammatical structure allows one to navigate a complex and diverse society such as America.

Moral Suasion

"Moral and educational suasion breathes the assumption that racist minds must be changed before racist policy, ignoring history that says otherwise. Look at the soaring White support for the desegregated schools and neighborhoods decades after the policies changed in the 1950s and 1960s. Look at the soaring White support for interracial marriage decades after the policy changed in 1967. Look at the soaring support for Obamacare after in passage in 2010."
This was a tough pill for me to swallow. Kendi's argument is essentially, "forget civil discourse and making friends. Force through your policies." I hate the means, but it's hard to argue against those ends.

Is public opinion downstream from policies?  I remember how angry people were when states started banning smoking in restaurants, which is now quite popular. In fact, a reversal would probably be unpopular.

However, the 1994 crime bill has gotten more unpopular with time. Legalizing abortion has not made it a less polarizing issue. Desegregating schools might be popular now, but a lot of that has to do with white flight and discriminatory housing/zoning policies that segregated communities anyway. And most of those communities lose their shit when anyone tries to build low-income housing, showing how little we've moved on segregation. 

But with other race issues, Kendi might have a point. I have to think about this more.

The Bad

Spaces
"Comparing spaces across race-classes is like matching fighters of different weight classes, which fighting sports consider unfair. Poor Black neighborhoods should be compared to equally poor White neighborhoods."
Kendi goes on to write that everything from businesses to colleges should be comparing apples to apples. And he's right, which is why I think it's foolish to look at the racial wage gap and not control for these factors. Sure, there is a huge gap. White men have most of the wealth, but that's mainly because Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffet, and Mark Zukerberg have most of the wealth. So it's really not comparing apples to apples.

Wilfred Reilly has shown that controlling for something as simple as geography can make most of the gap disappear. Black people are overrepresented in the south, which has lower wages (accompanied by a lower cost of living) and drags down the aggregate wage.

While he never comes out and says so, it seems that Kendi defines inequity by comparing black people to white people. I see two problems with this. First, if this is a white supremacist culture, someone forgot to tell Asian Americans. When it comes to things like earnings, educational attainment, incarceration rates, etc., there is a gap between them and everyone else, including whites and blacks. If the goal is total racial equality, shouldn't we be comparing everyone to them?

Second, when it comes to wealth/earnings, I'm kinda okay with inequality as long as we take care of everyone (which we don't). I just don't think it's the healthiest thing to measure, which I'll get to later.

Families
"millions of liberals and conservatives aghast at the growing percentage of black children being born into single-parent households in the 1970s and 1980s - aghast even though my dad turned out fine. The panic around the reported numbers of single-parent households was based on a host of faulty or untested premises..."
In extreme cases, like one he gives about an abusive, father, of course it is better for that child to be raised alone by his mother. But just because Christians promote the nuclear family, doesn't mean it's wrong. 

This Brookings report shows that if you are born into poverty and raised by your married parents, you have an 80 percent chance of climbing out of it. If you are born into poverty and raised by an unmarried mother, you have a 50 percent chance of remaining stuck. I feel like the data on this is clear and Kendi is 100 percent wrong to find it faulty or untested. So yes, families do matter.

Kendi notes that Charles Murray, among others, blames this phenomenon on the welfare system. Kendi blames it on married families having fewer kids (not sure how he reaches this conclusion). Christians blame it on black families turning away from Christ. 

But there is another explanation that I'm surprised Kendi missed. Surprised, because it blames the racist US government. It has to due with an out-of-balance gender ratio caused by mass incarceration. 

Racial Hierarchies

Kendi writes: 

"A racist idea is any idea that suggests one racial group is inferior or superior to another racial group in any way."
"We practice ethnic racism when we express a racist idea about an ethnic group ... Ethnic racism, like racism itself, points to group behavior..."
I totally agree with these ideas, which is why I cannot for the life of me understand how racist ideas like these can pass by, unchallenged, by Antiracists:

The Ugly 

One idea I struggle with is how much to hold accountable powerful people for the unintended influence they have over extreme fringe individuals. He comes across as more tepid and reasonable than many of the louder proponents of wokeism; but I don't see him calling people out for taking his ideas too far, like the National Museum of African American History and Culture I linked to above. And maybe it's wrong to expect him to.

The problem with the racist/antiracist world view is that fanatics will adopt it wholesale.

Consider shutdownstem.com:
"Our research papers turn into media releases, books and legislation that reinforce anti-Black narratives.
"For Black academics and STEM professionals, #ShutDownAcademia and #ShutDownSTEM is a time to prioritize their needs— whether that is to rest, reflect, or to act— without incurring additional cumulative disadvantage."
So now some STEM students, instead of studying science, technology, engineering, and math, believe it is their job to produce racial equity. 

Well, maybe they just mean a certain portion of STEM can make antiracism their mission and everyone else can keep on building things and finding life-saving vaccines. Nope.
"Those of us who are not Black, particularly those of us who are white, play a key role in perpetuating systemic racism ... Unless you engage directly with eliminating racism, you are perpetuating it ... #ShutDownAcademia and #ShutDownSTEM is the time for white and non-Black People of Color (NBPOC) to not only educate themselves, but to define a detailed plan of action to carry forward."
To be fair, they do make an exception for those working on COVID-19 solutions. Everyone else needs to "get to work."

"Racist"

I don't know if Kendi intentionally chose to redefine "racist", traditionally a pejorative term, to mean something broader,  knowing most people still think of "racist" as a pejorative term.

The tweet above is actually a reference to the phrase "defund the police" but it gets at the same idea that I'm talking about. Most people aren't familiar with Kendi's work and will hear his readers toss the word "racist" around and think it means, well, kick puppies. I don't think Kendi intentionally did this so he could call anyone who isn't an antiracist activist an emotionally-charged word like "racist." But I do have to wonder if he knew the effect this would have on his more aggressive followers.

When describing his white teacher who only called on white kids, he writes: "I wonder if her racist ideas called up my resistance to my Blackness and therefore categorized it as misbehavior..." I can't help but think he's using "racist" here the way pretty much everyone else uses it, in the pejorative sense. 

I just don't think it's wise to take a phrase that has a "kick puppies" emotional reaction and just decide to use it to mean something else and expect everyone to go along with you calling them a puppy abuser.

Neutrality

"A racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups.... There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy."
The other issue I have is with the concept creep of labeling anything that isn't antiracist activism as racist. I probably overuse this reference, but Scott Alexander best showed the absurdity of this approach:
"Murderism” is the ideology that murdering people is good and letting them live is bad. It’s practically omnipresent: 14,000 people are murdered in the US each year. That’s a lot of murderists, and a testament to the degree to which our schools teach murderist values....
For years, people have been pushing “soft-on-crime” policies that will defund the police and reduce the length of jail sentences – inevitably increasing the murder rate. Advocates of these policies might think that just because they’re not gangsters with knives, they must not be murderists. But anybody who supports murder, whether knife-wielding gangster or policy analyst – is murderist and responsible for the effects of their murderism.
Murderism won’t stop until people understand that it’s not okay to be murderist. So next time you hear people opposing police militarization, or speaking out in favor of euthanasia – tell them that that’s murderism and it’s not okay."
Alexander is, of course, being facetious. But he's showing how you can take any ideology and frame it in such a way that it sounds like there are only two types of people: those who support my simplistic, unequivocally good idea and those who are murderists and racists supporting bad things like murder and racism.

Here are examples of antiracism in practice that do not make sense. If my town changes the speed limit on my street from 30 mph to 25 mph, since that would sustain racial inequity, that would make it a racist policy. If a school decided to suspend two white kids each month, by lottery, that would be antiracist, since it would reduce racial inequity. Despite the policy being literal racism.

Let's say there are two policing reform options. Under one, the number of citizens of each race who are killed by police will be reduced by 10 percent. Under the second option, the number of black citizens killed by police will be reduced by 5 percent, with the killing of every other race staying the same. According to Kendi's vision, antiracists would have to choose the second option, even though fewer blacks die under the first option. Not to mention the fact that fewer total people die under the first option. In fact, choosing the first option, which does not reduce equity, would be racist.

Earlier I mentioned that white men have most of the money because, of the few people who have most of the money, they are all white men. Matt Yglesias explains why this distinction is important.
"You could, in principle, try to ameliorate the resulting racial wealth gap by making the wealthy elite more racially diverse — a strategy that would do nothing to help the vast majority of non-white people. Alternatively, you could try to narrow the gap between rich and non-rich people, which would help the majority of people of all races."
In other words, an antiracism solution would seek the first strategy, leaving our massive inequality in place.

Cart Before Horse

In my town, antiracists are pushing to stop the police department from using video surveillance because it disproportionally impacts people of color. This is my other problem with Kendi's vision of antiracism; it causes people to conflate cause and effect and treat the symptom rather than the disease.

*Video surveillance is not causing the arrest of people of color. People breaking the law is what is causing them to get arrested; the video is just making it easier for police to catch them. This is the type of shit that makes MAGA heads start frothing from the mouth and grunting "LAW AND ORDER!" 

I am more interested in addressing the policies and issues that cause certain people to be more likely to turn to a life of crime. This type of nonsense is not only ineffective but more likely to get authoritarian backlash.

This is what people mean when they say they are sick of identity politics. I think it is a mistake to base one's ideology on how a policy affects one racial group compared to another racial group, rather than whether the overall human condition is improving. 

And I am in favor of things like major police reform (ending the war on drugs, civil asset forfeiture, and qualified immunity) that will unwind the disproportionate effect on black communities, zoning laws that hoard opportunity from disadvantaged groups, and baby bonds that could narrow the wage gap. I just don't think those things will totally wipe away inequity in a way sufficient for the "present discrimination" Kendi's vision calls for because some outcomes are more complex than simply blaming it on racism. I prefer policies that improve the human condition rather than ones that improve one's lot compared to another's.

I think most people will agree that at least some of the racial inequity today is the result of past racist policies, so it makes sense to be aware of the impact current policies have on those inequities. Antiracism is a useful lens for analyzing policy. My main criticism is not of antiracism itself, but those for whom antiracism has become their only lens. I hope I have demonstrated how the idea is flawed, which is not to say it's useless.

*edit: After reading more, it appears that research shows facial recognition software has a higher false positive rate for darker skinned people. In that case, count me in for supporting the ban.
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