{"id":435,"date":"2019-10-02T20:21:32","date_gmt":"2019-10-03T01:21:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.liminalearth.net\/?p=435"},"modified":"2019-10-07T09:17:33","modified_gmt":"2019-10-07T14:17:33","slug":"book-challenge-day-7","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.liminalearth.net\/?p=435","title":{"rendered":"Book Challenge: Day 7"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

On my last book challenge day, I continue my cheating ways by again sharing two books. These are by the same author, American University history professor Ibram X. Kendi<\/a>. They are Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America<\/em> and Kendi\u2019s most recent book, How to Be an Antiracist.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I read How to Be an Antiracist<\/em> first. This book is brilliant,\ntightly reasoned, and introspective. As I read, I found myself diving into my\nown self-reflection, then coming up for air to learn more about Kendi\u2019s ideas. Kendi\u2019s\nwillingness to share his own intellectual and emotional journey impels the\nreader to their own, sometimes painful, self-examination. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Stamped from the Beginning<\/em> is a history of racist ideas, and addresses questions like, Where did the anti-black racist ideas that bedevil American society come from? How did they develop and why? What makes them so powerful and persistent? Tracing the origins of these ideas from the beginnings of the European trade in enslaved African people, Kendi draws on the lives of five significant figures from American history to help us understand these questions, beginning with Puritan minister Cotton Mather (1663 \u2013 1728) and concluding with activist Angela Davis (1944 – ). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

On a personal, visceral level, I can\u2019t imagine the amount of stamina and determination that Kendi must have summoned as he spent years immersed in these repugnant, raw, and ugly justifications for the inhumanity of slavery, Jim Crow, and modern-day discrimination in his study of racist ideas. But he concludes that \u201cracial inequality is a problem of bad policy, not bad people.\u201d He says that racist ideas are rooted in the attempt to justify self-interested choices that have racist effects. So, for example, the expedient of kidnapping and enslaving people to provide cheap, expendable labor resulted in the need to reconcile these immoral actions with the Christian faith professed by most of the enslavers. From this, the huge, teetering edifice of anti-black racist thought in America evolved. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

We are often taught the Enlightenment notion that beliefs shape thoughts which result in actions–the ideal of reason as the basis of action. But Kendi\u2019s history of racist ideas reveals that this gets it exactly backwards. As you look at the sweep of history, human beings make choices and then develop thoughts and beliefs to justify them. Along those lines, I think of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn\u2019s dictum that ideology is what allows people to do things they know are wrong. To the contrary, for good or ill, it seems that acts ultimately create ideology, or at least reinforce it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kendi says that \u201ca racist idea is any idea that suggests one racial group is inferior or superior to another racial group in any way\u201d and an antiracist idea is essentially the opposite. He proposes that, in a racist society, it is not possible to be \u201cnon-racist\u201d in the sense of being “colorblind” or neutral as regards to race. Instead, the alternative to racism is antiracism. Further, all of us hold some measure of racist and antiracist ideas and attitudes, so to become more fully antiracist requires constant self-reflection and struggle. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On my last book challenge day, I continue my cheating ways by again sharing two books. These are by the same author, American University history professor Ibram X. Kendi. They are Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[89],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-435","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-been-readin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.liminalearth.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.liminalearth.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.liminalearth.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.liminalearth.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.liminalearth.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=435"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.liminalearth.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":440,"href":"https:\/\/www.liminalearth.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/435\/revisions\/440"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.liminalearth.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.liminalearth.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.liminalearth.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}