Icon: enlarge
"Black Lives Matter" demonstrator in Kentucky: Kendi believes he has found a world formula.
Photo:
Chris Tuite / ImageSPACE / MediaPunch / AP
It is theoretically very easy not to become a racist: You have to treat every person as an individual.
And not as a member of a group or as a bearer of certain characteristics that are ascribed to one's skin color.
Actually banal.
But the problem is: even assuming that everyone would behave like this - would racism have disappeared from our world?
Rather not.
It is deeply embedded in institutions and anchored in political, economic and cultural structures.
Individual good behavior will not simply make it go away.
How to deal with this circumstance?
This is one of the big questions of our time.
Not only in the USA, where racism divides society as it has not for decades.
Also in Europe: "Black Lives Matter" has long been a European slogan, many took to the streets here after the murder of George Floyd.
There is a deep desire to know more about racism among non-blacks and blacks alike.
This is why "How to Be an Antiracist" by the American historian Ibram X. Kendi should also be one of the books of the hour in Germany. In the USA, it was on the New York Times bestseller list for weeks.
Ibram X. Kendi is an interesting guy.
He is 38 years old and one of the US humanities shooting stars.
He is currently building the new "Center for Antiracist Research" at Boston University.
Three years ago he published his award-winning study Branded, A Great History of American Racism.
Icon: enlarge
Author Ibram X. Kendi: Shooting Stars of the US Humanities
Photo: Michael A. McCoy / The Washington Post / Getty Images
Contrary to what the title suggests, "How to Be an Antiracist" is not an instruction manual.
The analysis actually consists of two books: A classic autobiographical development novel that tells how a young Afro-American everyone learns on his life path to understand and discard his racist view of other people.
Embedded in it is a theses-like non-fiction book that is saturated with numbers and reports on American racism in the past and present.
How he refuses to leave and what needs to be done about it.
Kendi wrote an important book - and a problematic one at the same time.
In the autobiographical section, Kendi tells how he grew up as a child of the new black middle class and kept making the same mistakes: looking at alleged gang members with fear, mocking small-town blacks when his family moved from New York to the countryside.
Remarkable openness
He describes the contempt that the civil rights-era Afro-American generation has for the hip-hop generation.
She accuses them of dragging their legacy in the mud with their vulgarity - a "racist" attitude for Kendi, since it is based on a devaluation of all African-Americans who have not succeeded in advancing.
Kendi also portrays the mutual aversion between African Americans and African immigrants.
With openness and honesty, Kendi traces these feelings - and because he describes himself as an average person, the result is a picture of US society that is fundamentally poisoned.
Whether white, black, Hispanic or Asian, man or woman: Everyone carries racism within them.
more on the subject
Icon: Spiegel Plus Jasmina Kuhnke tweeted against the right: "I saw through you" by Dialika Neufeld
Icon: Spiegel Plus Unconscious Discrimination: When Whites Talk About Racism By Eva Thöne
This is a different scenario than Robin di Angelo depicts in "White Fragility", the other successful book of the Black Lives Matter era.
While Di Angelo starts with the guilty conscience of the white middle class and limits himself to locating racism as an eternal evil in the minds of whites, Kendi has a more comprehensive view of things.
Man's aversion to strangers may have always existed.
The fact that it is attached to skin color is a European invention of the 15th century.
It was then that racism emerged, along with capitalism, to legitimize the slave trade.
It became a system of rule that has eaten its way into almost everyone's mind, including those of people who are discriminated against.
For Kendi there is only racism and anti-racism.
This conflict dominates society, no neutrality is possible in it, no life as a "non-racist".
Everywhere, starting with the equipment in schools, blacks are at a disadvantage; he finds himself in the tests that decide on university access.
Kendi proves all of this with figures and historical background knowledge.
more on the subject
Icon: Spiegel PlusIcon: Spiegel PlusRassismus: The Virus of ContemptA guest contribution by Zadie Smith
Racism has spread like a cancer in the US, he writes - and because Kendi always illustrates his argument with stories from his life, it is also his own cancer that serves as a picture for him.
Including chemotherapy, with which he conquered the disease.
But this is where the book becomes problematic.
Because, as against cancer, only the most difficult means would help against racism.
In the book, Kendi remains vague about what this medicine might look like.
"Teams" should be sent out to track down and fight racism.
In an article for "Politico", however, he recently stated what he meant exactly: The government should set up an anti-racism department that would consist of experts and should have the right to object to any political decision - and could also take disciplinary action.
The American constitution must be changed for this.
Which is a pretty bizarre fantasy: a group of anti-racist political commissioners should get the last word in the political decision-making process?
Revolutionary Guards oversee American MPs at work and punish anyone who refuses to go along with their ideas?
Such plans tie in with the totalitarian thinking of the 20th century.
display
Ibram X. Kendi
How To Be an Antiracist
Published by btb Verlag
Number of pages: 416
translated by: Alina Schmidt
Published by btb Verlag
Number of pages: 416
translated by: Alina Schmidt
Buy for € 22.00
Price query time
09/20/2020 10:37 p.m.
No guarantee
Icon: Info
Order at AmazonIcon: amazon
Order from ThaliaIcon: thalia
Product reviews are purely editorial and independent.
Via the so-called affiliate links above, we usually receive a commission from the dealer when making a purchase.
More information here
It is understandable that a mistrust of liberal democracy cannot do any harm, given the history of racism in the USA - but the good has never been forced.
And there is something else.
The political counterculture is currently dominated by American ideas to a greater extent than ever before, not even in 1968: The so-called identity politics, for example, is a child of American society, which is much more organized than European societies along communities.
The USA has always been a country of immigration.
"Black Lives Matter" is a response to racism, which in the USA is deeply connected to the history of slavery.
All of this can only be applied with difficulty to Europe.
There is racism here too.
But it just has a completely different story than in the USA.
Black Germans are often the children of American soldiers in the West, and often children of African students in the East.
Or they are migrants.
Of course they are exposed to racism - but anti-black racism is not the basis of the German social contract.
It exists and has always been.
But it is thwarted by many other power structures.
In fact, the biggest objection to "How To Be An Antiracist" would be that Kendi, that great critic of the US, only knows the US himself.
In relation to American society, his analysis works.
But he repeatedly claims that what is true for America also applies elsewhere.
Kendi believes he has found a world formula - and it doesn't exist.
Icon: The mirror