Racism, Intersubjectivity, and Multiple Selves

Interviewed by Hari Shreenivasan on Amanpour and Company, February 14, 2020, the author of How to Be an Anti-Racist (2019) Ibram X. Kendi understands the multiplicity of selves. Racism is structural says Kendi. It is not about a person’s make up (no such thing as a ‘racist bone’) but instead is about ideas and actions. Kendi eschews essentialism and says, “No one becomes a racist or even an anti-racist. It is a reflection of what a person is doing in each moment. And people change. And so if, in one moment, a person is saying that a particular racial group is inferior, they’re being a racist. In the very next moment, if they’re supporting a policy that’s leading to equity and justice, they’re being anti-racist. There are so many people with both racist and anti-racist ideas who support racist and anti-racist policies and because of that we can’t label them one or the other permanently. We can only say what they’re being in each moment.“  

[One might say Kendi is a phenomenologist, determining by an observable outcome or effect whether a person or a policy is racist. The disparities in health care, criminal justice, employment, banking and real estate practices, education, and income all speak to racist politics at the local and federal levels. It is not biology, but racist policies which incur distinct disadvantages to people of color.]

When Kendi notes that “...striving for anti-racism is an ongoing journey” I think about how precariously we all hold intersubjectivity; The tension held between subject-to-subject relating and subject-to-object relating always finds us falling to the side where we treat others like objects, thus we struggle to right ourselves atop that tightrope again, holding that tension.

Kendi posits that to say ‘I am not a racist’ is insufficient. To relegate this part of one self to the Not-me vitiates one’s capacity to self reflect on the possibility of holding, inadvertently or otherwise, racists ideas or having racist actions. Moreover, Kendi encourages that each of us move actively toward articluating and embracing anti-racist views and policies and toward actively fighting inequities. 

Kendi, a historian at American University, won the National book Award for Nonfiction in 2018 for Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America.