Kendi

Ibram Kendi is a cultural historian who won the National Book Award for nonfiction several years ago for Stamped from the Beginning. In this book he challenges deeply held and sometimes well-meant and progressive ideas about racism. He argues convincingly that even the strongest anti-racists have been infected with racism. I, of course, have been infected. Even people of color accept half-hidden racist beliefs that define black people as inferior. 

You may recall that President Obama once made a speech in which he pointed out that many black families have disintegrated--that they are in some ways inferior to the typical white family.  

Do white families set the standard that black families should try to meet? Or is there more than one way to build a good family?

Kendi's research goes back to Cotton Mather and the Founding Fathers, some of whom were very quietly opposed to slavery. Some argued in private  that people of color could be loving and loyal but not smart or creative, and that in compensation for these deficiencies, black people had been made more athletic and sexual. This ancient idea lives on today in the many jokes about male sex organs and "white men can't jump." 

The last ten winners of the men's Olympic high jump contest have been named Sotomayor, Wszola, Brumel, Drouin, Ukhov, Silnov, Holm, Klyugin, Austin and Avdeenko, two of whom are people of color.

Kendi has a new book: How to Be an Antiracist. In it he has written that the only way to fight racism "is to consistently identify and describe it--and then dismantle it."