The good news is you already are! You're reading this post. A racist wouldn't.
Don't let mean old Madame DiAngelo (who reminds me of Madame Defarge) chop off your common sense. And don't let Preacher Kendi persuade you all inequality springs from racism. Don't let either make you feel you have to "learn a great deal about" yourself because of your skin color. The content of your character remains the thing to think about.
A good friend had the sense to throw the DiAngelo book across the room, but still admitted, "I just want to be a better ally." That made me want to yell, "But sweetie, you've been a good ally your whole life!" Words and phrases to
brush off your shoulders: "microaggressions," "structures of
oppression/white supremacy/power," "white privilege." When they're
tossed your way, remind yourself--and the person tossing them--that
we're people, not victims and oppressors. That racism does not define America; it is one of America's problems. That we share a common humanity. Skin color is not what must define us.
Except: When you witness racism or bullying. The kind of thing Isabel Wilkerson describes in Caste: a black historian seated in first class, she has to contend with a white man refusing to move his bag. He's put where he's not allowed to put it--and loudly complains about how "they let in anybody" even though, he bellows, he's paid to be where he is. If you want to be a better ally, do the right thing, whatever the right thing is in the moment. If it's to yell at the white guy, do it. If it's to give your seat to the woman being bullied, do that. When you see a non-white friend being attacked--as all too many Asians are in the wake of the morally bankrupt former president--step in and make your presence felt. You'll figure out in the moment what's best; you'll be aware that being passive is wrong.
If you want to transform a racist into a reasonable human being, that's harder. That takes persuasion, maybe even preaching. Preaching's been exploited all too effectively by DiAngelo, who's channeling Jonathan Edwards (A blogger quipped: "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Broad") and Kendi, whose line when any inequality crops up is "what else could it be?" His sermon, "it's always racism" is misguided. It was racism on Isabel Wilkerson's plane. It isn't racism in my home or my classroom.
Preaching might even work with a very few racists, but I prefer the Socratic method, even when it doesn't get you very far. "Why do you feel that way?" is my favorite question. They might just get angry, but you've at least raised the question they haven't raised for themselves. The answer is usually, "I've always thought that way and I'm not gonna change." Maybe they won't. But maybe they will. Don't give up on them completely. Not even on the ones who want a white history month. Talk to them. The white guy yelling at Wilkerson in first class because he doesn't think black people belong there? Yell back. Or find a way to make him feel he's absurd.
For yourself, one thing to do besides continuing being the decent person you've always been is to read and learn the histories you didn't know. Another good friend said, "I didn't even know about the Tulsa race massacre until two years ago!" She said it as if she'd lived next door to a crematorium, smelled the smoke, and pretended the stench was roses. But she really just hadn't known, and now she does.
If you're on the fence regarding free speech versus allowing critical race theory to be taught in schools, read this:
https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzGkZQTBNHxwFSQTFNRLfmhKhtdF
Cards on the table: try not teaching that anywhere, least of all in a university. Here's Thomas Sowell's take on current black culture and why white liberals are making things worse:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JtyoNSmOYzo
A brief, incisive take on the term "white privilege":
https://cathy.arcdigital.media/p/the-problem-with-white-privilege
If you're a parent or employee of a large corporation who's read Ibram X. Kendi's How to Be an Anti-Racist, you should know the following:
(1) Calling racism and capitalism "conjoined twins," Kendi charges $20,000 per speaking engagement.
(2) In September, 2020, he tweeted about Amy Coney Barrett's adopted Haitian children, suggesting she was a colonizer:
Attacking someone's family is low. I'm no fan of the latest Supreme Court Justice appointee, but as a mother can imagine and sympathize with her agony at facing this gratuitous, disingenuous attack. Character shows in actions, and this one reveals who Kendi is.
(3) He's proposing a constitutional amendment to end racism: his guiding principle, that all inequality is the result of racism, would result in discrimination against any high-achiever perceived as creating inequality or profiting from an ill-defined inequality. His language, below, is again stirring, but entirely vague:
An interesting discussion of ways in which systemic racism does exist:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WD6aoUCQ21w
See this fabulous young artist on how she escaped wokeness:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5Ak5uEcDUQ&t=193s
Summarizing what's misleading in Kendi's argument: https://heterodoxacademy.org/blog/why-ibram-kendis-antiracism-is-so-flawed/
Why Robin diAngelo's book is good for keeping table legs from wobbling (but nothing else): https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/07/dehumanizing-condescension-white-fragility/614146/
On so-called critical race theory in schools: Here's a recent discussion of versions of what's called "CRT" in schools: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wplt3RpyKoc&t=1465s
Read. Here are some recommendations, a very partial list, in alphabetical order:
Fay Botham, Almighty God Created the Races: Christianity, Interracial Marriage, & American Law (University of North Carolina, 2009). Botham focuses on the ways in which Catholic and Protestant theologies influenced race law in America. The appropriately-named Lovings, the couple whose marriage was not rendered legal until the Supreme Court decision of 1967, are pictured on the cover.
Sarah L. Delaney and A. Elizabeth Delany with Amy Hill Hearth, Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years (Delta, 1993). Sisters born to enslaved parents combat racism.
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845)
http://mrbecker9.weebly.com/uploads/4/8/5/7/4857123/frederickdouglassfulltext.pdf
This is a portrait of what slavery does to identity-- to the feeling of manhood and of self-determination.
James Forman, Jr. Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America. (Abacus, 2017).
Drew Gilpin Faust, ed. The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830-1860. (Louisiana State University Press, 1981). Unabridged selections from the works of the proslavery apologists. Why read racists? It's a good idea to keep your enemies closer than your friends. Understand what the bad guys thought and why they thought it--why some still think it. Understand the intellectual similarities between these old-fashioned racists and the current crop of "anti-racist" or neo-racist ideologies. Curious similarities to the thinking of Ibram X. Kendi and Robin di Angelo may be found.
James Henry Hammond, Secret and Sacred: The Diaries of James Henry Hammond, a Southern Slaveholder, ed. Carol Bleser (Oxford UP, 1988) The "Cotton is King" defender of slavery, he raped his own nieces as well as his slaves. It's unnerving to read these diaries in which he recounts his misdeeds with no embarrassment and no regret, but doing so will inform you about the way one highly influential racist thought. And about beliefs that sustained, and sustain, those who think like Hammond.
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937; Amistad, 2006) A coming-of-age novel. Richard Wright and several male members of the Harlem Renaissance hated it for telling too much--for showing rural African-Americans, their beliefs, their accents, their way of life.
______________, Barracoon: The Story of the Last Slave, ed. Debra G. Plant (HQ, 2018). Too controversial to be published in Hurston's lifetime, this is her ethnographic work on one man's life, revealing forms of slavery that existed within Africa between various tribes.
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)
https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/jacobs/jacobs.html
Jacobs wanted to show what slavery did to women; her account reveals the destruction of the family, both white and black, the attack on motherhood, rape and sexual exploitation.
Margo Jefferson, Negroland (Vintage, 2016) Jefferson's memoir about growing up in a community of professional, well-educated African-Americans. It wasn't a picnic. Here's a review: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/11/books/review-negroland-by-margo-jefferson-on-growing-up-black-and-privileged.html
Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird (1960).
https://www.uek12.org/Downloads/TKAM_Full_Text.pdf
Yes, read this endlessly controversial novel. It's a realistic portrait of the South in the nineteen-thirties and long after. Because Atticus Finch is often seen as a "white savior" is no reason not to know that only a white lawyer could have halted persecution of a black defendant in the pre-civil rights era and long after. This novel is a portrait of the Jim Crow world. But here are some of (many) alternate points of view:
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/why-are-we-still-teaching-kill-mockingbird-schools-ncna812281
and
https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/2091589-6-reasons-to-not-teach-it
Here's a rebuttal of that line of thought:
https://www.cram.com/essay/The-Role-Of-The-White-Savior-In/FJE36JBGPR
Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States (Norton, 2018) Direct, comprehensive, balanced. Incisive on the inspiration for the American revolution in rebellions of enslaved peoples.
Heather Mac Donald, The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture (St. Martins Griffin, 2018).
John McWhorter, Nine Nasty Words: English in the Gutter, Then, Now and Forever. (Avery, 2021). Yes, one of them in the "n-word," the one that tortures academics. Just when I think of something I want to tell students about Allen Ginsberg, it's there--or its cognate--and I've already read it. There are those who say nuance and intention don't matter. But nuance and intention are among the most important aspects of friendly, civilized conversation.
McWhorter is brilliant; his substack, "It Bears Mentioning,"
https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/
and his podcasts with Glenn Loury are terrific. Loury just did an interview with the unfairly reviled Charles Murray, who is not the "white supremacist" the Southern Poverty Law Center deems him, but a thoughtful, scholarly, witty man:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wqgUclg7-Lk
Margaret Mead, James Baldwin, A Rap on Race (Delta, 1971) If you can get it--and it appears to be out of print--this conversation between the anthropologist and the writer reveals much about Americans and race in the sixties and earlier.
Anne Moody, Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968; Dell, 1976). A sharecropper's daughter, Moody risked her life on many occasions for the civil rights movement. This is her very moving story.
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (Vintage, 1970, 1999) Morrison's first novel, about a young girl made to feel ugly because of her dark skin.
Nell Irvin Painter, The History of White People (Norton, 2010) Comprehensive, brilliant.
____________, Creating Black Americans (Oxford, 2005)
Peggy Pascoe, What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America (Oxford UP, 2009). An all-encompassing study of miscegenation law in America. The cover photo, of Harry Bridges begging a clerk to allow marriage between himself and Noriko Sawada, his Japanese fiancée, is heartbreaking.
Adam Rutherford, How to Argue with a Racist: History, Science, Race and Reality. (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2020). Facts are delicious when they let you tell your racist relative he's descended from the ethnic group he reviles. Read this book and feel ready to do so.
James Shapiro, Shakespeare in a Divided America (Faber&Faber, 2020). Especially the chapter on miscegenation.
Thomas Sowell, Intellectuals and Race (Basic Books, 2013)
Shelby Steele, White Guilt: How Blacks and Whites Together Destroyed the Promise of the Civil Rights Era (Harper Perennial, 2007)
Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). The classic anti-slavery text.
With the original illustrations:
https://twain.lib.virginia.edu/huckfinn/huckpix/huckpix.html
It's worth getting The Annotated Huckleberry Finn, by
Michael Patrick Hearn. (Norton, 2001). On the controversial use of the word appearing more than 200 times in the text, see Michiko Kakutani:
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/07/books/07huck.html
Harriet A. Washington, Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medial Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (Anchor, 2006) You may have only heard of the Tuskegee syphilis study. Read this.
Gloria Wade-Gayles, Pushed Back to Strength: A Black Woman's Journey Home (Beacon, 1993). Growing up black and female in the Jim Crow South.
Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (Vintage, 2010) The History of African-Americans moving to the north. National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction.
____________ Caste: The Lies that Divide Us (Allen Lane, 2020) See her great Ted Talk, too. The book itself starts with a great idea--that American racism is a caste system like the Indian one--but devolves into anecdote, assertion, and oversimplification. Wilkerson is a very good writer, but this book should have been shorter.
Peter W. Wood, 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project (Encounter, 2020). An incisive, witty response to the ideological excess and scholarly failures of the 1619 project. There are others, I hasten to say, but this one's particularly well-written.
Howard Zinn, On Race (Intro. by Cornel West) (Seven Stories, 2011)
_________, A People's History of the United States (Harper Collins, 1980) This one's been accused of extreme bias--in some quarters seen as a "Marxist" reckoning with American history, omitting important events in order to present the nation as being founded in exploitation. But you might also see it as a history of the underdog, of those whose stories haven't been told, of the people whose names only mattered to themselves (as Edwidge Danticat once said of Haitian boat people trying to survive).
