Guardian Review

A vital study offers a way out from the 'tangled disingenuousness of mainstream narratives around racism'. I once considered outing a manager at work as a racist. I hesitated from the discomfort of embarking on such action, an unwillingness to fall into the category of victim, and because of the potentially serious consequences for the manager to be so labelled. I also knew that it was near impossible to prove; the racism was covert, though obvious to me. But in the end, I pulled back for a more prosaic reason: I realised that the boss to whom I'd have to report my assessment was more obviously racist than the offending manager. It's a mark of the transformative and unsettling power of Ibram X Kendi's writing that I relaxed into How to Be an Antiracist with the comforting and self-righteous knowledge that the title was not addressing me. After all I am black; I couldn't possibly be racist, could I? By the book's end, I wasn't so sure. Donald Trump has made the assertion repeatedly that he is the "least racist person in the world". But Kendi, the founding director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University in Washington, DC, argues that a minimum requirement for claiming antiracist bona fides is not to deny that which is palpably true. He highlights how Trump and his enablers have often countered criticism with "the white-supremacist idea that calling something racist is the primary form of racism". How to Be an Antiracist offers a way out from the tangled disingenuousness of mainstream narratives around racism. Whether you're an institution such as the BBC, fumbling editorially in determinedly refusing to describe Trump as a racist, or an individual in moral paralysis, dumbfounded by the febrile emotions now at large in a resurgence of racist attitudes, you are not alone; hope is on its way. At its simplest, the book argues that to be an antiracist is to take an active and persistent stance against racism. In Kendi's conception, words and phrases that obscure the offence - unconscious bias, microaggressions and others - should make way for clearer-eyed definitions. Rather than institutionalised racism, which always takes some unpacking from the abstract, let's call out the active ingredient: racist policy. Kendi believes that "we become unconscious to racist policymakers and policies as we lash out angrily at the abstract bogeyman of the 'system'". But it's not just white people whose prejudicial thoughts and actions have been affected by racism. Kendi places himself front and centre of the argument, exploring how black people, too, have been seduced by racist ideology, owning up to his misguided adoption as a youth of the "virtuous/reprehensible black man" dichotomy, in which he distanced himself from those African Americans considered to be unworthy and guilty of letting down the race. The teenage Kendi avoids stepping on the "kicks" (trainers) of other black boys "like they were landmines". Fed on noxious mainstream media tropes and propaganda about "ghetto blacks" and the "growing army of super-predators", he describes being "stalked inside my head by racist ideas". Poor racist whites have also been "played" by the establishment, buoyed, writes Kendi, by the notion that "I may not be rich, but at least I am not black". In the 1960s, US president Lyndon B Johnson expanded on that pitiable belief: "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best coloured man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." Writing calmly but insightfully in a series of brisk chapters, Kendi teases out the evolution of racism - from its historical underpinning and providing cover for the "civilising mission" of slavery and colonisation, through to the present, so-called "academic achievement gap" between black and white students, and the allegedly neutral standardised tests that serve as "the linchpin of a racist idea of behavioural racism". Ultimately, racism is not the product of hatred and ignorance but, rather, the design of "racist power [to exploit] out of raw self-interest", Kendi asserts. He cites cynical voter registration suppression techniques as a clear example in the 2000 presidential election of George W Bush, which was determined by the disqualification of thousands of votes from black people in Florida. In the course of How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi moves from his rigid framework and selective perception of the inequalities endured by black people as primarily explained through the prism of race; he's increasingly inclined towards the view held by Martin Luther King Jr - espoused in his Poor People's Campaign - of the intersection of racism with capitalism. Further, to be an antiracist is to challenge spurious (if perhaps well-intentioned) notions such as the "culture of poverty", which allegedly traps impoverished black people in dependency - in opposition to, and ignorant of, the "culture of work". "We can't let these conversations devolve into the impotent simplicity of who is or isn't a racist," said the African American senator Cory Booker in the aftermath of the mass shootings in the US cities of Dayton and El Paso. Booker spoke movingly of this "moral moment" at the Emanuel AME church in Charleston, where four years ago a white supremacist shot and killed several of the congregation. Echoing Kendi's call to action, he argued: "If the answer to the question 'Do racism and white supremacy exist?' is yes, then the real question isn't who is or isn't a racist, but who is and isn't doing something about it?" This vital book asks those same age-old questions: When does silence become complicity? Why do we fear taking action more than the devastating consequences of inaction? Kendi's writing is a search for a language to enable the antiracist that resides in all of us. Towards the end, the 37-year-old scholar draws on the analogy of fighting the colon cancer that has threatened his own young life. How to Be an Antiracist encourages self-reflection on the compelling truth: "Racism has always been terminal and curable."