Book In Review
The Anti-Fascist Book Club opened its new book with the introduction and the first chapter of Ibram X. Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist, and spent most of the hour on a single question: what the words mean. Nick anchored the discussion on Kendi’s “note on racism and racist,” a correction the author added to the paperback edition after using the two terms interchangeably in the hardcover. Kendi’s distinction, as Nick read it, is structural: racism “connotes power, policies and ideas” and is institutional, systemic, and plural, while racist “connotes a power, a policy or an idea” and is individual or singular. Kendi’s own revision — changing “internalized racism” to “internalized racist ideas” — became the panel’s model for how to hold a position and still correct it. Tara noted that she would not have chosen this book herself, which is precisely why she thought she needed to read it.
From there the panel tested the definitions against the introduction’s autobiographical opening, where Kendi recounts delivering a Martin Luther King Jr. oratory speech at a high school named for Confederate general Stonewall Jackson, and later recognizes his own award-winning speech as a vehicle for racist ideas about Black people. Nick read the passage where Kendi writes that racist and antiracist “are not fixed identities” and that what we say and do about race “in each moment determines what — not who — we are.” Both hosts extended Kendi’s framework outward: Nick argued that the same inferior/superior logic underwrites ableist, classist, sexist, and anti-LGBTQ+ policy, citing Nieta Greene of Disability Community for Democracy — in the chat during the stream — for the position that one cannot be antiracist without also being anti-ableist. Tara connected the definitional work to policy, using school funding through property taxes as an example of a mechanism that produces “good schools and bad schools” without ever naming race. She also read Kendi’s quotation of Lyndon Johnson on hobbling a runner with chains and then declaring the race fair.
The through-line of the episode was passivity. Nick read Kendi’s argument that colorblindness “is a mask to hide when someone is being racist,” and volunteered that he had bought into colorblindness himself in college before learning the difference between equality and equity. Tara framed the current backlash — the dismantling of the Voting Rights Act, and what Nick described as a Louisiana ruling ending anti-discrimination policies in schools — as evidence that racism is not over rather than proof that it is. Both hosts landed on the same practical instruction: give yourself grace for a system you did not build, and accept accountability for what you do inside it now. That is the frame the club carries into the rest of the book, and Nick closed by saying he intends to invite additional voices — and, if possible, Kendi himself — into the coming weeks’ discussions.
Books Mentioned
How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi — One World / Penguin Random House
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