To the Editor:
While Eboo Patel does not call Ibram X. Kendi the modern-day equivalent of a Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan as Republican flavor-of-the-month presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy did recently, Patel similarly turns Kendi (along with Robin DiAngelo) into a caricature, and then attacks the caricatures as a bad influence on academia’s efforts to cultivate diversity, equity, and inclusion (“Today’s DEI Is Obsessed With Power and Privilege,” The Chronicle Review, September 6).
Although I too am uncomfortable with some of the evangelizing in Kendi and DiAngelo, that does not prevent me from appreciating Kendi’s definition of an “antiracist” as one “who is expressing an idea of racial equality, or is actively supporting a policy that leads to racial equity or justice.” Nor does it blunt my general agreement with DiAngelo’s definition of race as “an evolving social idea that was created to legitimize racial inequality and protect white advantage” — especially since DiAngelo proceeds to sketch the history of the word “white” when it is used in law and custom to define who has and who does not have access to certain privileges.
A lot of what Kendi and DiAngelo write is valuable because it is empirical in the sense that it offers conclusions rooted in fact and open to revision as new evidence becomes available and perspectives evolve.
I view “antiracism” as a variety of a truth-seeking and insecure empiricism that admits that truth can never be fully grasped by a human. I view the Appiah-style cosmopolitanism that Patel champions similarly. I nod along as Patel spotlights Appiah’s pleasure in “walking down Kingsway Street, the main commercial thoroughfare in Ghana’s Ashanti’s region, and enjoying his interactions with Indian, Iranian, Lebanese, Syrian Greek, Hungarian, Irish, English, and various other groups.” I even agree a little when Patel concludes, “diversity means different identities relating pleasantly.”
But I never forget that Kendi being attacked as a Klan Grand Wizard by Ramaswamy is also an example of interaction across racial (and political — dare I say, intersectional) identities. No empirical approach can allow cross-racial attacks and one-upsmanship to be eclipsed by Kwame Appiah walking down Kingsway Street.
This is why I would never impose a DeSantis-style ban on Kendi’s How to Be an Anti-Racist or DiAngelo’s White Fragility, since the ban would cause the loss of much wisdom armored in fact, along with some things that drift into the territory of leveling ideology.
An example of the latter that provides a grain of truth for Patel’s argument is DiAngelo’s presumption that the proper response to a white person who asks, “How do I tell so-and-so about their racism without triggering white fragility?” is to ask, “How would I tell you about your racism without triggering your white fragility?” What if DiAngelo were asking this question of someone who meets the definition of “antiracist” set forth by Kendi? What if she were to ask it of a modern-day Viola Liuzzo, the white Civil Rights activist shot dead by the Ku Klux Klan after driving other activists to the Montgomery, Ala., airport on March 25, 1965? What if, in short, DiAngelo were to ask her question of someone before whom it would be wiser for her (and me, a Black person who has benefited from courage like Liuzzo’s), to kneel?
The real antiracism is an empiricism that never forgets that almost no conclusion is free of error, and that every conclusion and even every definition must be regularly gone over with a fine-toothed comb and probably revised. (Kendi himself has felt the need to revise his definition of “antiracism”).
The cure for DEI dogmas that get mindlessly moved around like refrigerator magnets, as Patel points out, is homework, homework, homework: homework that requires grappling with questions like the following: Is “antiracism” the sort of wrench you need to take the bolts out of some persistent structural inequality as it exists in, say, Flint, Mich.? If so, use it. But might Kendi-style antiracism make that structural inequality last longer? If so, throw the Kendi-wrench back in the toolbox, and pick up Appiah’s cosmopolitanism, or pick up Bidenomics, or Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, or Derrida’s deconstruction — whatever works
Michael Collins
Associate Professor
Department of English
Texas A&M University
College Station
