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<\/a>Author and historian Ibram Kendi, at right, greets Bates President Clayton Spencer and Christopher Petrella ’06 of the Office of Equity and Diversity on Oct. 23. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\n
\u201cWe have to be conscious of it on a regular basis in order to not be that way anymore,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Kendi was at Bates to give a talk titled \u201cHow to Be an Antiracist.\u201d It\u2019s a prescription he\u2019s abundantly qualified to offer. Professor of history and international relations<\/a> at American University, he\u2019s also the founding director of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American.<\/p>\n Moreover, Kendi wrote Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America<\/em>, which was awarded the 2016 National Book Award for Nonfiction, making Kendi the youngest scholar in 30 years to receive that honor.<\/p>\n Bates President Clayton Spencer, who described Stamped from the Beginning<\/em><\/a> as a \u201cgut renovation of our collective thinking about race,\u201d welcomed a large audience to Gomes Chapel for Kendi, who offered a 50-minute talk as well as subsequent Q&A and booksigning sessions.<\/p>\n Introducing Kendi was Christopher Petrella \u201906, associate director of programs for Bates\u2019 Office of Equity and Diversity. Petrella\u2019s generous preface concluded with an apt quotation from the abolitionist Frederick Douglass (who, he noted, spoke in Lewiston at Bates’ invitation in 1874): \u201cPower concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.\u201d<\/p>\n Historian and author Ibram Kendi, left, chats with Kingdell Valdez ’19 of North Andover, Mass. Valdez met Kendi during a session of the course “Introduction to African American Studies” on Oct, 23, prior to Kendi’s evening talk. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\n Once at the pulpit, Kendi responded with his own Douglass quote, one from 1874 that, he said, sums up the entire sorry history of racist thought: \u201cWhen men oppress their fellow men, the oppressor ever finds in the character of the oppressed, a full justification.\u201d<\/p>\n Kendi was pitch-perfect for the Bates audience. While steps to becoming an antiracist constituted the heart of his speech, he framed that checklist with arguments about American racism that were occasionally surprising and always thought-provoking.<\/p>\n \u201cHow and why did racist ideas become, literally, our common sense \u2014 in which racist ideas make sense to us, and antiracist ideas seem radical, extreme, and completely nonsensical and illogical?\u201d Kendi wondered.<\/p>\n \u201cHow and why did racist ideas become, literally, our common sense?”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n He said that writing Stamped from the Beginning<\/em>, which chronicles that ideological evolution over more than five centuries to the present, led him to a concept he calls the \u201cdual racial history of America\u201d \u2014 a dynamic process, like something from Newtonian physics but a lot harder on people. In this duality, every evidence-based effort to undo racism provokes a new and more sophisticated defense of racism.<\/p>\n Take, for example, the Jim Crow laws that followed the defeat of the South in the Civil War. And the proclamation of a \u201cpost-racial era\u201d following the election of the nation\u2019s first black president. Post-racism, Kendi said, is \u201cpossibly the most sophisticated racist idea ever constructed….It is a representation of every racist idea in history.\u201d<\/p>\n Following Kendi’s talk in the Gomes Chapel, Ella Fenderson, age 11, asks Ibram how elementary school students can talk about race in school, as her mother, Grace Kendall, director of design services for the Bates Communications Office, looks on. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\n He argued that ultimately there are only two causes of racial tension, or only two exits from any discussion of racism. Either the inferiority of some races to others is a true fact, or the existence of discrimination is. You can\u2019t have it both ways, or neither way.<\/p>\n So if you accept the premise of post-racism \u2014 that discrimination doesn\u2019t exist \u2014 then all that\u2019s left is the inferiority of one group or another. And away you go, down the road to growing your own personal racist beliefs, which are all the more convincing because you thought of them yourself.<\/p>\n In Stamped<\/em>, Kendi distinguishes between producers and consumers of racist ideas, and focuses on the producers. What motivates them? That led him to another key element in the talk, and one that stands conventional wisdom on its head.<\/p>\n It\u2019s commonly believed that ignorance and hate fuel racist ideas and ideologies, and those in turn are codified in racist policies. But just the opposite is true, Kendi said.<\/p>\n He argued that people implement racist policies to protect their own political, cultural, and economic interests and then, perhaps on the principle that the best defense is a good offense, deploy racist ideas to advance those policies.<\/p>\n Rakiya Mohamed ’18 of Auburn, Maine, poses a question to historian Ibram Kendi during a session that followed Kendi’s Oct. 23 talk at Bates. (Phyllis Graber Jensen\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\n \u201cIt shocked me to find that,\u201d he said, \u201cbecause of course I had been taught that historically, the main cradle of racism had been ignorance and hate.\u201d<\/p>\n Kendi noted that no group of people he studied for Stamped<\/em> considered their ideas racist. (And still today it\u2019s generally the racists who cry, \u201cI\u2019m not a racist.\u201d) \u201cPeople believed that black people were literally a different species of being that was closer to animal kind \u2014 \u2018That\u2019s not a racist idea, that\u2019s science.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Getting to the heart of his address, Kendi structured his rules for being an antiracist in a logical historical order:<\/p>\n Reject what “segregationist” ideas<\/strong>, ideas based on perceived functional biological distinctions between races. Kendi cited research from 2000, based on the genomic mapping of people representing five races, that showed that 99 percent of their genetic makeups were the same \u2014 and the remaining 1 percent was just scientists\u2019 reluctance to pronounce an absolute. \u201cThere\u2019s no such thing as biological races,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n Bolstering his case with more medical facts, Kendi took on the widespread belief that sickle-cell anemia is a \u201cblack disease.\u201d Instead, he explained, the disorder collaterally confers some resistance to malaria, and so is found more often among populations well-established in malarial regions \u2014\u00a0 not just in Africa. (A discussion about sickle-cell that Kendi had with his wife, a doctor, convinced her that a white child in her emergency room actually did have sickle-cell, despite the \u201cblack disease\u201d label.<\/p>\n Recognize that different races are equal culturally as well as biologically<\/strong>. \u201cA dominant strain within abolitionist thought,\u201d Kendi said, \u201cwas this idea that slavery, of course, was wrong \u2014 but one of the reasons it was so bad is because it was preventing black people from receiving the fruits of superior New England culture.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a>