If you want someone to do something, a good way to make it happen is to tell them not to do it. This is essentially what happened when the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) removed How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi from his reading list last year. I was actually quite proud of CNO Admiral Micheal Gilday when he defended his decision to add it in the first place against a group of senators who called him “woke”: “Sir, I’m not a theorist; I’m the Chief of Naval Operations,” Gilday responded. “What I can tell you is, factually, based on a substantial amount of time talking to sailors in the fleet, there’s racism in the Navy, just like there’s racism in our country. And the way we’re going to get after it is to be honest about it, not to sweep it under the rug, and to talk about it—and that’s what we’re doing. And that’s one of the reasons that book is on the list.” Bravo, CNO. Then he quietly removed the book without comment; as they say in Germany, Schade (too bad).
Anyway, I decided read the book and decide for myself. This well-written book accomplished what few others have done; it made me think. (It also made me ask if those who railed against it had actually read it). A well-researched and readable story of one man’s journey to wrestle with his own history and that of America, arriving at conclusions that were new to me and sometimes required me to make little drawings and diagrams to sort out concepts and understand his points.
Kendi makes readers uncomfortable by looking at racism in a very pragmatic way. Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people, but the silence over that by the good people.” This concept is built upon by Kendi when he challenges us to choose between “racist and anti-racist” and asserts that “there is no middle ground.” This hit home for me personally; for most of my life I would have called myself a “non-racist” and felt pretty good about it. Not so fast, says Kendi, “choose one side or embrace the other.” This seems to make some folks uncomfortable (which I think was the point!). But why is this different for racism than, say, rape? Most of us would say we are anti-rape; it would not suffice that we are non-rapists. As my friend Keith Green has stared “You can’t have racism without racists, just as you can’t have rape without rapists.” This reinforces Kendi’s point that to understand the issues you have to look not just at policy, but at individual people. His perspective—that of a Black man growing up poor in the city—is very different from mine. But isn’t that the point of reading? Racism has victims; if one is a victim of a crime, is it “playing the victim card” to say so? Why should racism be different? In the end, as President George Bush stated in his speech on terrorism, “You are either for us or against us.” There is no middle ground.
Kendi does make me wince when he calls out “white people” as a monolithic group, but he turns the same scrutiny on Black people, even himself, acknowledging that racism is not just a “white thing,” and that it can be transitory—one can be racist one day and antiracist the next. He points out an unpopular truth: When our founding fathers wrote that “all men are created equal,” they left out a key word—white. But that is what they meant. To call that out is not “un-American” as or “Critical Race Theory” the book’s critics may assert; it is reality—and history. One could expand this idea to other areas such as sexism. Are we against it, or for it? A female officer I know relayed a story where one male shipmate called her a “bi***” in the company of another man—who simply walked away. Did the second individual later congratulate himself for being “non-sexist”? Or does his silence make him complicit, and thus sexist? I think I know what Kendi would say!
Even if you ignore the rest of the book, the following point makes the read worth the time investment:
“In the end, the word “race” is totally out of place in this conversation . . . the only true “race” is the Human Race. This book is ultimately about the basic struggle we are all in, the struggle to be fully human and to see that others are fully Human.”
Right or not, I do not lose sleep over what books are—or are not—on the CNO’s reading list. In fact, the very idea of someone else telling me not to read something is an anathema. But I am glad the controversy brought it to my attention; reading Kendi’s book made me think about old concepts in a new way and taught me a new vernacular to as well as a new way to approach my fellow humans—and I am better for it. Read it and decide for yourself!
