Dr. Ibram Kendi’s “How to Be an Antiracist” is intended to be a relatively simple and straightforward book, which is both its strength and weakness. The book begins with a number of definitions: “antiracism”: ideas, policies, and practices that counteract racist ideas, policies, and practices; and racism: ideas, policies, and practices that create or maintain disparities between races. A nuance that Kendi brings, is the important addition to the analysis of part of the reason people who appear to be of 100% European descent continue to be in a position to have an undue impact on our lives as Black people, i.e. racism, is that racism creates these disparities by expressing itself in two different forms: segregationist racism and assimilationist racism.

I read these electronically but they are so good I wanted the actual copies. Beginning in Vol 1 and showing how the British further developed the idea and use of “race” in their “planting” of British people in Ireland in the 12th-13th century colonializing process (where we in the U.S. got “plantation”). Allen details a strategy refined in England that creates a positively racialized buffer class that then protects the ruling class from the negatively racialized group at the bottom of the society, which in the above-mentioned case was the Irish. In the U.S., this group would be Black people and other non-White people. This oppression then allows the class oppression of the positively racialized group (British Protestants in this case) and, in Allen’s framework, becomes the way in which the racial oppression of the negatively racialized group intersects with the national oppression of the positively racialized group.

A Strategy For Labor: A Radical Proposal by Andre Gorz (1965)- The idea of the “non-reformist reform” or “structural reform” has helped me see a way to think about projects such that we could shape them as Afro-Socialist even though they are being formed in the middle of capitalist organizations and structures. Gorz wanted to create a middle step for socialism between (1) programs that don’t fundamentally challenge the main ideas of Cedric Robinson called “racial capitalism” and (2) full out armed revolution or waiting for capitalism to fall in on itself. Option (a) is essentially more of the same, a treadmill, and option (b) in the militarized state of the 60’s, let alone today, was not possible. So, Gorz had this idea of creating projects that contained the elements that if they were to be implemented at a grander scale would dramatically shift a society away from capitalism and towards socialism. Strategy for Labor poses all critiques of capitalism that are intended to make it a more socially beneficial society as essentially socialist, which offers us a path to imagine what it might mean to be a socialist in the current moment, although that expansive definition could capture people as socialist who do not want to be defined as such. However, A Strategy for Labor has the limits of European Socialism…

The Peoples Institute for Survival and Beyond (PISAB) has the best definition of ‘race”. Period. Dot. Came across it again today while doing my homework assignment (See prior post.). See it below…

Through work this past year with Grantmakers in the Arts on racial equity, I had the opportunity to take a couple of two-day anti-racism workshops with The People's Institute…