My Review of How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
This is a work of striking clarity, moral urgency, and conceptual precision. With personal vulnerability and intellectual rigor, Kendi offers not only a compelling framework for understanding racism, but a moral invitation: to refuse neutrality. One of the book’s central contributions is its insistence that the binary between “racist” and “not racist” is false. In its place, Kendi proposes a more honest and active paradigm—racist or antiracist—rooted not in intention but in effect. This simple yet profound claim has reshaped how many of us think about our roles in perpetuating or resisting injustice. I am deeply grateful for the way Kendi articulates this binary and challenges readers to continual self-examination and societal engagement.
I also appreciate the book’s consistent grounding in policy and power. Kendi is right to point us away from vague moralism and toward the structural and political realities of racism. His emphasis on racist and antiracist *policies*—rather than just racist attitudes or feelings—helps us avoid both the paralysis of guilt and the complacency of performative allyship.
That said, I find myself lingering over one of Kendi’s deeper claims: that racism (and reality itself, to some degree) is reducible to power dynamics. Pragmatically, this is compelling. It sharpens analysis, energizes action, and situates racism squarely in the realm of the material and political. But ontologically, I hesitate. I am not convinced we cannot or should not dig deeper than the epistemological ground Kendi stands on. At times, his vision seems shaped by a Foucauldian lens, where all relationships and structures ultimately reduce to contests of power. While I acknowledge the usefulness of that analysis, I also believe there is a mystery beneath power—something like hegemony, desire, or even metaphysical longing—that Kendi leaves unexplored. Kendi has both feet planted in a substantive anthropology that elevates human agency to a position of indespenible normativity. For one (like me) who adopts a theological anthropology that sees human agency as secondary and responsive (both to divine agency and to systemic agency ((i.e. the Tilichian notion of the "demonic"))) Kendi's downwardly conflated ontology of power will not satisfy.
This limitation becomes particularly evident in his treatment of colorism. In places, Kendi seems to suggest the possibility of "reverse racism," a concept I find untenable. The impossibility of reverse racism is not rooted in a racist denial of Black agency or influence, as Kendi suggests, but in an understanding of the historical and ongoing reality of white hegemony. Racism is not merely about power in a general sense—it is about the ordering of society around whiteness, a hegemonic center that shapes everything from aesthetics to moral standards to political norms. That hegemony, I think, must be more deeply interrogated if we are to grasp the full texture of racism’s reach.
Still, I return to this book again and again with gratitude. Its honesty, structure, and insistence on transformation offer a powerful guide for those of us who wish to travel the long, hard journey toward antiracism. My critiques are not rejections but engagements—signs that the book has done what the best books do: invited thought, stirred reflection, and deepened the conversation.