Is it a racial crime for me to be myself?

Despite what monochrome Americans will tell you, some of the rest of us already have post-racial lives.

The prominence of Ibram X. Kendi in American institutions takes a further harmful turn with his ignorance of, and indifference to, the complex lives of people who are neither black nor white. The most egregious example is this passage, asserted with his book's characteristic absence of argument: "It is a racial crime to be yourself if you are not White in America. It is a racial crime to look like yourself or empower yourself if you are not White." (38)

I read those lines over multiple times and all I could think was:

What?

There's no footnote, no further explanation. All Kendi gives you as reason to believe these statements is his say-so, as someone who is not "White".

So, as someone who is also not "White" (by any standard actually in use), I am just as qualified as he is when I respond, from my own lived experience: these generalizations have no grounding in reality. They make no sense. They read like a fever dream.

I've been the victim of overt racial discrimination a half-dozen or so times in my life. More often than that, I've been judged on the basis of my skin colour by people like Jona Olsson who are aligned with Kendi's way of viewing the world, and use my skin colour to make false assumptions about the way I am. But even when that happens, it's an annoyance. Nothing about it comes even close to making my existence a "crime".

Now, Kendi himself isn't concerned with discrimination per se, but with policy:

Racism is a marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities…. Racial inequity is when two or more racial groups are not standing on approximately equal footing…. A racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups. (17-18)

But so then here's the thing, Ibram: I am on approximately equal footing with white people! My race hasn't made a difference to my life opportunities. Being born in Gen X rather than a Boomer or Silent, and therefore not having the academic opportunities previous generations had: that's made a difference. But race? Sure, there was the one guy, once, who I talked to on the phone about renting an apartment and who then, once he saw my skin colour, claimed the apartment was rented… so I went to another available apartment of similar quality and rented that instead. It was one guy. That wasn't structural inequity, it wasn't racist policy, it was one random redneck – and it was thirty years ago. The number of incidents like that in my life have been so close to zero as to be a rounding error – the very definition of "approximately".

So by Kendi's definition I haven't even faced racial inequity. But then to claim that being myself or looking like myself or empowering myself is a "racial crime"? You might as well tell me that I was born on Mars. You are making shit up, about me, that has zero grounding in my life experience or in any statistical evidence that could merit a generalization.

This point isn't just about me, or even just about other people like me whose experience Kendi ignorantly erases. It's about the future – for everyone. Kendi uses the term "post-racial" as a pejorative, seeing the idea as hopelessly naïve. But "post-racial" is absolutely not that for me. My life is already there! Or at least it was, before white do-gooders under Kendi's influence decided to start racializing things that were not racialized before. We are not yet at the point where black people can have the life experience I have had, in which racism is a minor detail. But we are at that point where half-white half-Asian people can have it. And that's what we should be building on, because it points so clearly to a better future. It's not only possible for brown people to have a post-racial life, it's something that actually happens. The question should just be: how can we get black people a life experience like mine?

Honestly, I am highly dubious as to whether the "crime" claim even makes sense as a description of black people's life experience. It doesn't seem to fit the way Thomas Chatterton Williams or Tyler Austin Harper describe their experiences, for example. Even in Kendi's descriptions of the racism he personally encountered, we primarily hear childhood instances of relatively minor disrespect – the sort that I got from my gym teacher, who dished out the same disrespect to my white friend. Nothing in them sounds to me like it was a crime for Kendi to be himself. (It certainly lends no credence to his implication that we must prioritize racism over all other issues.) But even if we assumed he is right that to be black in the US is a "racial crime", it would remain an absurd erasure to claim it's like that for everyone else.

Now I don't think Kendi actually had the experiences of people like me in mind when he wrote those lines. But that's exactly the problem: in the literally black-and-white racial discourse of the United States, it is assumed that anyone with any non-white blood is functionally black, even if, like me, you have as much white as nonwhite ancestry and no black ancestry. The white people will lump themselves into one category and you into a category with black people, because people like Kendi tell them, without evidence, that "people of colour" all have the same life experience in the relevant respects, irrespective of any inconvenient details like the truth.

Monochrome Americans see the world in black and white. (Image from Wikimedia Commons believed to be in the public domain.)

For these reasons the term monochrome American has recently started to creep into my vocabulary, to describe black Americans like Kendi together with the white Americans who have given him his perch. Those two groups have been at the centre of American racial discourse for longer than I've been alive, and they set the terms of that discourse in ways that often make no sense to the rest of us: East Asians, South Asians, Latinos, Native Americans. The fundamental monochrome American assumption is that, just as Kendi refuses to acknowledge any space between racist and antiracist, so likewise there is no space between black and white: if you have one drop of non-white blood, your ancestors might as well have been slaves. Your stories don't need to be told, because a black person knows everything about your experience and can speak for you. It's the job of the black person to tell the story and the job of the white person to amplify it. Everybody else should just shut up and let the important people speak.

It is illustrative, in that regard, that Kendi consistently uses the term "Latinx" to describe people who hate being called by that term. He doesn't actually need to learn anything about them and their understanding of the world. By virtue of being black, he already knows. After all, there are only two kinds of people.

The closest that I've ever experienced to Kendi's claim being true, that it's a crime to be yourself as a non-white person, was entirely because of him and monochrome Americans who think like him. Kendi was clearly held up as the most prestigious professor at the university where I worked, the one who could tell us all how to think about race. At the same moment, many people were losing their jobs for contradicting black-and-white Kendist racial orthodoxy. Those were the policies that systemically made me, as someone whose very existence is a nuanced distinction, feel the need to hide that existence away. I had considerable reason to fear that if I was myself, if I did empower myself, if I did tell my own story, then, like those others, I would lose my job, or at least find the job a lot harder to do with the scarlet R on my forehead.

There is thus considerable irony in this claim of Kendi's on the same page:

Race creates new forms of power: the power to categorize and judge, elevate and downgrade, include and exclude. Race makers use that power to process distinct individuals, ethnicities, and nationalities into monolithic races. (38)

Race created Kendi's power: the power to have millions of dollars thrown at him, dozens of people working for him who he proceeded to fire, thousands of credulous white people hanging on his every word. And he used that power to process my individuality into a monolith of experience that those white people now believe I share with him. He categorizes and includes me in his own racial experience, and he has the power to make white people believe that false inclusion. What Ibram X. Kendi is, in his own words, is a race maker. And those of us whose race he has made are sick of it.