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.

This is my current reading project. My eldest son, Kufere, gave it to me for Christmas at my request. And boyeeeeee: Long sentences. Long paragraphs. 19th century economics…

As President Obama leaves office, it was a strange walk down memory lane to read Slavoj Zizek's "First As Tragedy, Then As Farce", a 160 page…