Author: Ibram X. Kendi, with illustrator: Ashley Lukashevsky
Title: “Antiracist Baby”; Subtitle "Picture Book"
Publication: Kokila (Penguin, Random House), ISBN 978-0-593-11050, July 2020, 27 pages, heavily illustrated.
I picked up this book at Target today on impulse.
The book comprises a poem with illustrations, and two pages of advice for parents.
It’s a little odd to name a newborn child “Antiracist Baby” as if that were a legal name. He does say that racial attitudes are “bred”, not inborn. And that babies must be taught that there is no neutral ground between racism and anti-racism. You can’t be Sweden or Switzerland during WWII.
One idea is that children who grow up in largely all white neighborhoods need to be taught intentionally that race is a major concept in our society even if it is a social construct and not scientific. He says children should not expect to be “color blind” but should be able to name what race (or possibly other intersectional group?) a person belongs to, and that categorization of people, which was taboo twenty years ago, is necessary today.
The book does distinguish between “equity” and “equality of opportunity”, the latter foreclosed by collective (and government-adopted) policy choices.
Bret Weinstein effectively reviews new book by Ibram X. Kendi, Be Anti-racist
DarkHorse Podcast Clips with Bret Weinstein offers what amounts to a book review of Ibram X. Kendi’s “Be Antiracist: A Journal for Awareness, Reflection and Action”, from One World, Oct. 2020.
The philosophy of the book forces everyone into a binary state. There is no in between (not racist and not actively and publicly anti-racist as a public ally). The video explores the logical contradictions that come from such a position, resulting that eliminating the possibilities that are inconvenient happen only out of seizing power, not out of moral rightness in itself. Weinstein points out some internal logical contradictions in the idea of equity as compared to equality. Jordan Peterson has done the same in the past.
Kendi’s work seems to have taken over the controversial “diversity training” lesson plans from Robin DiAngelo.