Kendi-ism Is a Dead End. Let’s Return to Color-Blindness

By Andre M. Archie

Sunday, October 15, 2023

 

The recent financial travails taking place at Ibram X. Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research are unfortunate. The staff layoffs and the unaccounted-for $55 million in donations to the center don’t bode well for the celebrity academic and his anti-racism cause. However, this is an opportune time for all Americans to reacquaint themselves with what anti-racism has nearly vanquished: the notion of color-blindness. In his books and public appearances, Kendi consistently argues that the notion of color-blindness is a mask to hide racism. I beg to differ.

 

In his “I Have a Dream” speech in 1963 at his March on Washington in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. famously said that he envisioned that his “four children [would] one day live in a nation where they would not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” Earlier that same year, and in a radically different context, King in his “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” wrote searingly about racial prejudice and its collateral damage to black Americans and white Americans and to “those great wells of democracy which were dug deep by the founding fathers in their formulation of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.” No other public figure in modern times has expressed sentiments so resonant with the color-blind tradition in the Western intellectual tradition.

 

To be color-blind is to be guided by the moral belief that the mere possession of hereditary qualities, such as race, should not confer moral merit by one’s possession or nonpossession of them. Instead, moral merit can be, and should be, conferred on an individual’s actions, because actions reveal one’s character. It’s incumbent on all Americans to embrace the color-blind approach to race relations before the comfortable racism in the guise of anti-racism seeps even further into the body politic, permanently dividing America against itself. The term comfortable racism describes an environment we are slowly growing accustomed to. It results from the combination of middle-class exhaustion with the topic of race and the ideology of anti-racism. Comfortable racism is an ideology of “separate but equal” by choice. It’s where our society is heading if the value and necessity of color-blindness aren’t taken seriously.

 

Recently, my daughter wrote a high-school research paper about the Scottsboro Boys. This infamous, heartbreaking case was about nine African-American boys who were abused and jailed illegally for having been accused, falsely, of rape near Scottsboro, Ala., in 1931. The country was outraged by the treatment of the boys. Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird is based in part on some of the racial themes highlighted in the Scottsboro case. The case was instrumental in building momentum for the civil-rights movement. My point is that to be color-blind isn’t to be ignorant of America’s racial past. It’s the ability for us, as individuals and as a country, to not be defined by our racial past. This is what I reminded my daughter as she wrote about the Scottsboro case. We can’t allow ourselves as Americans to resegregate by choice along the lines of race. There is a big difference between those who want racial harmony and equality and those who believe that racism is natural. We must take a stand against conflating these two claims by embracing the only viable position worth taking in a heterogeneous society such as ours: the color-blind position.

 

Much of what motivates the opposition to color-blind principles is due to America’s past. Given our racial past, some of the discomfort is understandable. However, Kendi in his anti-racist teachings isn’t dealing with this discomfort in good faith. Martin Luther King Jr. took a stand; he was not a victim. In the 19^th century, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass took a stand. They were both Christian men who lived according to their faith’s moral standards. King and Douglass fought for racial harmony, and there is no common ground whatsoever between anti-racism and the vision of King or Douglass. You cannot follow Kendi’s teachings and at the same time praise King’s message. Both King and Douglass believed that racism is unnatural and destructive and that it must not be accepted — this is the color-blind standard. Color-blindness is about how we treat others; it’s not about denying hardship. It embraces hardship so that as a people we can learn to be better Americans, to listen to our better angels. Anti-racism, on the other hand, capitalizes on yesterday’s hardships.

 

Moving forward, as color-blind Americans, we must all speak up — in our classrooms, places of worship, and our places of employment — against ways of thinking that divide us along racial and ethnic lines. If we have to call our child’s school to challenge the assignment that demonizes white people as victimizers, or the assignment that characterizes patriotic African Americans as racially confused, we must do it! We must do our part to stand up to the racial bullying. When reasonable voices are attacked on college campuses for daring to see people of color as individuals, and not as bearers of racial trauma in need of safe spaces and separate graduations, we must fight back. We cannot return to a racially complacent mindset, with people looking the other way out of cowardice, to go along to get along. We cannot let the doctrine of separate but equal creep back into American life.

 

We cannot afford to go along any further with the anti-racism message. Imagine if we all settle into a sort of comfortable racism. Out of exhaustion, we say, “Okay, let’s just let the anti-racists be — at least the kids will learn something about the pain from our past.” This is naïve thinking. Having separate but equal by choice is not what thousands of black and white Americans lost their lives fighting for during the journey up from slavery and out of Jim Crow. They fought to be judged by the content of their character, not by the color of their skin.