[ The postracial idea is the most sophisticated racist idea ever
produced.] [[link removed]]

OUR NEW POSTRACIAL MYTH  
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Ibram X. Kendi
June 22, 2021
The Atlantic
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_ The postracial idea is the most sophisticated racist idea ever
produced. _

, The Atlantic

 

The signposts of racism are staring back at us in big, bold racial
inequities. But some Americans are ignoring the signposts, walking on
by racial inequity, riding on by the evidence, and proclaiming their
belief with religious fervor. “America is not a racist country,”
Senator Tim Scott said
[[link removed]] in
April.

Black babies die at twice
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rate of white babies. Roughly a fifth of Native Americans and Latino
Americans are medically uninsured, almost triple
[[link removed]] the
rate of white Americans and Asian Americans (7.8 and 7.2 percent,
respectively). Native people (24.2 percent) are nearly three times as
likely
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white people (9 percent) to be impoverished. The life expectancy of
Black Americans (74.5 years) is much lower
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that of white Americans (78.6 years). White Americans account for 77
percent of the voting members of the 117th Congress, even though
they represent
[[link removed]] 60
percent of the U.S. population.

Just as you can recognize an impoverished country by its widespread
poverty, you can recognize a racist country by its widespread racial
inequity. In the United States, Black college graduates owe
an average [[link removed]] of
$25,000 more in student loans than white college graduates. Native
Americans die from police violence
[[link removed]] at
three times the rate of white people; Black people die at 2.6 times
the rate; and Latino people die at 1.3 times the rate. In the United
States, racial inequity is widespread by any measure.

And yet, some don’t want the American people to stop and see. They
don’t want our kids to learn about the racism causing racial
inequity. They are trying to ban
[[link removed]] teaching
it in schools; Florida passed the latest such ban last Thursday
[[link removed]].

They can’t acknowledge racial inequity because to acknowledge it is
to discuss why it exists and persists. To discuss why racial inequity
exists and persists is to point to the libraries of nonpartisan
studies documenting widespread racism in the United States.

To say that there is widespread racial inequity caused by widespread
racism, which makes the United States racist, isn’t an opinion,
isn’t a partisan position, isn’t a doctrine, isn’t a left-wing
construct, isn’t anti-white, and isn’t anti-American. It is a
fact. But in recent years, some have reduced a host of facts to
beliefs. “I don’t believe that,” Donald Trump said
[[link removed]] in
September when a reporter asked him about the existence of systemic
racism.

This is a precarious time. There are people tired of quarantining
their racist beliefs, anxious about being held accountable by
“wokeism” and “cancel culture,” yearning to get back to the
normality of blaming Black inferiority for racial inequity. The
believers are going after these people with disinformation. They are
putting words in the mouths of Black Lives Matter activists, critical
race theorists, the writers of the 1619 Project, and anti-racist
intellectuals—and attacking the words they put in our mouths.
Representative Ralph Norman of South Carolina claims that we believe
[[link removed]] “people
with white skin are inherently racist.” Florida Governor Ron
DeSantis claims
[[link removed]] that we
believe “all our institutions are bankrupt, and they’re
illegitimate.”

No nation, no person, is inherently or permanently racist. The
anti-racist resistance to slavery and Jim Crow is as much a part of
American history as those peculiar institutions are. White people have
been abolitionists and civil-rights activists, and they are among the
people striving to be anti-racist today. Some institutions in the
United States have been vehicles of equity and justice. But what we
write or say or think doesn’t matter to the believers. All that
matters to them is ensuring that adults and children continue to walk
on by the signposts of racism that implicate them. All the believers
want to do is make myths out of reality to keep the American people
out of reality.

“It is time for America to discard the left-wing myth of systemic
racism,” former Vice President Mike Pence tweeted
[[link removed]] on June
3. “America is not a racist Nation—America is the most just,
righteous, noble and inclusive Nation that has ever existed on the
face of the earth!”

We’ve heard this before.

“America is not a racist Nation” is the new “America is a
postracial nation.” We are witnessing the birth of the new
postracial project.

Icouldn’t have directed anyone to my favorite Philadelphia
restaurant as a doctoral student in 2008. It had no sign. I don’t
even remember its name. Most people walking by it on North Broad
Street would not have known it was there. Whenever I walked in,
searching for a late-night meal, I was greeted by its unappetizing
decor.

But I adored this discreet hole-in-the-wall, blocks from my home in
North Philadelphia. I adored what I smelled whenever I stepped inside.
I adored what I heard—the unseen owner/cook/waitress/hostess
greeting me from far back in the steaming kitchen.

Forgive me. I don’t remember the elderly Black woman’s name. I’m
not much of a small talker. Neither was she.

Most nights, I’d walk over to the kitchen. I’d return her
greeting. I’d order a platter. I’d sit on down and wait. And wait.
And read. And think. And wait. All in perfect peace.

But not on the night of January 3, 2008. A tiny, grainy box television
seized my attention as soon as I heard it. I had not been following
the presidential campaign season closely. I didn’t watch much
television or read much news. I had been hibernating in my studies
since beginning my doctoral program months earlier.

So on that night, I did not go to the kitchen. I shouted my order as
I’d seen other people do. She nodded and kept on cooking.

All the tables were empty. I chose one. The TV was mounted where the
grime of the ceiling and discoloration of the wall met. I did not know
that Iowa had had its Democratic caucus that day. I sat in silent
shock when the network announced that the Black candidate had won that
lily-white state.

When he came out to deafening applause from his supporters, the cook
turned waitress came out with her food and her smile. She placed both
down on my table without a word. Then she turned around and looked up,
like me, at the mounted TV.

Almost as if on cue from a director, Senator Barack Obama began to
speak.

“Thank you, Iowa,” he began
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“You know, they said this day would never come.”

The crowd applauded. I sat there, still, like my food.

“But on this January night, at this defining moment in history, you
have done what the cynics said we couldn’t do.”

Obama spoke on and the lady stood on, rugged and tender, like our
environment.

“We’re choosing unity over division, and sending a powerful
message that change is coming to America.”

The message was indeed powerful. _If he could win Iowa, he could win
America_. Change seemed to be coming. The audience started chanting.

“We want change! We want change! We want change! We want change!”

By the next morning, some white Americans had started
transfiguring _We want change_ into _We have changed_. “What was
remarkable was the extent to which race was not a factor in this
contest,” Adam Nagourney wrote
[[link removed]] in _The
New York Times_.

As Obama won more primaries, the narrative spread. The fact that
racial inequity existed
[[link removed].] and persisted
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matter. The day after Obama won South Carolina on January 26, Peter J.
Boyer identified
[[link removed]] Obama
and Cory Booker, then Newark’s mayor, as members of “the
post-racial generation” in _The New Yorker_.

By the end of January, journalists were explaining what
“postracial” meant. “The post-racial era, as embodied by Obama,
is the era where civil rights veterans of the past century are
consigned to history and Americans begin to make race-free judgments
on who should lead them,” NPR’s legendary analyst Daniel
Schorr reported
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adding that “it may still be too early to speak of a generation of
colorblind voters, but maybe color blurred?”

Thereafter, Obama’s campaign tunes of racial progress were further
remixed as tunes of racial arrival. “So, in answer to the question,
‘Is America past racism against black people,’ I say the answer is
yes,” John McWhorter wrote
[[link removed]] in _Forbes_ weeks
after Obama’s election.

The postracial myth was embedded so deeply into the American
consciousness that when Trump ran a racist campaign and won eight
years later, countless people were shocked. The myth of a postracial
America died with Trump’s election. It has now been resurrected,
paving the conceptual way for Trump’s return and the ruin of this
nation.

The people who promulgated the original postracial project in 2008
aren’t necessarily the same people resurrecting it today. The
postracial myth was first propagated by liberals who were eager to
avoid grappling with persistent inequities. Back then, many liberals
were stepping over the reality of inequality to fantasize that the
nation had done the impossible—elected a Black president—because
it had overcome racism. The denial of racism stymied the battle
against it, leading many Americans to underestimate the political
appeal of birtherism and Trump, providing a clear runway for his MAGA
campaign to take off, and then allowing it to land in the White House.

And now, even though Trump’s ghastly presidency and the ghastly
murder of George Floyd awoke many liberals to the need to build an
anti-racist nation, many conservatives have seized on the postracial
myth to fight those efforts. They insist that anti-racism is
anti-white. That insistence echoes the mantra coined by the longtime
white supremacist Robert Whitaker in 2006
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“Anti-racist is a code word for anti-white.” GOP politicians want
their voters to feel aggrieved and enraged before the 2022 election.
They want them to believe the violent lie that teaching critical race
theory amounts to attacking and harming white children. Republican
politicians want their voters to believe the fantasy that systemic
racism is “a bunch of horse manure,” as DeSantis called it.

But I’m hardly shocked that this racist idea has been resurrected.
The postracial idea is the most sophisticated racist idea ever
produced. It keeps resurfacing and mutating and harming in new forms.

Crude popularizers of racist ideas, such as Trump, tell people
precisely how other racial groups are inferior; immigrants from Latin
America, he said, are criminals, drug dealers, and rapists. That sort
of racism is relatively easy to recognize and dismiss.

But the postracial idea is the hardest racist idea to put down.
Everyone is inclined to consume it. White people and people of color
alike long for racism to end. When we yearn for something to end—and
don’t know what the end looks like—it is easy to make ourselves
believe the end is near. Believing the myth of a postracial America is
a cheap way to feel good, like buying the fast food down the block
from my favorite restaurant in Philadelphia. We don’t realize that
to believe the postracial myth is to normalize racial inequity and
deny that racism is dividing and devastating our society.

Because although Americans see racial inequity, we don’t all agree
on its causes. Many Americans search for nonracial explanations for
racial inequity, particularly class and its proxy, education. But
presenting class as the answer avoids the question of why people of
color are unduly poor and white people are disproportionately wealthy.
It ignores the racial inequities _between_ classes. It ignores the
fact that in New York City, college-educated Black women suffer
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severe pregnancy-related complications than do white women who
haven’t completed high school. It ignores the fact that
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Americans who haven’t graduated high school have more wealth than
Black college graduates.

The cause of racial inequity is either racist policy or racial
hierarchy. The racial problem is the result of bad policies or bad
people. Either Asian New Yorkers experienced the highest surge
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unemployment during the pandemic because they are lazy and prefer
welfare over work—or the inequity is the result of racist policy.
Either Black and Latino people are the least likely
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be vaccinated against COVID-19 because there’s something wrong with
them—or the inequity stems from racist policy. Either Black girls
are six times
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likely to be expelled from school as white girls because they
misbehave more—or the inequity is caused by racist policy. To
believe in racial hierarchy, to say that something is wrong with a
racial group, is to express racist ideas.

The sophistication of the postracial myth is simple: Eliminating the
explanation of racism for racial inequity ensures that the believers
willingly consume and cook up their own racist ideas to explain the
racial inequity all around them.

I’d often bring a bag of books to my favorite restaurant. I’d
read as I waited a long while for my food. I devoured books and essays
on Black life, racism, anti-racism, and history. I had studied these
topics for years. But nothing prepared me for the intensity of
doctoral studies. Nothing prepared me for the precision and collisions
of the sharp minds around me. Nothing prepared me for writing
practically a book a semester in the form of multiple 30-page research
papers. Nothing prepared me for the total life immersion of study.

In fact, I was readying myself to join a guild of intellectuals with
expertise on the structures of racism. This guild studies, diagnoses,
and strives to eliminate racism. The believers call us “race
hustlers,” but they would never call oncologists “cancer
hustlers.” They’ll do anything to delegitimize our training and
expertise, which veils their absence of training and expertise, which
legitimizes their postracial fairy tales.

Fighting racism—in academia, in media, in activism, in art, in
education, or in public service—is more than a job for most of us.
It’s a calling to save nations from their national histories, to
save human beings from human beings. Racism is an existential threat
to the United States, like climate change, pandemics, and nuclear war.
We know that the American people can’t handle _this_ truth, but we
tell them anyway and brace ourselves for the postracial gales bound to
come—such as this one.

Our multiracial, multidisciplinary, multisectoral guild remains as
indistinct on the streets of the U.S. as my favorite restaurant was 13
years ago. We don’t have a name. We don’t hold up signs displaying
our expertise. To the American people, our expertise simultaneously
exists and doesn’t. It exists when people believe us. It doesn’t
exist when people don’t believe us. Our remedies and reparations for
racism are rejected when they go “too far.”

Because everyone, apparently, is an authority on damn near everything.
I can tell an astrophysicist that she is wrong about the existence of
extrasolar planets, and she can tell me that I am wrong about the
existence of racism. Humility is dead. Expertise is losing out to the
world of make-believe, where everyone knows it all, where the climate
isn’t changing, where vaccines aren’t saving lives, where teaching
our kids the truth is harmful, where anti-poverty programs aren’t
better crime fighters than cops, where assault rifles aren’t used to
commit mass murder, where Nikole Hannah-Jones doesn’t deserve
tenure, where the 2020 election wasn’t legitimate, and where the
original postracial project didn’t produce the infernal Trump
presidency.

To use W. E. B. Du Bois’s words, “lies agreed upon” are king.
Ignorance preyed upon is king. Patriotism as racism is king. The
conspiracy theory is king.

Anyone can diagnose their nation as “not racist.” In the world of
make-believe, who cares whether they can’t define what they mean by
that? Who cares about definitions? Who cares about the vulnerability
of kids to racist messages? Who cares about education? Who cares
whether GOP state legislators are attacking the recognition of racism
as they institute racist voting policies to maintain their power? Who
cares about democracy? Anyone can be interviewed and listened to and
taken seriously when they claim that racism doesn’t exist, when they
vilify the 1619 Project, when they demonize critical race theory, when
they slander anti-racism—when they wholly disregard racial inequity
and injustice and violence. Anyone can participate in the new
postracial project.

Iwatched obama’s iowa victory speech on a tiny mounted television
with a stranger as my food cooled. I hardly realized that at that very
moment, racial reality was cooling too.

I’ll never forget it.

“This was the moment,” Obama proclaimed that night.

This was the moment when the eagerness of many Americans to close the
book on America’s racist past ended up closing the book on
America’s racist present, which closed the book on America’s
racist future, which wrote the book on how America ends.

“This was the moment,” Obama said again. “Years from now,
you’ll look back and you’ll say that this was the moment.”

Indeed, this was the moment when the American people created the
original postracial project that is bearing down on Americans yet
again, like a knife over a nation’s heart.

_Ibram X. Kendi
[[link removed]] is a contributing
writer at The Atlantic and the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the
Humanities and the director of the Boston University Center for
Antiracist Research [[link removed]]. He is the
author of several books, including the National Book
Award–winning Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of
Racist Ideas in America
[[link removed]] and How
to Be an Antiracist
[[link removed]]._

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