The Two Questions You Need to Build the Foundation for Anti-Racist Living
It was a bright clear fall afternoon. I was walking back to my residence hall after a riveting conversation in my political science class about systems of government. The local high school had just ended its school day and there were throngs of students leaving. A car sped up driving down the street. Out of the passenger’s side window, a young man adorned in light blue high school colors with fair skin and blonde hair stuck his head out. And he yelled “N*****!” as the car sped by. The moment was too fast. The only thing I could think to yell back was “I’m Asian you idiot!”
This was my introduction to Racism in America. Coming from Sri Lanka, race was not a particularly salient identity. Sri Lanka being a (relatively) racially homogenous country, race wasn’t the primary organizational schema for social hierarchies. Yes, ethnicity; yes, gender and sexuality; definitely yes, socioeconomics; but never race. I had theoretically understood the concept of race through my readings and watching some American TV shows. But race was, at that point, largely about differences by skin color. It was later, during my college days that I came to realize the power and endemic nature of systemic racism in America.
It’s a worthwhile exercise to see if you can recall when you first encountered racism. By that I mean not your first realization that you were racially different from someone based on their skin color, but rather that you were different, and that difference meant that you were either afforded or denied privileges because of that difference. I suspect that the earliest realization of this schema came later to those with dominant white identities and much too soon for those with minoritized identities. This is evidence of one of the key tenets of the racialized experience in America: that it is pervasive. Whether it is at school, at work, when you are old, when you are young, when you are the CEO of a company, or when you are in a customer-facing role… at all times, every time, and every place, race is a factor in how one makes meaning of the world and how the world makes meaning of you if you are of a minoritized race.
If racism is pervasive and omnipresent, then the resistance of it has to be as well. Dr. Ibram Kendi, writing in How to be an Anti-racist makes the argument that people either act in racist ways or anti-racist ways. The simplicity of that argument is powerful in its call to action but also acknowledges the power of entrenched ideologies. All racism needs to survive and persist is apathy and passive acceptance of the racial order: a hierarchy that places whiteness at the top and positions the performance of whiteness as normative. Anti-racist work then has to call into question and critique any such positioning of whiteness as preferred or normative. Kendi’s thinking proposes what is a fairly simplistic (although not simple) framework for anti-racist work.
Is race either explicitly or implicitly a salient unit of meaning-making in a decision, practice, position or action?
Is the impact of the decision, practice, position or action increasing or decreasing the existing disparities between minoritized and non-minoritized people?
If the answer to the first question is yes (and one could make the argument that the answer is always yes), and the answer to the second question is that it is increasing the disparities between racial groups, then the act is racist. If it reduces the disparities between racial groups, then the action is anti-racist. The challenge for everyday living is to examine all our positions, decisions, and actions through this lens.
When we examine the most recent controversies in American life, whether it is voting rights legislation, the firing and non-hiring of Brian Flores as a coach in the National Football league, or the policies on no-knock warrants, and apply this framework to the actors and the decision-makers, it becomes abundantly clear that there is much work to be done in advancing anti-racist thinking in organizational life.
But let us begin by integrating anti-racist practices in our personal lives too. So, to the young person who yelled the N-word at me many years ago… what I should have said is that he made race a salient unit of meaning-making in deciding how he wanted to address me. And it further exacerbated the low sense of belonging I had an already largely white neighborhood. That makes it a racist act.
He should do better. We all should do better. Let us get to work.