Ibram Kendi’s Thesis Could Use a Lot More Rigor (Part II)

“In short, Kendi’s consequentialist view of racism as rooted in policy (which, however unpredictably and unintentionally, results in racial disparities) does not explain everything.”

Editor’s note: This is the second part of a two-part essay series by Jonathan Church examining where the work of Boston University professor and author of How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi, could benefit, in Church’s view, from more logical rigor—or where it goes awry entirely. Part one can be read here.

False Equivalence

Ibram X. Kendi’s claim that “to say something is wrong about a racial group is to say something is inferior about that racial group” is a second fallacy in his work: the fallacy of false equivalence. That is, “is wrong” is not the same as “is inferior.” To believe otherwise is to contradict Kendi’s own argument that policy is responsible for creating racial disparities. To point out the racial wealth gap (as Kendi does), or the “deterioration of the Negro family,” is to discern something wrong in the black community. There is no implication that black people are incapable of generating wealth or forming stable families. There is no implication that black people are inferior.

The implication, instead, is that the aspirations of black Americans, in terms of wealth or family, have been sabotaged not through any fault of their own but by means of racist policies. The claim that there is something wrong in the black community is a claim that there is something inferior about policies historically implemented by white people. To say that something “is wrong” with black people is almost to say that something “is inferior” about white people—or, at least, their ill-conceived distinction between “races,” which rationalized racist policies.

Indeed, a major impetus behind Whiteness studies is the goal of decentering and dismantling Whiteness, which refers to the norms, habits, beliefs, attitudes, ideologies, and discourses that underlie all the “white” institutions that rule society. While Kendi addresses policy rather than Whiteness in his work, one of his major targets in Stamped from the Beginning is so-called “assimilationists” who “first used and defined and popularized the term ‘racism’ during the 1940s,” while refusing “to define their own assimilationist ideas of Black cultural and behavioral inferiority as racist” and defining “only segregationist ideas of Black biological inferiority as racist.”