On the Travesty of whitewashing AntiRacist Education
Abstract
Kendi’s answer to the question of ‘How to be an Antiracist” is simple and succinct: to become an antiracist you must be an activist, advocating antiracist policies that engender racial equity and reduce comparable racial inequity. But the real solutions are more complex than that. He claims that the only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it and then dismantle it, yet he abandons their descriptions for historically inaccurate narratives, and poorly supported autobiographical vignettes, and offers no way to identify racism, racialization, or how they manifest. The taxonomy he offers is disconnected from prevailing theories. It equates ‘anti-White racism’ and ‘Black racism’ to anti-Black racism and white supremacist violence, apprising equal validity to the terms for racial analysis. Racialized ‘whiteness’ is left unquestioned and omitted, and functionally maintains ‘race,’ ‘racisms’ and ‘antiracism,’ racialization, and their mystification.