Welcome to a special episode of Conversations with Coleman. Today, I'm going to be reading a review of Ibram Kennedy's best selling book, How to Be an Antiracist. But before I do that, I'd like to read an open letter that I wrote to Kennedy in the hopes of having a conversation with him.

So here's that letter. Dear Professor Kennedy, I'm writing you this letter in the hopes that you and I can have a public conversation. As you know, the current moment has seen a renewed focus on the issues of racism and inequality on these topics. Your writing has proved hugely influential. As I write this, How to be an Anti-racist has spent 30 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list and start from the beginning, has spent 19. The more your ideas spread, the more they elicit both praise and criticism.

My own view falls in the latter category. I've offered criticisms of your work and I've put forward an alternative vision, which is why I believe a conversation between us in the spirit of genuine truth seeking would be fruitful. Many people pay attention to each of us because we represent an widely held but importantly different visions for how the nation and ultimately the world should address the issues of race and racism. As a result, many in our respective audiences, as well as people who see elements of truth in both of our perspectives, would welcome this conversation.

As an initial suggestion, I'm offering my podcast conversations with Coleman as a venue, if you prefer a different venue. I'd be happy to accommodate.

To move us all toward a beneficial cause, I've set up a go fund me page, anyone who wants to see this conversation happen can donate and all the proceeds raised will go to the United Negro College Fund whether or not you choose to accept my invitation.

That said, I hope you do choose to accept the invitation, which I offer humbly and in the spirit of truth seeking best Coleman Hughes. OK, so that's my open letter, and you can find it on letters, wiki conversations, and please share that letter if you want this conversation to happen.

And if you can donate to the go fund me and share the page with your friends again, whether or not Candy accepts my invitation, that money will go to the unseats. OK, now on to my review of Kennedy's book, which was written about nine months ago. For a city journal. So here we go. In twenty sixteen, Max Kennedy became the youngest person ever to win the National Book Award for nonfiction.

His surprise bestseller, stamped from the beginning, cast him in his role as an activist historian, ambitiously attempting to make six hundred years of racial history digestible and five hundred pages in his follow up, How to be an Anti-racist Kennedy, now 37, a Guggenheim fellow and a contributing writer at The Atlantic, reveals his personal side weaving together memoir, polemic and instruction as he invites the reader to join him on the front lines of what I like to call the war on racism.

If the book has a core thesis, it's that this war admits of no neutral parties and no cease fires. For Kennedy, quote, There is no such thing as a not racist idea, only racist ideas and anti-racist ideas. His Manichean outlook extends to policy, quote, Every policy in every institution, in every community, in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity, Candy proclaims, defining the former as racist policies and the latter as anti-racist ones.

Every policy.

That question was posed to Kennedy by Vox co-founder Ezra Klein, who gave the hypothetical example of a capital gains tax cut.

Most of us think of the capital gains tax if we think about it at all as a policy that's neutral as regards questions of race or racism, but given that black people are underrepresented among stock owners, Klein asked, would it be racist to support a capital gains tax cut? Yes, can be answered without hesitation. And in case you plan on escaping the charge of racism by remaining agnostic on the capital gains tax, that won't work either because Kennedy defines a racist as anyone who supports, quote, a racist policy through their actions or inaction, unquote.

Hailed by The New York Times as the most courageous book to date on the problem of race in the Western mind, how to be an anti-racist is certainly bold in its effort to redefine a concept that bedevils American society on his unusually expansive definition.

Candice's racism operating not just behind niche issues like the capital gains tax, but also behind problems of civilizational significance.

Racism, he writes, has spread to nearly every part of the body politic, heightening exploitation, causing arms races and threatening the life of human society with nuclear war and climate change.

How exactly racism is behind the threat of nuclear holocaust is left to the reader's imagination. At times, it's hard to know whether to interpret Kennedy's arguments as factual claims subject to empirical scrutiny or as diary entries to be accepted as personal truths. Indeed, much of the book reads like a seekers' memoir or a conversion story in the mold of Augustine's confessions.

Raised in a rough part of Queens in the 1990s, Kennedy recounts his long journey from anti black racism to anti white racism and eventually to anti-racism. In high school, Kennedy delivered a speech bemoaning the bad behavior of black youth by college, he had outgrown that phase and become white, convinced at one point that white people were literal aliens. The later scaling down to the belief that they were, quote, simply a different breed of human.

A New Yorker piece cites a column he wrote as an undergraduate in which he argued that, quote, White people were fending off racial extinction using psychological brainwashing and the AIDS virus. Having matured out of his antiwhite phase, Kennedy takes a refreshingly strong stand against anti white racism in the book, rejecting the fashionable argument that blacks can't be racist because we lack power.

He reflects with embarrassment on his old beliefs, avoiding condescension by lecturing his former self instead of the reader, still certain autobiographical details call for embarrassment, but don't get it. He recalls, for example, his first night living in Virginia as a teenager, during which he stayed up all night, quote, worried the Ku Klux Klan would arrive at any minute. That took place in nineteen ninety seven. The book is weakest in each chapter devoted to capitalism, capitalism is essentially racist, Candy says, and racism is essentially capitalist.

To test this claim, a careful thinker might compare racism in capitalist countries with racism in socialist or communist ones, or you might compare racism in the private sector with racism in the public sector. But Kennedy does neither.

Instead, he presents the link between capitalism and racism as self. Evidently true.

Quote, Since the dawn of racial capitalism, when world markets level playing fields, when could black people compete equally with white people? Candy asks, implying that the answer is never.

But I can think of several historical examples in which capitalism inspired anti-racism, the most famous is the Plessy vs. Ferguson Supreme Court case when a profit hungry railroad company upset that legally mandated segregation meant adding costly train cars, teamed up with a civil rights group to challenge racial segregation.

Nor was that case unique. Privately owned bus and trolley companies in the Jim Crow South frequently resisted segregation because separate cars and sections were too expensive, according to one scholarly paper on the subject. History offers little evidence that capitalism is either inherently racist or anti-racist as a result. Kennedy must resort to cherry picking data to demonstrate a link.

Citing a Pew article, he asserts that the black unemployment rate has been at least twice as high as the white unemployment rate for the past 50 years because of the conjoined twins of racism and capitalism.

But why limit the analysis to the past 50 years? A paper cited in that same Pew article reveals that the black white unemployment gap was, quote, small or nonexistent before 1940, when America was arguably more capitalist and certainly more racist. Candy, also cherry picks this data when discussing race and health, she laments that blacks are more likely than whites to have Alzheimer's disease, but neglects to mention that whites are more likely to die from it, according to the latest mortality data from the Center for Disease Control.

In the same vein, she correctly notes that black people are more likely than white people to die of prostate cancer and breast cancer, but does not include the fact that blacks are less likely than whites to die of esophageal cancer, lung cancer, skin cancer, ovarian bladder brain, non Hodgkin's lymphoma and leukemia. Of course, it should not be a competition over which race is more likely to die, of which disease. That's precisely my point.

By selectively citing data that shows blacks suffering more than whites can be turns what should be a unifying, race neutral battleground, namely humanity's fight against deadly diseases into another proxy battle in the war on racism.

So let me just butt in here outside of the text of the essay to talk a little bit about covid of racial disparities, because this was written before covid, of course, worse than the skewed approach to data in Kennedy's book are the factual errors.

Citing an entire book by Manning Marable but no specific page, Kennedy claims that in nineteen eighty two, President Reagan cut the safety net of federal welfare programs and Medicaid, sending more low income blacks into poverty, end quote.

I could not find any data and Marable's book showing that the black poverty rate rose during Reagan's tenure. In fact, the opposite appears to be true.

According to the Census Bureau's historical poverty tables, the black poverty rate decreased for every age group between nineteen eighty two and the end of Reagan's tenure in nineteen eighty nine. Also erroneous is Kennedy's claim for which he offers no citation that, quote, white women are the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action programs.

Judging from a similar claim made in Vox, this myth seems to come from a paper published by the critical race theorist Kimberle Crenshaw in two thousand six. Crenshaw's paper, troublingly, contains no data and no empirical analysis.

However, a group of political scientists did conduct an empirical study on the relationship between white women and affirmative action in the same year. They found that employers who supported affirmative action were no more likely to employ white women than employers who didn't.

The primary beneficiaries of affirmative action, at least in university admissions, are in fact the black and Latino children of middle and upper middle class families.

People like myself, what Kennedy lacks in empirical rigor, he makes up for in candor, whereas many anti-racist dance awkwardly around the fact that affirmative action is a racially discriminatory policy, Kennedy says what they probably believe but are too afraid to say, namely, quote, Racial discrimination is not inherently racist.

She continues, quote. The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity if discrimination is creating equity than its antiracist, if discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist. The only remedy to racist discrimination is anti-racist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination, end quote. Insofar as Kennedy's book speaks for modern anti-racism, then it should be praised for clarifying what the ante really means.

Fundamentally, the modern anti-racist movement is not against discrimination, it's against inequity, which in many cases makes it pro discrimination. The problem with racial equity defined as numerically equal outcomes between races is that it's unachievable. Without doubt, we have a long way to go in terms of maximizing opportunity for America's most disadvantaged citizens, many public schools are subpar and some are atrocious.

A sizable minority of black children grow up in neighborhoods replete with crime and abandoned buildings, while the majority grow up in single parent homes. To many, black people are behind bars. All of this is true, yet none of it implies that equal outcomes are either possible or the proper goal. Candy discusses inequity between ethnic groups, for example, which he views as identical to inequity between racial groups as problems created by racist public policy. This view commits him to some bizarre conclusions, for example, according to the twenty seventeen Census Bureau data, the average Haitian American earned just sixty eight cents for every dollar earned by the average Nigerian American.

The average French American earned just 70 cents for every dollar earned by the average Russian American, similar examples abound. So ask yourself, is it more likely that our society imposes policies that discriminate against American descendants of Haiti and France, but not Nigeria or Russia, or that disparities between racial and ethnic groups are normal even in the absence of racist policies? Kennedy's view puts him firmly in the first camp.

To be anti-racist, he writes, is to view the inequities between all racialized ethnic groups, by which he means groups like Haitians and Nigerians as problems of policy and quote. Put bluntly, this assumption is indefensible. What would it take to achieve a world of racial equity? Top down enforcement of racial quotas. A constitutional amendment banning racial disparity, a department of anti-racism to prescreen every policy for racially disparate impact.

These ideas may sound like they were conjured up to caricature antiracist as Orwellian supervillains, but Kennedy has actually suggested them as policy recommendations.

His proposal is worth quoting in full. This is from Politico. Quote, To fix the original sin of racism, Americans should pass an antiracist amendment to the US Constitution that enshrines two guiding anti-racist principles racial inequity as evidence of racist policy and the different racial groups are equals. The amendment would make unconstitutional racial inequity over a certain threshold, as well as racist ideas by public officials with racist ideas and public official, clearly defined, unquote. So that's the first half of Kennedy's proposal.

Can this suggestion that racist ideas would or could be rigorously defined is cold comfort, given his capacious definition of racism in his book can be called Belief in an achievement gap between black and white students.

A racist idea. Does that mean that President Obama would have violated Kennedy's anti-racist amendment when he talked about the achievement gap in 2016? Would we have to overturn the First Amendment to make way for the antiracist amendment? OK, Kennedy's proposal continues, quote. The antiracist amendment would establish and permanently fund the Department of Anti-Racism, comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees.

The Department of Anti-Racism or the DOJ would be responsible for declaring all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won't yield racial inequity.

Monitor those policies, investigate private racist policies when racial inequities surfaces, and monitor public officials for expressions of racist ideas.

The DOJ would be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas, end quote.

Can these goals are openly totalitarian, the Dowa would be tasked with investigating private businesses and monitoring the speech of public officials. It would have the power to reject any local, state or federal policy before it's implemented. It would be made up of a panel of experts who could not be fired even by the president. And it would wield, quote, disciplinary tools over public officials who did not voluntarily change their racist ideas as defined presumably by people like Candy, what could possibly go wrong?

The odds of Kennedy's proposal entering the political mainstream may seem minuscule and therefore not worth worrying about, but that's what people said about reparations as recently as two years ago.

In the long run, American public opinion on race will change. It's just a matter of what direction it will change towards in five, 10 or 50 years. Supporting an anti-racist constitutional amendment might become the new progressive purity test.

Kennedy, however, doesn't think it's likely. Despite the wild success of his own book tour, which, according to The Washington Post, was drawing crowds so large that bookstores have resorted to holding readings in churches, synagogues and school auditoriums.

Candy, nevertheless, thinks that the antiracist project will probably fail, for one thing, she doesn't believe that people can be persuaded out of racism. People are racist, out of self-interest, not out of ignorance. Candy writes, Therefore, racists can't be educated out of their racism. Educational and moral suasion is not only a failed strategy. Elements is a suicidal one.

This is a tough claim to square with the rest of his book, which contains story after story in which he gets persuaded out of his own racist beliefs, including one story where a friend named Clarence reasons him out of believing that white people are aliens.

Indeed, what makes Kennedy's personal story so compelling is precisely the fact that he's constantly changing. That said, when reflecting on his college days, Kennedy describes his former self as, quote, a believer more than a thinker. So perhaps not everything about him has changed.

How to be an anti-racist is the clearest and most jargon free articulation of modern anti-racism I've read, and for that reason alone, it's a useful contribution.

But the book is poorly argued, sloppily researched, insufficiently fact checked and occasionally self-contradictory. As a result, it fails to live up to its titular promise, ultimately teaching the reader less about how to be antiracist than about how to be anti intellectual. OK, that's the end of my review, as you can see, I was not impressed by the book and I was rather harsh on candy. But I'm also aware of how easy it is to unintentionally strawman somebody's arguments when they're not around to defend themselves.

And this is one of the reasons why I'm so eager to actually talk to Candy about all of these issues. So if you're also eager to see that conversation, please share this video along with the open letter and donate to the Go Find Me page. As always, if you appreciate my work, please like and subscribe on YouTube or go to my website, Kohlman Hughes dog. OK, that's all for today, thanks for tuning in. Until next time.