Though it was hardly his intention, no president has caused more Americans to stop denying the existence of racism than Donald Trump.
Kendhi maps Trumps actions to explain how we get to here suggesting a nation is what it does, not what it claims to do.
U.S. could just as accurately be described as a land in denial. It has been a massacring nation that said it cherished life, a slaveholding nation that claimed it valued liberty, a hierarchal nation that declared it valued equality, a disenfranchising nation that branded itself a democracy, a segregated nation that styled itself separate but equal, an excluding nation that boasted of opportunity for all. A nation is what it does, not what it originally claimed it would be. Often, a nation is precisely what it denies itself to be.
The question is what will happen next.
The abolition of slavery seemed as impossible in the 1850s as equality seems today. But just as the abolitionists of the 1850s demanded the immediate eradication of slavery, immediate equality must be the demand today. Abolish police violence. Abolish mass incarceration. Abolish the racial wealth gap and the gap in school funding. Abolish barriers to citizenship. Abolish voter suppression. Abolish health disparities. Not in 20 years. Not in 10 years. Now.
In a separate piece in GQ, ZZ Packer provides a profile of Kendhi and a discussion of his work.
One problem is that most white people think of racism as a moral failing wrapped in an identity. They want to say “I am not a racist” the way Richard Nixon insisted “I am not a crook.” But in How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi argues that policies and actions are racist, not people. You can express a racist notion in one part of a sentence, he says, and an antiracist notion in another.