"How to be an Antiracist" Mastermind Experience

In this Twitter thread, Brendane Tynes discusses the failures of Kendi's text to address structural racism, anti-blackness, settler-colonialism and the appeal of this text to white liberal academic spaces.

From the writer: "Rich white capitalists may be donating millions to Black Lives Matter, but they’re also funding and praising nonsense like Kendi’s babblings on race and capitalism."

From the publisher: "The popular new genre of antiracist nonfiction seeks to educate white readers about race, but it does not center more powerful critiques from the Black radical tradition."

From the publisher: "In the last month since George Floyd’s death, people across the United States have started to look more critically at how we deal with race and incorporate anti-racism into our everyday lives. But one of the biggest challenges we’re running into is white people getting it wrong. Here’s why that’s happening and how to do better."

From the creators: "Have you ever made a successful change in your life? Perhaps you wanted to exercise more, eat less, or change jobs? Think about the time and attention you dedicated to the process. A lot, right? Change is hard. Creating effective social justice habits, particularly those dealing with issues of power, privilege, supremacy and leadership is like any lifestyle change. Setting our intentions and adjusting what we spend our time doing is essential. It’s all about building new habits. Sometimes the hardest part is just getting started. The good news is, there’s an abundance of resources just waiting to empower you to be a more effective player in the quest for equity and justice. Please use this plan just as it is, or adapt it to a sector, an ethnic/racial group, or interest area."

From the creator: "There's more to being an antiracist than aligning yourself with its value and endorsing its principles. Take this antiracist self-assessment tool to determine how effectively you work to dismantle racism in systems and within yourself."

"From the publisher: ""The ANTIRACISM TOOLKIT FOR ALLIES (which you are reading now) provides
analyses of white advantage and information about how to disrupt racism
and create work communities where everyone thrives. We wrote a guide
specifically for white people because white supremacy grants unearned
advantages to whites. The work of recognizing these advantages and actively
resisting racism is the most crucial work that white people can embrace in
order to create meaningful change."""

From the creators: "Culture is powerful precisely because it is so present and at the same time so very difficult to name or identify. The characteristics listed below are damaging because they are used as norms and standards without being pro-actively named or chosen by the group. They are damaging because they promote white supremacy thinking. They are damaging to both people of color and to white people. Organizations that are people of color-led or a majority people of color can also demonstrate many damaging characteristics of white supremacy culture."

From the creators: "Just what is going on with white people? Police shootings of unarmed African Americans. Acts of domestic terrorism by white supremacists. The renewed embrace of raw, undisguised white-identity politics. Unending racial inequity in schools, housing, criminal justice, and hiring. Some of this feels new, but in truth it’s an old story. Why? Where did the notion of “whiteness” come from? What does it mean? What is whiteness for?"

From the publisher: "As Ferguson, Missouri, erupted in August 2014, and media commentators across the ideological spectrum referred to the angry response of African Americans as “black rage,” historian Carol Anderson wrote a remarkable op-ed in The Washington Post suggesting that this was, instead, "white rage at work. With so much attention on the flames," she argued, "everyone had ignored the kindling." Since 1865 and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, every time African Americans have made advances towards full participation in our democracy, white reaction has fueled a deliberate and relentless rollback of their gains. The end of the Civil War and Reconstruction was greeted with the Black Codes and Jim Crow; the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision was met with the shutting down of public schools throughout the South while taxpayer dollars financed segregated white private schools; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 triggered a coded but powerful response, the so-called Southern Strategy and the War on Drugs that disenfranchised millions of African Americans while propelling presidents Nixon and Reagan into the White House, and then the election of America's first black President, led to the expression of white rage that has been as relentless as it has been brutal. Carefully linking these and other historical flashpoints when social progress for African Americans was countered by deliberate and cleverly crafted opposition, Anderson pulls back the veil that has long covered actions made in the name of protecting democracy, fiscal responsibility, or protection against fraud, rendering visible the long lineage of white rage. Compelling and dramatic in the unimpeachable history it relates, White Rage will add an important new dimension to the national conversation about race in America."