Ibram X. Kendi’s Appeal Against Make-Believers and the Post-Racial Myth

I was raised on PBS, which meant I was raised on Mister Rogers Neighborhood. In every episode, after candidly discussing real-world themes like divorce, disability, or racism, the sweater-clad host invited us to follow his little red trolly to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe. In that imaginary world, puppets and people acted out ways to cope with the episode’s theme. When all was well again in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, the trolley transported us back to the real world. In his article for The Atlantic titled Our New Postracial Myth, Ibram X. Kendi argues that, in a sense, too many Americans never caught the trolley home. “White people and people of color alike long for racism to end,” Kendi contends.[1] “When we yearn for something end—and don’t know what the end looks like—it is easy to make ourselves believe the end is near.”[2] In other words, much like my childhood trips to the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, Kendi sees the fervent depiction of a post-racial U.S. as a reflexive retreat from reality to cope with the unresolved issues and unpleasant loose ends of our collective history. He has an appropriately ironic moniker for the promoters of this fictionalized post-racial idea: “believers.”[3]

Reporting on something as demonstrable as the existence of racial inequities in the U.S. should not have to be classified as point-of-view journalism. However, today, in a climate in which so many “have reduced a host of facts to beliefs,”[4] Kendi’s narrative style, personal voice, and lived experience carry greater persuasive force and authority than any objective, Joe Friday, just-the-facts-ma’am reporting of the same topic. That is not to say he shies away from the facts of the matter; instead, they comprise the form on which his narrative is draped. While the form offers shape and support, it is the narrative that compels. His narrative techniques, characters, and the lived experiences he conveys through them are also where his argument derives the bulk of its authority. Through all of this, Kendi crafts several appeals—chief among them an appeal to exchange the land of make-believe for the real world, where he argues it is much too soon to be hoisting the banner of mission accomplished.

I. Kendi’s Cause: See the Post-Racial Myth for What it is

The cause Kendi champions is easy to glean and, despite his article’s point-of-view pedigree, is objectively evidenced at its core. He implores us through his article to cast aside the notion that the legacy of racially motivated discrimination was immaculately washed away by the presidential ascension of Barack Obama in 2008. Kendi argues that this myth, “first propagated by liberals who were eager to avoid grappling with persistent inequities,” was co-opted by Conservatives and has since been twisted into “the most sophisticated racist idea ever produced.”[5] In furtherance of this cause, Kendi offers a logically compelling objection to the post-racial argument based on the disjunctive premise that “the cause of racial inequity is either racist policy or racial hierarchy.”[6] The objection Kendi draws from this premise, which I will outline below, is astoundingly compelling because it reveals a self-defeating logical fallacy on the part of the post-racial proponents.

Conservatives are eager to argue that widespread racist behavior is a relic of the past and that systemic racism does not exist; despite this, significant inequities between races are known to persist. If conservatives are correct, if neither racist behavior nor racist policy is the source of these inequities, then the only other possible explanation is that the inequities are attributable to some natural racial hierarchy, i.e., some fundamental, inherent differences determined by race. The problem with this argument is that the latter explanation is itself a definitively racist judgment. Merriam-Webster defines racism as “a belief that race is a fundamental determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.”[7] Therefore, the post-racial argument reduces to a racist argument. In Kendi’s words, “eliminating the explanation of racism for racial inequity ensures that the believers willingly consume and cook up their own racist ideas to explain the racial inequity all around them.”[8] While Kendi’s article is distinctly point-of-view, it is firmly supported and fueled by this objective, resoundingly sound display of logical reasoning.

II. The Authority of a Greasy Spoon

Kendi supplements the objectively evidenced core of his argument with the authority of first-person experience. He assigns himself a supporting role in the article, secondary to that of the “hole-in-the-wall,” greasy spoon Philadelphia restaurant that he tells of frequenting in 2008.[9] His narrative skill transforms that unappealing setting into the main character—or perhaps primary witness—of his cause. He describes a discrete, unassuming place with grimy ceilings, discolored walls, and “unappetizing décor” owned and operated by an older Black woman who cooks, hosts, and serves.[10]

Kendi subtly employs this restaurant and its proprietor as foils to the notion of a sudden, post-racial cleansing. They are first-person evidence against the Conservative argument. If Obama’s ascension to the presidency marked the end of racial inequities born of racist policies and the wiping clean of a slate covered in layer after layer of racial discrimination, then it must have missed Kendi’s favorite dining spot. Perhaps the smears of grease over the “tiny, grainy box television” mounted near the ceiling waved the spirit of reconciliation onward, like lamb’s blood on an Israelite’s doorframe.[11] The moment came, applause rolled, and the restaurant and its owner “stood on, rugged and tender,” listening to chants of “We want change!”[12] As we glean, post–racially inequitable U.S. looks an awful lot like racially inequitable U.S. Of course, he does not explicitly state any of this in the article—at least not in that part of the article. Kendi merely tells his where-were-you-when-it-happened story of Obama’s triumph in the 2008 Iowa Democratic Caucus. Still, that firsthand narrative succeeds where objective facts fail by giving the reader intimate access to lived experience.

In today’s social-media-focused culture, certainly here in the U.S., reflexively agreeing or disagreeing prima facie with notions like the post-racial idea is commonplace despite holding little to no argumentative or authoritative power. In a world that is perfectly receptive to facts, presenting a sound, well-reasoned, conjunctive argument displaying the fallacious reasoning of an alternative view is the gold standard of objective, argumentative authority. However, in a world inhabited in no small number by purveyors of make-believe, such as Kendi’s believers, a much greater degree of authority derives from story. Kendi addresses a similar sentiment later in his article, declaring that “expertise is losing out to the world of make-believe.”[13] It feels counterintuitive to place facts second in authority to narrative. Based on Kendi’s tone, he likely perceives that irrational ranking as a destructive threat. Still, he plays along in a sense. Bare facts and figures provide readers with only a secondhand account of an issue. By contrast, a narrative approach like Kendi’s more intimately encroaches on the reader’s sympathies by delivering the information firsthand, putting the reader as close as possible to experiencing the events for themselves.

In Our New Postracial Myth, Kendi’s well-reasoned, objectively evidenced foundation and narrative overlay is an appeal for far more than an injunction to care for racially marginalized people. In a sense, he implores the believers in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe to take the trolley back home; he implores the lost boys at the Capital on January 6th to retire from Neverland; he implores us to pursue humility, weigh expert opinions greater than our own, and to seek the truth. By way of those rectifications, he does seem to hope that more people will either join the efforts to reverse systemic racism, end their resistance to those efforts, or, if nothing else, return their racist beliefs to the quarantine from which they escaped during years of prodding by Trump and figures like him.

[1] Kendi, Ibram X. 2021. “Our New Postracial Myth.” The Atlantic, June 22, 2021. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/our-new-postracial-myth/619261/, para. 37.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Ibid, para. 7, 8, 40, 42.

[4] Ibid, para. 6.

[5] Ibid, paras. 33, 35.

[6] Ibid, para. 39.

[7] “Racism.” In Merriam-Webster Dictionary, n.d. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/racism.

[8] Kendi, Ibram X. 2021. “Our New Postracial Myth.” The Atlantic, June 22, 2021. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/06/our-new-postracial-myth/619261/, para. 40.

[9] Ibid, paras. 12–24.

[10] Ibid, paras. 12, 14, 18.

[11] Ibid, para. 16.

[12] Ibid, paras. 24, 27.

[13] Ibid, para. 45.