July 2020

Favorites of the month (all three!): How to be an Anti-Racist, Grant, and Wuthering Heights

In his book, How to be an Anti-Racist, Ibram X. Kendi recounts a conversation with a former professor, Ama Mazama:

“It is impossible to be objective,” Mazama instructed her students, her tone conclusive as she revealed the “simple idea” that would fundamentally reshape Kendi’s worldview.

“If we can’t be objective, then what should we strive to do?” Kendi asked.

“Just tell the truth,” said Mazama. “That’s what we should strive to do. Tell the truth.”

In How to be an Anti-Racist, Kendi faithfully follows Mazama’s directive, exposing the painful fissures of our racist society with unalloyed and unequivocal honesty. Race, Kendi tells us, is a social construct predicated on subjective bias, self-interest, and power — “the power,” he writes, “to categorize and judge, elevate and downgrade, [and] include and exclude.” Leveraging this power, society’s “race makers” have been able to sort men and women into monolithic groups in ways that intertwine the individual with certain perceived behaviors, beliefs, and cultures. Over time, this has led us to focus on the “mirage” of race as either a). a surrogate for individualization or b). a pardon for structural inaction. 

Kendi’s antidote to all of this comes in the form of “antiracism,” a step beyond what he calls a mere “awareness of racism.” Antiracism, Kendi explains, provides an updated framework with which to think about race, helping us to recognize racism more readily, understand its harm more fully, and more effectively contribute to a just and equitable society. In recognizing that racism exists in all of us, Kendi tells us that the process of becoming an antiracist is “always ongoing,” requiring a multi-faceted grasp of “biology, ethnicity, body, culture, behavior, color, space, and class” as well as a willingness to constantly reexamine the way we think about race. As such, Kendi argues, the term “racist” can and should be thought of less as a personal “pejorative” and more of as a “description” that calls out, contextualizes, and corrects certain behavior. “The only way to undo racism,” Kendi writes, “is to consistently identify and describe it — and then dismantle it.”  

One of my favorite aspects of Kendi’s How to be an Anti-Racist is his unambiguity — he gets straight to the point, no matter how uncomfortable it might make you feel. With a clear and direct style, he prefaces each chapter with a series of definitions, boiling down such complex terms as “racist,” “assimilationist,” “ethnic racism,” “colorism,” etc. to their barest, most consumable core, before diving into more complete — and more complex — explanations. With this balance of clarity and depth comes an abundance of “aha” moments: Each of Kendi’s chapters is bound to afford the reader some new, transformative insight, whether that be about the distinction between human “culture” and human “behavior,” the deracialization of behavior, or the curse of racially charged expectations.  

As a reader, I also really connected with Kendi’s vulnerability. With the understanding that “the heartbeat of racism is denial, [and] the heartbeat of antiracism is confession,” he courageously owns up to the racism that exists within himself – an admission that helps us readers react more honestly and less shamefully to the racism in our own selves. Growing up, Kendi felt “afraid of the black body”; traversing the hallways of his high school, he would avoid bumping into people, making eye contact, and stepping on shoes, all in the fear that one of his black peers would personate some sort of racialized behavior. Later on, Kendi embraced the beauty of his identity and heritage but in ways that made him hate white people. In assuming all white people to be aggressive, greedy, prejudiced, and self-centered, he fell into racism’s ugly trap, viewing people solely by their membership in an arbitrarily constructed group as opposed to who they are as individuals.

The criticisms I have of How to be an Anti-Racist aren’t as much “criticisms” as they are a wider entreaty for more inclusive and less unilateral dialogue on the subject of race. As Jia Tolentino has pointed out, the “how to” nature of Kendi’s book gives it something of a “boot campy” feel, yielding a misleading sense of discomfort akin to taking a freezing shower, swallowing cough syrup, or going to the dentist. The journey to becoming an antiracist, says Tolentino, should be joyful: “To deepen your understanding of race…should make you feel like the world is opening up, like you’re dissolving into the immensity of history and the present rather than being more uncomfortably visible to yourself.”

In my opinion, the “how to” nature (and, not to mention, incredible market success) of Kendi’s book is also problematic in that it has the potential to singularly position Kendi as the definitive voice on what it means to be a racist and what it means to be an anti-racist. While Kendi’s book is exceptional, it is not perfect. As he predicates so much of his book on the distinctions between “Blackness” and “Whiteness,” for example, he never lucidly or cohesively explains what said “Blackness” and “Whiteness” actually are (or at least what he perceives them to be). Likewise, in rejecting well-intended assimilation as a suppression of Black culture (“The minority assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around,” he writes, quoting Obama’s Dreams from My Father), he doesn’t necessarily clarify how his proposition of racial disintegration will facilitate an authentically and sustainably anti-racist future. To be antiracist is to nurture difference, yes, but how do we ensure that this difference doesn’t obfuscate or jeopardize our shared humanity?

Kendi’s How to be an Anti-Racist is an excellent book that should be read by all. Yet let us not treat it as an elixir to be gulped down with no space for introspection or reexamination. Our conception of the “truth,” in the words of Professor Mazama, is as subjective as it is changeable, demanding our close, full, and eternal attention.  

Nearly three years ago, I had the privilege of attending a book talk with author Ron Chernow on his (then) recently published biography of Ulysses S. Grant. During the talk, Chernow defended the much-discussed length of his book (it’s more than 1,000 pages long!), reframing his exhaustive approach to biography as an exercise not in wasteful tautology but in genuine and important discovery. His task with every book, he said that evening, is to thoroughly “probe the silences and evasions” and to uncover “the character revealed under the pressure of circumstance,” no matter how long many years, or how many pages, it takes.

With Grant, Chernow proves the wisdom and the efficacy of his no-stone-left-unturned approach. To his contemporaries and even some of his closest friends, Ulysses S. Grant was indeed a perplexing enigma. During the Civil War, newspapers lauded him a military genius, yet his “nondescript face” and “unadorned” dress rendered him indecipherable from any common man in any common crowd. As president, he governed with courage, conviction, and diplomatic finesse, yet his struggles with alcoholism hung like a specter over his administration while his characteristic naivety often made him a pitiable plaything for duplicitous cronies, awarding him the long-standing (albeit profoundly unfair) reputation of a clumsy, corruptible drunkard.   

There are many who have criticized the length of Grant, but I believe it is only through such exhaustive excavation that Chernow allows us to really get to know the man behind the myth. Jettisoning storied fictions concerning Grant’s “butchery” and stupidity, Chernow recasts him as a feverish reader, a dazzling raconteur, and a “steadfast protector” of the small and weak, dating all the way back to his schooldays when he’d go toe-to-toe with schoolyard bullies. Far from the “butcher” Confederates villainized opposite their demigod, Robert E. Lee, Grant was a gentle, devout Methodist and a devoted family man who pined for his wife and children whenever they were apart. He loved animals so much that he couldn’t bear to hunt or eat fowl, remarking, “I could never eat anything that went on two legs.”   

Perhaps more than any other facet of his character, Chernow lends critical perspective to Grant’s drinking. In applying our modern-day diagnosis of alcoholism as not a “personal failing” but a chronic and often genetically inherited disease, Chernow discards the long-held picture of Grant as the indulgent, bacchanalian boozer, revealing instead the truth of a painful addiction and — in the end — the glory of what was arguably his greatest triumph. Anyone who has been touched by alcoholism will greatly appreciate the way Chernow handles Grant’s addiction and will surely cheer when, at long last, he conquers his demons and renounces booze for good.

With such a thorough and attentive unshrouding of the man Grant really was, Chernow unearths a deeply misunderstood genius and a deeply underestimated hero. Able to recapitulate in detail the campaigns of Napoleon, Frederick the Great, and Julius Caesar, Grant was a mastermind of the battlefield. Drawing upon his mastery of psychology and his pliant, improvisational approach, he was able to exploit his enemies’ weaknesses and strike at the exact right moment while fostering an impenetrable “sense of unending activity.” Unlike Lee, who was narrowly focused on his home state of Virginia, Grant as Commanding General of the Union Army embraced a comprehensive strategy aimed at unequivocal Southern capitulation. And while many of his colleagues maintained a safe distance from actual combat, Grant regularly fought alongside his men, inspiring them with his presence and courage.  

Still, it was what Grant did for freed slaves, Chernow argues, that most entitles him to “an honored place in American history.” Endowed with an innate sense of justice, Grant came to embrace abolition as a fundamental and essential motive of the Civil War. As Brigadier General, Major General, Lieutenant General, and ultimately Commanding General of the entire Union Army, he served as a protector and advocate for runaway slaves, employing them as teamsters, cooks, hospital attendants, and nurses while envisioning fully franchised citizenship for African Americans long before many of his contemporaries. “He was always up with, or in advance of, authority furnished from Washington in regard to the treatment of those of our color,” wrote Frederick Douglass of Grant during the war. Once president, Grant emerged as “the single most important figure behind Reconstruction,” heralding a precursor to the Civil Rights movement that vouchsafed a vision of biracial democracy while ensuring the rights of African American citizens to vote, hold office, own land, and achieve literacy. During his eight years in the White House, he made it his principal mission to realize the goals enshrined in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, signing into law bills that protected African American rights while systematically crushing efforts by white supremacist groups to resuscitate the antebellum status quo.  

When I finished Chernow’s book, which concludes with Grant’s passing, I couldn’t help but cry. After weeks of absorbing Chernow’s deep and expansive retelling of Grant’s extraordinary life, his death begets an unmistakable sense of personal loss, conjuring the feeling of losing a friend or, better yet, a hero — at once misunderstood, undervalued, and yet sorely needed. Certainly, in reading Grant, one is inclined to recognize in its pages something of a mirror, reflecting another time in which our “great experiment” too hung in the balance, its foundations quaking under the intersecting mantles of hatred, cowardice, and fear. As president, Grant was saddled with the Civil War’s violent and chaotic “afterbirth,” a reign of white supremacist terror that engulfed the Southern half of the United States, threatening the country as much as (if not more than) secession itself. With thousands of African Americans being murdered across the South, Grant acted with courageous and aggressive conviction, beseeching Congress to prioritize legislation that would institute criminal penalties for denying citizens their rights and endow him as president with the power to send in federal troops if states did not act on their own. Responding to what they saw as a violation of states’ rights, conservative Republicans and Democrats critiqued Grant’s actions as despotic, dubbing him “Kaiser Grant,” while apotheosizing the Confederacy — and its standard bearer, Robert E. Lee — as the most noble “lost causes.”  

Today, 135 years after Grant’s death, we still find ourselves entrapped by these same tensions and delusions and in critical need of a “Grant” of our own. The writer T. J. Stiles has said that “we read biography to know a life but also to ratify our conviction that the individual matters.” Certainly, in the case of Grant as revealed and ratified by Chernow, the individual in question not only matters. He, in the end, may be necessary.

It is an admittedly strange and likely futile exercise to “review” a book as weathered and beloved as Wuthering Heights. So much has been written about Emily Brontë’s classic novel, by people far smarter than I, and I doubt I have anything new or inventive to say about it here. As I attempt to reflect on my personal experience as a humble reader, however, I can and must admit that it was NOT the book that I was expecting. For as long as Wuthering Heights has been in my general consciousness, I assumed it to be a passionate love story, moored (pun intended!) by the handsome, brooding, mysteriously seductive Heathcliff, a role made famous by the likes of Laurence Olivier, Richard Burton, Ralph Fiennes, and Tom Hardy. In reading the book, I was shocked to discover that Heathcliff is not the Tom Hardy of my dreams but rather a villain, evil to the core and completely devoid of any positive human feeling. Certainly, the “love” Heathcliff and Catherine “Cathy” Earnshaw share when they are young is seemingly sweet; yet as it is never acted upon, it remains an infantile, self-indulgent, and lustful dalliance. As the couple gets older, this immaturity is only corroborated by the melodramatic language they use to describe their love — a language that seems to far surmount the love they actually feel.   

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is one of my all-time favorite books, which made me excited to read her sister Emily’s Wuthering Heights. The love shared between Charlotte’s titular Jane and Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre is real, deep, and steeped in a surprisingly progressive conception of sexual equality. But as Pauline Nestor tells us, “Emily,” unlike her sisters, “was no feminist.” “As tempting as it may be to read her character in such a light,” she argues, “Emily’s strengths were personal and idiosyncratic, not underpinned by any shared ideology or sense of a common cause.” While reading Wuthering Heights, I certainly felt tempted to ascribe feminist “cause” to many of Emily Brontë’s characters and plot devices. The book has a noticeable preoccupation with physical boundaries with its many allusions to doors, gates, locks, keys, etc., and the two Catherines seem to both feel an acute sense of imprisonment: “What irks me most is this shattered prison… I’m tired of being enclosed,” laments Catherine Earnshaw; “she was forbidden to move out of the garden, and it fretted her sadly to be confined to its narrow bounds,” Brontë later writes, describing Catherine Linton.

Nevertheless, my research shows that these allusions, powerful though they may seem, do not represent some coded feminist manifesto. Wuthering Heights is as Gothic — and as apolitical — as they come. Its setting — “a perfect misanthropist’s Heaven” where “nobody decent came near” — is decidedly supernatural, filled with rumored ghosts, changelings, and vampires. We never quite know where Heathcliff comes from (“I declare he is that strange acquisition my late neighbor made in his journey to Liverpool — a little Lascar, or an American or Spanish castaway”) or even what he is, whether that be a vampire or the devil himself (“He’s not a human being,” insists his wife Isabella). With its focus on childhood and its fascination with the natural world, the book occasionally slides into the Romantic genre, evoking something resembling Blake, Burns, or Coleridge, but then — poof! — someone’s been bitten or knocked to the ground, and the delightful reverie is over.

As someone who is typically not enamored with Gothic lit, I struggled to enjoy Wuthering Heights. To be honest, so much of it did not make any sense to me. Madness seems to come out of nowhere, beautiful women are drawn to sickly, dyspeptic, diabolical men they barely know, and the narrator, Nellie Dean, is as reliable as a middle-school gossip.

But perhaps, in a way, that is the very genius of Wuthering Heights. With an unreliable narrator, we as readers are left with far more questions than answers; we are never quite certain of what the truth actually is. That might explain why we keep coming back to Cathy and Heathcliff’s story, just to hear it one more time.