Description: Director of Programs at The Art Effect by day. Scholar of literature, media, and popular culture by night.
The other day, in the context of talking about my pop culture analysis writing and the cultural work I endeavor to do by generating writing in the first place, I described my approach as “anti-racist,” and a colleague asked me what I meant by that. In thinking through my response in the moment (these kinds of questions can sometimes make the lunchtime work-chat experience uncomfortable), I realized I haven’t ever written an articulation of my thoughts. Hence the writing of this post.
When I describe myself or any facet of my work as anti-racist, I’m informed by Ibram X Kendi’s writing on anti-racism, the idea being that it’s not enough to be non-racist, that to truly dismantle unjust systems, one must be actively and intentionally anti-racist, which is to say, one must be constantly reckoning and renegotiating the must acknowlege the ways in which they are complicit in an unjust system and reckon with experiences where one has been benefitted by or harmed by said unjust systems.
And attempting to be anti-racist is perhaps best understood as just that, an ever-ongoing and never-ending attempt. It’s not a Get Out Of Jail free card to being racist. To be anti-racist is to make a constant practice of existential reckoning: reckoning with how institutionalized inequity impacts our lives, reckoning with whether (more like, to what extent) such institutions help or harm us en masse, reckoning the social hierarchies to which we inadvertently belong, based on feature or conditions we don’t