“Progress” by Ibram X. Kendi

Chapter 17 is prefaced with a photo of Chris Williams and his children Harley and Hunter, Silver Springs, Maryland, 2020.

In chapter 17, Ibram X. Kendi reflects on progress made and unmade, and the ways in which progression and regression are intertwined in the fight for racial equity. Throughout history, he notes, visible “progress” has often obscured concurrent problems, creating an all-or-nothing narrative that fails to recognize the complexity of American racism.

As an illustrative example, Kendi cites the 2008 election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States. Obama himself, Kendi contends, was seen by many as a symbol of incontrovertible progress: a Black man ascending to the White House for the first time represented a long-standing barrier shattered and a new era for both American politics and daily life. But for others, Kendi cautions, Obama’s election was seen as evidence that the United States had progressed far enough to be considered post-racial, which then meant that it was no longer necessary to identify and counteract racism—it was “over,” a problem from the past that had been inarguably solved.

What Kendi refers to as the “propanganda of racial progress” dates back to slavery, when enslavers would justify Black bondage by insisting that they had actually improved the lives of those they enslaved. This equivocating stance of moral relativism would persist through the drafting of the country’s founding documents, the Civil War, and its subsequent years, shifting and morphing to fit the evolving conditions of Black Americans’ ongoing subjugation.

Though the laws and systems maintaining their oppression changed over time, the prevailing notion that free Black people were being policed and controlled “for their own good” remained a constant. This approach reinforced racism while masquerading as a sign of progress, bolstered by the insidious falsehood that the end of slavery meant the end of racism and no further reflection was necessary.

The mythologized gains of racial progress, Kendi notes, have long been used to alleviate white Americans’ guilt over their treatment of Black Americans even as Black Americans have continued to suffer at their hands. With each tangible win has come some degree of white abdication of responsibility—the more power Black people are perceived to have, the less work white people think they need to do to facilitate justice. When Black men got the vote, for example, many white abolitionists erroneously assumed their work was done.

This absolutist interpretation of progress has, the author contends, long obfuscated the harsh reality of the Black American experience: progress and regression have always moved forward in tandem, and narratives of progress frequently serve to undermine the rest of the story.

“At the Superdome After the Storm Has Passed” by Clint Smith

“At the Superdome After the Storm Has Passed” is prefaced by an epigraph dated August 29, 2005, the date Hurricane Katrina made landfall on American soil. Many of New Orleans’s poor Black neighborhoods sustained incomprehensible damage, and an estimated 1,800 people died, while around 100,000 were stranded. Tens of thousands took refuge in the Louisiana Superdome. Smith’s poem, set in the Superdome, recalls the chaos, inequity, and desperation of this aftermath in seven stanzas.

“Mother and Son” by Jason Reynolds

“Mother and Son” is prefaced by an epigraph dated November 4, 2008, the date Barack Obama became the first Black person to be elected president of the United States. In his short fiction piece, Jason Reynolds tells the story of a mother and son eager to visit the polls to vote for him. They spend hours waiting at the polls with their Black neighbors, sharing a palpable sense of pride at casting this historic vote. Close to midnight, they finally watch Obama take the stage in victory.