How to Be an Antiracist Essay Questions

How are racist stereotypes damaging, according to Kendi?

There are innumerable forms of damage, from mental duress to fewer job opportunities to higher rates of incarceration to the horrors of slavery. The thing that all of these have in common is that they result from racist ideas and racist policies, the former of which claims that Black people are inferior and prone to certain types of negative behaviors and the latter of which actualizes the goal of a racial hierarchy through laws and judicial rulings.

Why does Kendi regret the speech he made in high school?

In his introduction, Kendi remembers a speech he gave after winning a competition in high school. In this speech, he expressed his disappointment in the Black community and his peers because they did not achieve the greatness that Martin Luther King Jr. did. He blamed his own people for their shortcomings, and was proud to be a "good example" of his race. However, looking back, he believes that he was actually being racist and perpetuating false ideas. This anti-Black racism and uplift suasion rhetoric does not have to be from White people to be deleterious, something that Kendi did not realize at the time but now sees as a core part of his journey to antiracism.

Why don't people want to label themselves racist if that is what they are?

Kendi writes that the "R-word" is a tattoo: it seems permanent, fixed, and insurmountable. Everyone knows that being a racist or being racist is a bad thing, and even actual racists like President Trump shy away from the label when their comments indisputably advance racist ideas. Denial is powerful, and people do not want to have this label as an aspect of their identity. But Kendi's main point is that people aren't always a racist or always an antiracist: he tells an interviewer at PBS, "no one becomes a racist or even an anti-racist. It is a reflection of what a person is doing in each moment. And people change. And so if in one moment a person is saying that a particular racial group is inferior, they’re being racist. If, in the very next moment, they’re supporting a policy that’s leading to equity and justice, they’re being anti-racist. And there are so many people with both racist and anti-racist ideas who support racist and anti-racist policies."

Why does Kendi not believe there is a real "achievement gap"?

While statistics show that there is a major difference between Black students and their White and Asian peers, it is not because White students are inherently smarter. The concept of an "achievement gap" is a way of implying Black intellectual inferiority; it uses problematic methods like standardized testing (many of which were created by eugenicists) and dropout rates without any discussion of what those things really tell us. Efforts to close this gap "have been opening the door to racist ideas" (103) instead of identifying and fixing the real issues. The truth is that "districts with a higher proportion of White students receive significantly more funding than districts with more students of color" (103), and that means "the racial problem is the opportunity gap, as antiracist reformers call it, not the achievement gap" (103).

Why do White people believe that affirmative action is anti-White and that Black spaces racist against White people?

White people have a hard time understanding affirmative action as being anything other than anti-White because, to them, it means that people of color are getting extra privileges or special treatment; in their minds, this process takes place in a void rather than as a necessary intercession due to entrenched racial biases and policies. With Black spaces, White people often see segregation, not separation. They do not see Black people coming together in solidarity "to separate Black people from racism" (175). They don't understand that the integrationist strategy "expects Black bodies to heal in proximity to Whites who haven't yet stopped fighting them" (174). They are being selfish and ignorant, failing to understand why an affinity space is necessary for people who suffer from enduring racist ideas and policies.