Situational Irony: MLK and Stonewall Jackson
Kendi notes this ironic moment from his youth: "Did anyone notice the irony that at this Martin Luther King Jr. oratorical contest, my free Black life represented Stonewall Jackson High School?" (5). King, of course, is the famed civil rights leader advocating for racial equality, but Stonewall Jackson was a Confederate general in the Civil War, fighting to uphold slavery.
Situational Irony: Smurf
Kendi explores the idea of "Black behavior" in one of his chapters, using the story of Smurf, a frightening and tough Black teenager at his school. Smurf confronts him one day on the bus with a gun, asking, "'You scared, yo?' he asked with almost brotherly warmth, a smile resting on his face" (70). Kendi helps the reader feel the frightening nature of this encounter with the contrasting irony of the gun and the warm smile.
Verbal and Dramatic Irony: Whites
Kendi writes, "We, the young Black superpredators, were apparently being raised with an unprecedented inclination toward violence—in a nation that presumably did not raise White slaveholders, lynchers, mass incarcerators, police officers, corporate officials, venture capitalists, financiers, drunk drivers, and war hawks to be violent" (75), his tone dripping with irony as he shows how absurd it is that Whites raise these deleterious individuals but that Black people are the ones who are said to have inherently bad parents.
Situational Irony: DRC
Kendi notes that "Racial capitalism makes countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo one of the richest countries in the world belowground and one of the poorest countries in the world aboveground" (163). This sad irony is all too typical in the history of colonialism and imperialism. Places like the DRC are extremely lucrative in their gems and minerals and other natural resources, which were exploited by Europeans as the Africans in the regions suffered under forced labor and oppression. This history has created more or less the same situation in the present day.
