The opposite of 'racist' isn't 'not racist'. It is 'anti-racist'.
Kendi's book is not about not being racist. It's not about being post-race or neutral or colorblind. Rather, it is, definitively, about being antiracist. Here, Kendi distinguishes between someone who is personally not racist and someone who actively fights against racism in the hope of creating a fairer world. If someone remains neutral and does not fight against racism, they are playing a part in perpetuating racism and allowing it to exist in society. If someone thinks promoting colorblindness or touting a post-racial world is the way to combat racism, they're also wrong. A person must seriously, emphatically, and unrelentingly work towards antiracism.
Racist ideas make people of color think less of themselves, which makes them more vulnerable to racist ideas.
Kendi emphasizes the influence and dangers of ideas. People's preconceptions and stereotypes can have a huge impact on the victims, creating low self-esteem and a lack of confidence, both of which ultimately affect the way people live their lives. When something painful and harmful about someone is repeated to that person over and over again, he or she may start to believe it and act accordingly.
What gives me hope is a simple truism. Once we lose hope, we are guaranteed to lose. But if we ignore the odds and fight to create an antiracist world, then we give humanity a chance to one day survive, a chance to live in communion, a chance to be forever free.
Kendi ends the work on a hopeful note. It's not excessive, nor does it promise easy, fast solutions to endemic racism, but it's definitely hopeful. He says that having no hope at all means that there is no point in continuing to fight and that they will eventually lose. Retaining hope means that the struggle will endure; for such a goal as eliminating racism, there is no other option. Things have changed and they will change. People can be better. Racism is not permanent or necessary for America to survive and thrive; it can be pulled out by the root and the soil watered with antiracist policies and ideas so as not to return to the deleterious past.
Both my parents emerged from poor families...Both framed their rise from poverty into the middle class in the 1980s as a climb up the ladder of education and hard work. As they climbed, they were inundated with racist talking points about Black people refusing to climb...
Kendi's parents aren't bad people. They worked hard, valued education, were activists, and lovingly raised their sons. However, their particular circumstances and the pervasive rhetoric of the 1980s surrounding "inferior" Black people meant that they began internalizing anti-Black ideas. They'd be the last people to see themselves as racist, and certainly being Black in America wasn't easy for them even though they worked their way into the middle class; all the same, their distinguishing between themselves and the single mothers, drug users, dropouts, minimum-wage earners, and petty criminals did nothing to advance antiracism. Kendi is honest about this and about his own similar views, challenging readers of all backgrounds and races to identify and root out racist ideas.
One of racism's harms is the way it falls on the unexceptional Black person who is asked to be extraordinary just to survive—and, even worse, the Black screwup who faces the abyss after one error, while the White screwup is handed second chances and empathy.
As a young man, Kendi wasn't a great student, which he saw became a commentary on the Black race. Other young Black men might get involved in drugs, or slack off in their duties, or have a child at too young an age, or do anything young people might do that could cause them a degree of trouble. In contrast, Kendi points out, the White kid will get second chances and have people assume the best of him, while the Black kid will be deemed a failure representative of the whole race and can have his future derailed in unconscionable ways. The normal, ordinary Black kid has to be extraordinary to survive. They do not get to mess up; they do not get to be flawed or lacking. This is yet another way in which racism corrupts.
The history of capitalism—of world warring, classing, slave trading, enslaving, colonizing, depressing wages, and dispossessing land and labor and resources and rights—bears out the conservative definition of capitalism.
Kendi lambasts conservatives for their unfettered, unnuanced support of capitalism, noting that the things they're actually supporting are bringing wrack and ruin to the environment, people, codes of ethics, and more. In this quote, he lists that various actions capitalists have taken—ones most people would be quick to condemn, regardless of their political affiliation—and shows that they are absolutely indicative of what capitalism is about, as well as being deleterious to among everyone except for the very rich (who are also, of course, mostly white men). He endeavors multiple times in the chapter on class to point out that ordinary White people have nothing to gain from capitalism and that they are negatively affected by the policies of racists.
I am forever grateful that the Black graduate-student discourse was ruled by queer Black feminists instead of by patriarchal Black male homophobes.
Black cis-hetero men certainly bear the weight of racial prejudice, but they do not regularly endure what Black women and queer Black folk do. Intersectionalism explains that one's identity is shaped by the multiple identities a person has, and entrenched sexism and homophobia mean that women and queer people must reckon with the prejudice and pain that these facets of their identity may cause them in the United States. Kendi did not initially consider this, but he came to change his thinking as a result of the formative individuals in his department. His thanks to them here is moving, but he also wants his readers to acknowledge that they may have to do a great deal of introspection, research, and work themselves if they aren't as lucky to have the friends and guides he did.
What if economic, political, or cultural self-interest drives racist policymakers, not hateful immorality, not ignorance?
Kendi notes that the claim that people simply need more vivid examples of the horrors of racism in order to correct their behaviors and beliefs is probably mostly wrong. The fact is, racist policymakers do know what they're doing, and ordinary people's racist ideas and behavior are also unlikely to stem from complete and utter ignorance as to how BIPOC might be impacted. Rather, racist policies come about because of self-interest; it did in the beginning, it has for centuries, and it will continue to do so unless we work to dismantle policies that harm BIPOC.
A similar bond exists between implicit bias and post-racialism. They bond on the idea that racist ideas are buried in the mind. Because they are implicit and unconscious, implicit bias says. Because they are dead, post-racialism says.
Both "implicit bias" and "post-racial" are entrenched in 21st-century rhetoric and strike most people as understandable and, in the case of the latter, largely positive concepts. However, both of these concepts are flawed, as Kendi points out. Implicit bias suggests people are hard-wired to be racist and that they have no idea what they're doing and saying when they assert racist ideas or promote racist policies. Post-racialism suggests that we've moved beyond race: that it's an outmoded way of thinking about things, that Obama's election meant we'd come so far, and that talking about race only holds us back. People might think they want to be post-racial or colorblind, but what they're actually doing is dismissing the real, lived experience of BIPOC.
I started questioning myself. What am I doing to change policy? How can I genuinely urge people to focus on changing policy if I am not focused on changing policy?
Kendi is an academic: he's a professor and a scholar, perhaps most famous for his books. Yet he understands that he cannot write books about being antiracist, which entails working to change racist policy, without actually working to change policy himself. He came to see that he had not been doing enough of that, and while he did not need to step away from his academic work, he did need to find ways to commit himself to what he advocated. He has since formed antiracist institutes at American University and Boston University, and he is tirelessly working to affect change. This quote is one of many examples that shows Kendi probing his own ideas and shortcomings, consistently asking himself if he is doing the right thing to dismantle racism; by doing so, he is a model for all readers.
