Summary
Chapter 13: Space
Kendi and his peers called the African American Studies space a Black space (even though, of course, Temple University was governed by and filled with White spaces). The most prominent person there was Molefi Kete Asante, who wrote the seminal work Afrocentricity and formed the doctoral program in African American Studies, the first in the nation. His right hand was Professor Ama Mazama, a fiercely intelligent woman who agreed to be Kendi’s dissertation adviser. She said once in class that it was impossible to be objective, which stuck with Kendi. When he asked what people should strive to do if they could not be objective, she replied that they must tell the truth.
Kendi reflects on the idea of the Black space, like the Black neighborhood, as an inherently dangerous space. This is a racist and powerfully misleading idea. Such spaces are stigmatized and feared, as if White spaces did not create school shooters and drunk drivers. There is good, bad, violence, and peace in all spaces, no matter what color. Racist power racializes space as it racializes people; "the ghetto," "the inner city," and "the third world" are all terms that point to this fact. The hierarchy of space relates to funding and resources, elevating White spaces in all ways.
At Temple, the “fishbowl,” or the glassed-in classroom, was the main hangout for Kendi and other African American Studies scholars. He made friends there and enjoyed touting the merits of his HBCU and listening to his peers do the same. It bothered him, though, that a woman named Nashay constantly derided hers, which, he learned, was due to the fact that they messed up her transcript once. Kendi thought about how Black people and White people heaped scorn on HBCUs or said they weren’t the “real world,” as if the real world were White. Of course, such criticisms ignore the fact that Black spaces are substantially less rich than White ones, and “comparing spaces across race-classes is like matching fighters of different weight classes” (172).
As Kendi thought about his anger at Nashay, he realized he had been similar to her. When it came to White spaces, he would distinguish between the individual and the space, but with Black spaces, would generalize. He knew there was no way to love Black people without loving Black spaces.
Turning to history, Kendi explains how space racism has a central role. He looks at integrationism after the Civil War and how this strategy expected Black bodies to heal in proximity to Whites, who were still opposed to them. Many Blacks did not want to do this, of course, and preferred to have their own communities. Separation is not segregation, and “the antiracist desire to separate from racists is different from the segregationist desire to separate from ‘inferior’ Blacks” (175). Yet when Black people gather among themselves, White people see spaces of White hate. They see spaces of segregation, not of cultural solidarity.
Kendi looks at Jim Crow separation as immortalized in Plessy v. Ferguson; when the Warren Court overruled this in Brown v. Board of Education in 1954, Warren wrote that in public education, ‘separate but equal’ had no place and "separate educational facilities were inherently unequal” (176). This was a monumental moment; however, in 1973, in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, the Court ruled that property-tax allocations resulting in inequities in public schools were not unconstitutional. Progress is ever followed by backsliding.
In the 1970s, busing was a major issue, and the problems of Brown were laid bare. The court “reinforced the legitimacy of integrated White spaces that hoard public resources, include some non-Whites, and are generally, though not wholly, dominated by White peoples and cultures” (177). The integrated White space was the ideal, and “inferior” Black children were left behind. Barack Obama wrote that the “minority assimilated into the dominant culture, not the other way around” (178).
Some current thinking uses Martin Luther King Jr. as an integrationist, but King was never race-neutral or colorblind. He did not want Black people to fade into oblivion in White spaces: he wanted equal access to all public accommodations and equal resources for all racialized spaces.
Kendi notes that lynching of Black bodies means that segregationists are more dangerous to the Black body, while integrationists are more dangerous for Black bodies in their lynching of Black cultures. Ultimately, being antiracist is eliminating all barriers to all racialized spaces, to support the “voluntary integration of bodies attracted by cultural difference, a shared humanity” (180).
Chapter 14: Gender
Kendi introduces the reader to two women from his doctoral program: Kaila and Yaba. Kaila was a Black lesbian, funny, bold, and truly herself. Yaba had “irrepressible Blackness” and was the “most ethnically antiracist person in my new world” (182).
When Kendi arrived at Temple, he admits he was a “racist, sexist homophobe” (182). When he was brought up, homosexuality was something about which his parents stayed silent. When it came to feminism, his mother was not weak and his father did not want her to be, but even though Kendi was not raised to be a Black patriarch, he essentially became one because the world around him expected it and he was not taught to be a Black feminist.
In 1965, Daniel Patrick Moynihan released “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” in which he talked about the Black family as being broken. It was matriarchal, with a concomitant crushing burden on Black men. Such men were seen as having it worse off than Black women, and Black women’s issues faded from view at the same time that their failings were made manifest.
Kendi’s parents could not help joining “the interracial force policing the sexuality of young Black mothers” (184) during the 1970s and 1980s, lamenting the single-parent household of these women in the absence of any other context for how those homes could be or should be or why they were that way. In the 1990s, welfare and sexual irresponsibility were blamed for these households. Only Black feminists defended these women.
Kendi’s mother did start to question Christian sexism and attended some consciousness-raising conferences for Christian women. In the 1970s, women’s liberation groups and Black women’s caucuses developed their own spaces. This also happened in the antiracist queer community, which formed its own spaces; for example, the Combahee River Collective issued a statement embodying queer liberation, feminism, and antiracism in an unprecedented fashion. In the 1990s, Black feminists were aghast at the treatment of Anita Hill in her testimony against Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas, and Philomena Essed coined the phrase “gendered racism.” In 1991, critical race theorist Kimberle Williams Crenshaw explored the term “intersectionality” in her work, focusing on the intersection of race and gender. Kendi explains that to be antiracist, one must be against the hierarchy of race-genders. To be truly feminist is to be antiracist, and to be truly antiracist is to be feminist.
Gender racism led to the sterilization of Black women in the 1970s. It explains why women of color with the same degrees as White women make less, why they are in poverty at higher rates, why they are likely to lose their baby at higher rates, and more.
Gender racism impacts White women and males of color as well, and thus resistance to Black feminism and intersectionalism is self-destructive. The gender-racist idea says that the pinnacle of womanhood is the weak White woman (hence the hatred for Hilary Clinton in 2016), and the Black woman is seen as hypersexualized. Both races of women are harmed by these stereotypes. As for Black heterosexual males, their resistance is also destructive and self-destructive: “No defense is stronger than the frail tears of innocent White womanhood. No prosecution is stronger than the case for inherently guilty Black manhood” (191).
Chapter 15: Sexuality
Queer racism refers to inequities between race-sexualities; homophobia and racism have been intertwined for ages. For example, Havelock Ellis, who coined the term “homosexual” and considered it a congenital defect, wrote of lesbian “negresses” having abnormally prominent clitorises.
Kendi’s best friend at Temple was Weckea. Weckea was laidback and inquisitive, and Kendi looked up to him intellectually. One day, their mutual friend Raena told Kendi, when Weckea was not there, that Weckea was gay. This stunned Kendi, who had had no idea. He thought about what he “knew” of Black gay men: they were hypersexual; they were reckless. The only gay men he’d been around before were the ones at FAMU who were very feminine, and Kendi “assumed Black gay men performed femininity” (196). He did not yet understand that gender was an authentic performance, that women and men could act in ways not tied to their biology, and that it is transphobic to assume they are “acting” rather than being who they are.
Kendi tried to figure out why Weckea did not tell him he was gay, and he came to realize his friend probably sensed his homophobia. As for Kendi, he knew he had to choose between his homophobia or his friend, so he chose his friend. He had to come to terms with the fact that all Black lives mattered, including those of poor transgender Black women, statistically the most oppressed and violated of all Black intersectional groups.
To be a queer antiracist is to be an ally to transgender people, to intersex people, to women, to all gender non-conforming people, and to homosexuals. It means listening, learning, being led by them, and seeing that homophobia, racism, and queer racism are problems.
Yaba and Kaila helped Kendi see that if he was not defending Black women or queer Blacks, then he was not being an antiracist. They were unsparing in their criticism of people who did not see it this way, and sometimes Kendi felt personally attacked. Yet this was how he learned, and he began reading everything they mentioned. He wanted to overcome his gender racism and queer racism. He had to drag himself before people who intimidated him and gave him constructive criticism, and he is grateful these women had the patience to do that for him.
In particular, Yaba and Kaila vilified “patriarchal women,” which usually meant White women standing behind their White patriarchs. This was a term Kendi found surprising, but he kept learning. He saw that they had problems with homophobes rather than with heterosexuals, and with patriarchy rather than with men.
Overall, Kendi is immensely grateful his Black-student discourse “was ruled by queer Black feminists instead of by patriarchal Black male homophobes” (200). These models helped him along his path to being a gender antiracist and a queer antiracist.
Analysis
In “Space,” Kendi states that White people tend to think any space not designated for them is racist, but, just like affirmative action’s “reverse discrimination” detractors, this is missing the point: Black people need to be able to separate from White people if they wish and form their own spaces without having to be in proximity to their oppressors. Kendi mentions several spaces in this section, including where he felt at home on Temple’s campus and the larger Black spaces of HBCUs (historically Black colleges and universities). He also acknowledges that both Black and White people tend to look down on Black spaces or compare them unfairly with White spaces. It is categorically absurd to compare a well-endowed White university with an HBCU that has a fraction of the funding. It is also problematic to idealize the White space and try to make that integrated White space the norm; in expressing this point, Kendi rescues Dr. King from the arms of integrationists who claim he thought that Black bodies should just meld into White spaces.
In “Gender” and “Sexuality,” Kendi admits to his reader that he had a lot to learn with regard to those two topics. He explains that while he was not raised to be a sexist homophobe, he nonetheless internalized the prevailing patriarchal, homophobic beliefs of his community. He had the model of his quasi-feminist mother to help him understand a fair marital partnership, but it was not until he met Kaila and Yaba at graduate school that he came to the writings and ideas of Black feminists. The intersection of race and gender means that Black women are doubly burdened, and Kendi provides numerous statistics showing that Black women fare worse economically than White women. They are also privy to gross stereotypes regarding their putative sexual promiscuity and are harshly censured for their lifestyle (e.g., Kendi mentions how his parents and other middle-class Blacks looked down upon Black single mothers).
Kendi stresses that gender racism is not just deleterious to Black women but also to Black males and White women. The latter are pushed to conform to the feminine ideal of a weak White woman, and the former is heavily punished for coming anywhere near that ideal beacon of womanhood. Kendi writes, “No defense is stronger than the frail tears of innocent White womanhood. No prosecution is stronger than the case for inherently guilty Black manhood” (191), a haunting assertion that evokes Emmett Till, the Central Park 5, and other horrifying encounters between White women and their supposed Black aggressors.
In “Sexuality,” Kendi recounts how learning his best friend at Temple, Weckea, was gay was a turning point for him because it challenged his stereotypes of what gay men were like. His friendship with Weckea was more important than holding onto his homophobic tendencies, but he also knew he could not simply make an exception for this one gay friend of his: he had to pull his erroneous beliefs out by the root and learn how to be an ally of queer Black people. He does largely gloss over the historical and pervasive homophobia in the Black community, but he nevertheless offers some powerful advice for how to be a queer ally and why one can’t be a true antiracist without being a queer ally. In numerous interviews, Kendi has further elaborated on this point, recently talking to Democracy Now about Black trans women: “black transgender women are literally experiencing a genocide. I mean, I don’t know of any way to talk about the fact that their average life expectancy currently is in the mid-thirties. This isn’t 1750; this is 2019. And we have a group of Americans whose life expectancy is in the mid-thirties. And part of the reason why is because people of color, black people, white people, Americans do not value their life, view them in the way in which — and we view them in the way Trump views Latinx immigrants. And we criticize Trump without criticizing our views about these black transgender women. All of these people, their lives matter, and we need to recognize the ways in which they’re being subjected, as a result of their gender, as a result of their sexual orientation, as a result of their transgender status, as a result of their race, as a result of their class, how that’s all intersecting to lead to their genocide.”
