Summary
Chapter 16: Failure
In this chapter, Kendi explores why racist societies endure and why antiracist strategies fail. One cannot think of race as a social construct, nor as a forward-march, nor as simply rooted in ignorance and hate rather than in self-interest. Focusing on healing symptoms and not changing policies does not work. Repetitive failures endure and exact a toll.
One of the most attractive failed strategies is “uplift suasion”: according to this strategy, the Black person must always act in the superior way and must not bring the race down. Kendi felt the burden of being perfect in front of the White and Black races: he was never allowed to be his imperfect self. The concept of uplift suasion came up at a dinner date Kendi was having with his future wife, Sadiqa, in which they found themselves harboring this belief system and then trying to pick it apart.
Uplift suasion was common in the abolitionist era, in which leaders like William Lloyd Garrison preached “moral suasion” and “educational suasion,” trying to appeal to his fellow White people based on morality and their sense of horror and shock at the excesses of slavery. However, racial ideas are not logical, and it seems clear that “economic, political, or cultural self-interest drives racist policymakers, not hateful immorality, not ignorance” (206). W.E.B. Du Bois noted the failure of these suasion tactics in the 1930s, saying that it was clear Americans knew the facts but were still indifferent and unmoved by them. Even though the history of the Civil Rights era presents numerous accomplishments, such as the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, it is not just a story of victory. Racist power started civil rights legislation out of its own self-interest and stopped out of its own self-interest. Generally, once the fears Americans hold do not come to pass, they are more likely to let their guard down and see that they are benefitting as well; only then does it seem possible to embrace antiracism.
At a Black Student Union meeting in 2006, Kendi was prepared to present to his peers his plan to help the Jena 6, six Black students who’d beaten up a White student after numerous racist actions had taken place at their high school. The boys were going to be persecuted to the fullest extent of the law, a move that was clearly motivated by racism. Kendi was tired of being an academic and wanted to be an activist. He knew that demonstrations provided momentary highs and were done often to satisfy one’s own feelings. Now, though, he was ready to put things on the line.
When Kendi presented his ambitious and extensive—and, arguably, dangerous—plans, his peers evinced their discomfort. He did not care and ploughed forward. He thought he was admirably radical with his “scorched-earth” words and writings. He thought everyone had to be fearless, although he now knows this is not true and antiracists really only need to be courageous.
When Kendi’s fellow BSU officers voted down his plan, he left feeling annoyed. He saw them as the failure, not himself. He says it is easy to blame people for being close-minded instead of recognizing our own foolishness; we blame people’s hate, stupidity, and lack of commitment much more quickly than we look at our own strategies and behavior. The “failure doctrine avoids the mirror of self-blame. The failure doctrine begets failure. The failure doctrine begets racism” (214). It becomes easier to critique every strategy and thus justify our own inaction “on the comfortable seat of privilege” because we are “too often bound by ideologies that are bound by the failed strategies of racial change” (214).
Kendi concludes by explaining that there is a difference between demonstrating and protesting, and it is easier to do the former. Demonstrations are often a favorite of suasionists, but power usually ignores demonstrations. The most effective ones are not momentary gatherings but ones that “provide methods for people to give their antiracist power, to give their human and financial resources, channeling attendees and their funds into organizations and protests and power-seizing campaigns (215).” Effective protests make racist power want to change their racist policies, though it is admittedly difficult to do this since the racist power has laws that get in the way.
Chapter 17: Success
Kendi received his doctorate and was now beginning his teaching career at SUNY Oneonta. It was a rural place in upstate New York and “Whiteness surrounded [him] like clouds from a plane’s window” (217). Kendi did have White colleagues whom he liked quite a bit, but he was closest to Caridad, an Afro-Latinx woman whose husband had recently died of cancer and whose professorship Kendi had taken. Caridad inspired Kendi with her successful ways of engaging with students, inspiring them to self-reflect.
At a talk given by Boyce Watkins, in Watkins compared racism to a disease, Kendi asked Watkins if he thought racism might be more like an organ: essential for America to function and essential for America to live. Watkins demurred, but Kendi would not change his own perspective at all. He eventually came to see that antiracists could be just as closed-off to new ideas and unwilling to change as racists.
Kendi’s perspective on racism had come from a book that explained “institutional racism”: how racism was overt (on the level of individuals) and covert (on the level of the total White community). Kendi felt this was true, but he could not yet see that perhaps racism was polluting to Whites and that some Blacks were thriving in the system of racism. He thought he had everything figured out and that racism was “an inanimate, invisible, immortal system, not…a living, recognizable, mortal disease of cancer cells that we could identify and treat and kill” (221).
Kendi makes several other points: The idea of covert racism can provide cover for specific policymakers and policies by giving people no recourse but to lash out angrily at the abstract “system;” there are some similarities between the institutional antiracist and the post-racialist in that they both think institutional racism is unseen and unseeable; again, it is better to be precise with one's terminology, so Kendi uses “racist policies” instead of “institutional racism.”
Kendi tells the story of Trayvon Martin’s murder at the hands of self-appointed vigilante George Zimmerman, the story of Alicia Garza founding the international Black Lives Matter movement, and the story of his own writing of Stamped from the Beginning, which entailed his wading through terrible, nauseating archives of the stories of racism. The trash, as he deemed it, cleansed his mind to a large extent. He did his best to uncover and critique his own racist ideas as he wrote of the history of racist ideas, and he committed himself to his lifelong mission of being an antiracist.
These steps in working to achieve this mission include: stop proclaiming he is not racist; admit the definition of a racist; confess racist policies he supports and racist ideas he expresses; accept their source; acknowledge definition of antiracism; struggle for antiracist power and policy in his spaces; remain at the antiracist intersection with other bigotries; think with antiracist ideas.
Chapter 18: Survival
In the last chapter, Kendi covers his wife Sadiqa’s fight with breast cancer, his mother’s fight with breast cancer, and his own fight with colon cancer. Through all of those struggles, he thought deeply about racism’s source as self-interest, and about moral and educational suasion as suicides.
He also thought about what he could do to change policy, something people often asked him when he talked about his book on tour. He moved to American University, where he founded and directed the Antiracist Research and Policy Center. The teams who worked with him would investigate racist policies, research and propose alternatives, monitor said polices, etc.
Kendi’s colon cancer was stage 4 and he was likely to die. He could barely come to terms with this, but committed himself to fighting, thinking of everything that brought him joy now and everything that would bring him joy if he were to survive. He persevered through chemotherapy, still writing, exercising, and trying to live through the pain, which he realized was essential for healing. The six months of chemo obliterated his cancer and he survived.
Concluding, Kendi says the country can survive metastatic racism. He know this metaphor is heavy-handed, but he thinks it is a valid way to address the disease of racism. Racism should be treated like cancer, saturated with antiracism to kill the racist cells; the country should be given healthy food for thought, the exercise of antiracist ideas, and should be monitored closely.
He advocates that “we must believe. Believe all is not lost for you and me and our society” (238). Kendi feels hope only because of the truism that “Once we lose hope, we are guaranteed to lose” (238). Ignoring the odds and fighting to create an antiracist world will give humanity the chance to survive, to live, and to be forever free.
Analysis
In the final three chapters, Kendi considers what contributes to the failure of antiracism, what brings about its success, how he came to equate racism with a disease, and what the next steps are for him and his readers.
In terms of failures, he describes how, since the abolitionist era, well-meaning Whites have promoted certain strategies that sound good but are in fact rarely successful. This included moral suasion, which tried to illuminate the horrors of slavery and Jim Crow through exposing them and, once people’s eyes were open, hoping that the newly-awakened people would contribute to positive changes. Today, moral suasion is still a palatable tactic, one which hopes that by illuminating racist policies and ideas, White people in power will be pushed into action. Kendi proposes, though, that perhaps racist ideas make people illogical—in which case, waiting for them to open their eyes is a waste of time. He writes, “What if racist policymakers know about the harmful outcomes of their policies? What if racist policymakers have neither morals nor conscience, let alone moral conscience, to paraphrase Malcolm X? What if no group in history has gained their freedom through appealing to the moral conscience of their oppressors, to paraphrase Assata Shakur? What if economic, political, or cultural self-interest drives racist policymakers, not hateful immorality, not ignorance?” (207.) This stunning conclusion is accompanied by the sobering reminder that White people tended only to embrace change once they saw that to do so benefited them or that none of the prophesied dangers had come to pass.
Another “failure” Kendi notes is one that will be familiar to those readers living through the uproar over the death of George Floyd and other Black people at the hands of police: demonstrations, which are rarely impactful, and which are not the same as protests. Demonstrations provide momentary highs and feelings of satisfaction to the participants. They are peaceful and rarely go beyond merely annoying racist policymakers. Demonstrations that merge into protests, which are more aggressive, are only ever successful when they equip their participants to work to change policy—where to donate money, whom to call and write, how to really help. Kendi does not deride demonstrations, of course, but he counsels people that antiracism takes more work than holding up a sign at a peaceful march.
So what, then, brings about success? Kendi builds on what he wrote about changing policy by explicitly focusing on antiracism and its tenets, goals, and practical steps. These steps include a great deal of honesty and self-reflection, avoiding denials of racism, and trying to acknowledge what racist views one holds and where they come from. They also include working intersectionally and endeavoring to “[equalize] racial distinctions in ethnicities, bodies, cultures, colors, classes, spaces, genders, and sexualities” (226). Simply, Kendi puts it, “I realized there is nothing wrong with any of the racial groups and everything wrong with individuals like me who think there is something wrong with any of the other racial groups” (227).
In the final chapter, Kendi writes of his mother, his wife, and his own struggles with cancer, and how he came to see racism as a disease that could be eradicated. He initially felt that it was more of an essential organ: something that could not be removed and was necessary for the body (politic) to function. However, this view suggests that racism can never be extracted and eradicated, and Kendi no longer subscribes to it. Instead, racism should be viewed as something foreign in the body that is dangerous to it but can be removed with the proper treatment. This is hard but possible: removing it requires removing racist policies, looking for “clear margins” and “healthy cells of equity” (238), keeping up a healthy diet of antiracism, vigilantly monitoring for recurrences, and treating early. In an interview with PBS, Kendi clarified this point at length: "I think the first step with both is acknowledging the diagnosis. Acknowledging, it’s very, very hard, particularly when you’re someone like me. I was my mid-30s. I didn’t smoke and drink. I was a vegan. And someone coming and telling me I have stage four colon cancer, that was very, very hard for me to accept, because I thought I was healthy, just as many Americans who feel that they have been doing right by, let’s say, people of color, it’s very hard for them to accept the diagnosis that they, too, are being racist. But that first step of acknowledging the diagnosis is critical, because how can we go about healing, right, if we don’t even admit that there is a problem? And so I think, after we get past that, then we can actually go after racism how we go after metastatic cancer, which is a local and a systemic treatment. The local treatment is literally going in and removing, surgically removing the racist policies from our institutions, from our communities, in the way surgeons remove, surgically, the tumors. But then they don’t stop there. They then flood the body with systemic treatment, which is chemotherapy and, increasingly, immunotherapy, which is to reduce the cancer cells they can’t see, which is to protect against a reoccurrence of cancer, in the same way we could flood the body with anti-racist policies that literally can eliminate the remaining sort of tumor cells of inequity, that can protect against a reoccurrence. And then doctors don’t stop there. They then make sure they watch and follow the body very closely to ensure that there’s not going to be a reoccurrence. And then, when there is a reoccurrence, what do they do? They aggressively treat, all the while they’re encouraging the cancer survivor to eat well, right, to exercise, which is equivalent to, essentially, thinking and recognizing the world from an anti-racist standpoint, recognizing that there should not be any inequities, because the racial groups are equals."
One can hope, Kendi concludes, knowing that “Racist power is not godly. Racist policies are not indestructible. Racial inequities are not inevitable. Racial ideas are not natural to the human mind” (238).
