Summary
Chapter 4: Biology
Kendi cannot remember the name of his White teacher, which may have been a coping mechanism, but he writes that people often “see and remember the race and not the individual” which is “racist categorizing” (44).
He does remember what she did, though. His class was mostly comprised of Black kids, with some Latinx and Asian kids and three White kids. The teacher almost always overlooked the kids of color and called on the White kids instead. Kendi did not notice this until one day when a small, timid Black girl raised her hand to answer a question and was promptly ignored in favor of a White student.
Kendi explains that people have deemed such an occurrence a “microaggression,” a term coined by Harvard psychiatrist Chester Piece in 1970. It describes “the constant verbal and nonverbal abuse racist White people unleash in Black people wherever we go, day after day” (46). Kendi does not like the term, explaining how it came to prominence in the era of the first Black president and seemingly made it easier to talk around the word “racist.” A microaggression is an instance of abuse, and it is not minor. Therefore, Kendi prefers the term “racist abuse,” and he states that only racists shy away from the R-word (in this context, "racist").
After the incident in the classroom, Kendi was roiling with anger. The class went to the chapel; when the morning service was over, he refused to get up. His teacher did not ask him what was wrong, assuming it was, as she did with Black kids, misbehavior rather than distress. When she tried to grab his shoulder, he screamed not to touch him, and he remained when she went to get the principal.
In third grade, Kendi was aware that he was Black and not White; to him, the White kids looked like they were a different species. Adults in his life had been teaching him that superficial physical differences “signified different forms of humanity” (49), which was the definition of biological racism.
Biological racists believe that the races are different in their biological makeup, that there is a hierarchy, and that inferior races should be segregated. These beliefs are widely held, but many people don’t realize they hold them. Kendi remembers hearing that Black people were more physically gifted. He recounts the words of historians and doctors who claimed over the last hundred and fifty years that Blacks were more improvisational by nature, that Black men had larger penises, and that Blacks were not as smart.
Though Kendi believed at the time that all humans descended from Adam and Eve, there was another biblical issue regarding biology: the curse of Ham. In Genesis, there is the story of Noah’s three sons coming across their naked, sleeping father; while two looked away, Ham covered him. Noah, upset that his nakedness was seen, cursed Ham’s land of Canaan. In 1578, a travel writer best articulated the idea that Ham’s son and his posterity were cursed with black skin, justifying their enslavement. Yet when Columbus discovered a group of people not mentioned in the Bible, speculations began about “a different Adam” and polygenesis. Some slaveholders preferred this belief that slaves were not descended from Adam. Polygenesis remained popular throughout the 1700s and 1800s, functioning in Charles Darwin’s work in the form of natural selection. The White race was “winning” and was evolving, heading toward perfection; other weaker races would go extinct, assimilate, or be enslaved. Biological racism lingered in this capacity for a long time, and even though it is no longer important academically, it still permeates people’s thoughts.
In 2000, President Clinton announced the mapping of the human genome, which revealed that all human beings are 99.9% the same genetically, regardless of race. Yet, not long after that, more familiar arguments surfaced, connecting biology to behavior. There is no such thing as racial ancestry, though: only ethnic ancestry. People native to certain regions share the same genetic profile and are called “populations.” There is actually more genetic diversity between populations within Africa than between Africa and the rest of the world. Race is “a genetic mirage” (53).
If humans are 99.9% similar, then they are 0.1% distinct; segregationists argue that this 0.1% is racial and has grown exponentially. Assimilationists do not want to talk about race and say that identifying as Black or some other non-White race is a setback. This does not make sense in this current, racialized world, even if race is merely a mirage or construct. Kendi writes, “terminating racial categories is potentially the last, not the first, step in the antiracist struggle” (54).
When the principal came to see Kendi, she did sit down, listen, and talk to him. He was not punished, and the teacher eased up on the non-White students. However, his mother told him that if he was going to protest, he’d have to accept the consequences. He left that school and went to a different Episcopalian school for the rest of elementary school, and then to a private Lutheran school for seventh and eighth grade.
Chapter 5: Ethnicity
Eighth grade was the year of the OJ Simpson trial, and Kendi remembers himself and his Black friends being elated at Simpson’s acquittal. He also knew the Black adults weren’t convinced of Simpson’s innocence, but they certainly knew that the justice system wasn’t innocent, either.
In eighth grade, Kendi and all the other kids made fun of each other, and Kendi remembers making fun of Kwame, a handsome, popular, and athletic Ghanaian kid. Even though he did not realize it at the time, Black people making fun of other people of the African diaspora brings back the horror of the slave trade.
Ethnic racism, as it is called, began in Africa with the slave trade. Certain Africans were considered better slaves, while others were considered inferior. Planters devised explanations for their racism, claiming that African chiefs sold their own people. These claims were repeated by Black people, but they are false: Africans chiefs and Africans themselves did not see the various ethnic groups around them as all African or Black, and thus did not sell their “own” people.
Kendi recounts how immigration rates increase in the 1990s, and he introduces to the narrative his friend Gil and his brother Cliff, two Haitian children who lived with their parents across the street from Kendi. Kendi remembers the parents as being friendly but a little aloof, and he accounts for the stereotypes that exist between these groups: African Americans are lazy, uneducated, unfriendly, while West Indians are selfish, lacking in race awareness, and whites’ lackeys.
The rising immigrant rate was not popular with many Americans, and indeed, today’s anti-immigrant administration repeats pabulum about “real” Americans and dangerous immigrants.
Once ethnic groups come under the gaze of race makers, they become racialized and thus enter into the hierarchy of value. Such classifications are as old as the country itself; one example is the “Five Civilized Tribes” of the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole, so designated in the colonial era.
Ethnic racism is particularly obvious in the question, “where are you from?” Kendi replies that he is from Queens and New York until the person asks where his parents are from, and then he says New York and Georgia, and finally adds he is a descendent of enslaved Africans. This invariably flummoxes the questioner.
Kendi recounts a moment early in his professorial career. A Ghanaian student in a class of mostly Black students repeated the stereotypes that Blacks were lazy and relied on welfare. When Kendi countered by mentioning the stereotypes of West Indians, it backfired when all the Black students began nodding. He kept the Ghanaian student behind to talk to him, and also to make sure that other students did not mess with him. He asked the student about how the British conceived of Ghanaians and whether those ideas were true. The student said no, of course, and Kendi asked where he had gotten his ideas about African Americans from. The boy thought about this, and then said he'd gotten them from family, friends, and observations. Kendi followed up by asking where they had gotten those ideas from, and the boy realized it had been from American Whites.
Kendi appreciated the student’s open-mindedness and explains to the reader that he did not want to overreact when the student trashed American Blacks because he himself had held these ideas at one time. There is the double standard in ethnic racism of loving one’s position on the ladder above other groups and hating those who are above them.
Kendi next turns to studies that show that Black immigrants do better than Blacks born in America. The initial claims were that Black immigrants are harder-working and more motivated, but this is an ethnically racist idea: the fact is that all immigrants tend to be more resilient and resourceful than native-born members of their race in their old and their new countries. “Immigrant self-selection” indicates that immigrants tend to have an internal drive that does well for them. Thus, sociologist Suzanne Model explains, “West Indians are not a Black success story but an immigrant success story” (67).
Chapter 6: Body
Kendi enrolled in John Bowne high school in Flushing, Queens. One day on the bus, Smurf, a Black classmate of Kendi’s, showed him a gun and asked if Kendi was afraid. Though Kendi was indeed afraid, he was cool and calm about it and Smurf left him alone. Once, when Smurf threatened another kid sitting in his spot and beat him up, Kendi did nothing; he is forever ashamed of this.
This anecdote leads into Kendi’s point that in the 1990s, the refrain was that Blacks were more violent and the Black body was inherently larger and more threatening than the White body, necessitating more force in order to be controlled.
Kendi imbibed these ideas as well, along with those from his parents, who warned him about Black robbers, killers, and drug dealers in his neighborhood. There was certainly aggression in his high school population, with crews getting into fights, and Kendi could not bring himself to do right when wrong was committed in front of him. He was “as scared of the Black body as the White body was as scared of me” (73).
Blackness arms Black people even when they are not carrying guns. Black bodies are at least 21% of those killed by police in 2018 even though they make up 13% of the population. In 1993, a bipartisan group of White legislators passed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which was supported by some members of the Congressional Black Caucus who were also afraid of the Black body. The law included new prisons, capital offenses, minimum sentences, three-strike laws, police officers, weapons, and trying 13-year-olds as adults. Politicians and political scientists spoke of “super-predators” in Black inner-city neighborhoods; they were “radically impulsive, brutally remorseless youngsters…who murder, assault, rape, rob, burglarize, deal deadly drugs, join gun-toting gangs, and create serious communal disorders” (75). Apparently, Kendi notes wryly, this was how young Black boys of his generation were being raised—as if the nation did not raise “White slaveholders, lynchers, mass incarcerators, police officers, corporate officials, venture capitalists, financiers, drunk drivers, and war hawks to be violent” (75). The “super-predators” never materialized, but that is not surprising because “crime bills have never correlated to crime any more than fear has correlated to actual violence” (76).
For Kendi and others, it is admittedly easier to remember the violence than the nonviolence, and he thought violence characterized himself, the neighborhood, and all the Black people there and in his school. He was just like the nightly news, focusing on the crime and danger. Yet, violent crime is and was not endemic or everywhere, and Kendi did not live in a “war zone.” This was not the everyday, lived reality for Black Americans.
Though young Kendi tended to associate Blackness with danger, the statistics do not support this in any way. The reality is that “communities with a higher share of long-term unemployed workers also tend to have higher rates of crime and violence” (79). There are higher correlations between violent crime and unemployment than there are between violent crime and race.
Strategies to reduce violent crime in Black neighborhoods tend to be: tough policing and mass incarceration of "super-predators" (in the segregationist view ); tough laws and tough love from fathers and mentors (in the assimilationist view); and higher-paying jobs (in the antiracist view) (80).
The conclusion is clear: there’s no such thing as a dangerous racial group, though there are dangerous individuals (like Smurf).
Chapter 7: Culture
In high school, the only thing Kendi really cared about was basketball. At some point, he no longer liked school, and he only got the minimum grades he needed to stay on the team. He enjoyed going with his friends to the Ave, the central artery of Southside Queens. There, they marveled at the clothes, the conflicts, and the pretty girls.
The Ave featured culture in all its magic and boldness, but Black culture was not always appealing to Whites. Kendi writes of the hostility towards “Ebonics,” considered by Whites to be “broken” English. More than that, African American culture is seen as a distortion or pathological deviation from the standard culture. Segregationists think Black culture cannot ever equal White culture; assimilationists say racial groups can reach superior cultural standards; antiracists reject cultural standards and call for a leveling of cultural difference.
Kendi loved the Black culture he saw on the Ave, and he knew the wider culture imitated and appropriated it even as they spoke of it as delinquent and thuggish. His first encounter with Black culture was the Black church, where he loved being amidst the culture created by his ancestors.
Culturally, racist scholars say there are no African elements among Blacks today because they were stripped of all of their cultural heritage and became an American and nothing else. Certainly, a lot of African American culture comes from European tradition, but not all. The “deep structure of culture” consists of philosophies and values: it blends Christianity; it changes English into Ebonics, and European ingredients into soul food.
At the start of Kendi's sophomore year, his parents moved the family to Manassas, Virginia, where he had to start Stonewall Jackson High School. Kendi was hoping to make the junior varsity basketball team but surprisingly did not, which utterly crushed him. He assumed he’d have no friends and did not know what to do without basketball.
In his new hometown, he initially looked down on the southern Blacks, thinking that his status as an urban Black northerner made him superior. This was also a form of cultural racism; it was no different from Europe judging the rest of the world according to European cultural standards. Antiracism means seeing all cultures in their differences at the same level.
Chapter 8: Behavior
Kendi eventually made friends but was not a good student. He was constantly criticized for this; he remarks that many times, the older generation evokes Martin Luther King, Jr. to guilt young people into acting better in some way. In the 1990s, leaders like Jesse Jackson reminded young Black kids that King “died for them.” President Bill Clinton said it was not racist for Whites to dislike gangs and say that welfare dependency and children out of wedlock are bad. On that view, then, Black people needed to stop playing “race cards” and take responsibility for their behavior.
One of the problems with racism is how the unexceptional Black person is “asked to be extraordinary just to survive” and “even worse, the Black screwup [...] faces the abyss after one error, while the White screwup is handed second chances and empathy” (83).
As a poor student, Kendi was seen as more than that: he was a poor Black student and thus an example of the race. It is a racist idea to believe that a racial group’s success or failure redounds to its individuals; it is expressing a racist idea to talk of “Black behavior.” To be an antiracist means acknowledging that there are no racial behaviors and that culture is separated from behavior. Culture is a group tradition that a particular racial group might have, but not all individuals adhere to it or it might not exist across all racial groups; behavior, in contrast, relates to human traits and potential that everyone has (but that might manifest differently in different people).
Historically, an example of this can be seen in the well-meaning abolitionists’ (or progressive assimilationists') claim that oppression degraded the behaviors of oppressed people. This view continued after slavery and more currently was deemed “post-traumatic slave syndrome” or PTSS. The psychologist who coined this used anecdotal evidence and modeled it on PTSD, ignoring the fact that many people who live through traumatic experiences do not get PTSD. Of course, Kendi clarifies, Blacks have suffered trauma from slavery and oppression, but it is not accurate to say Blacks are a traumatized people. This claim erases large chunks of history, such as the immediate Reconstruction era with tremendous progress for the newly freed slaves, and represents Black people as having self-hatred, hostility, and other negative traits due to their Blackness.
As a Black teenager, Kendi felt the pressure of “letting down the entire race” (98) and knowing that kids like him could not fail or fail to be twice as good. Thankfully Kendi’s parents did respond as individuals, and they did not see him as a thug because he was not a good student. He joined the International Baccalaureate track, which he hated, and felt like an imposter. He read about the differences in standardized testing scores between Whites and the other races, showing lower rates for Latinx and Black kids. He internalized his inferiority, which didn’t make sense to him until he was an undergraduate student preparing for the Graduate Record Exam (GRE).
At his test prep classes, he noticed how the instructor was not helping the students become smarter but instead helping them prepare for the test itself. Students who could not afford these tests or access them would most likely be worse off. The students who did better on the exam would then potentially benefit from the “attribution effect,” which “drives us to take personal credit for any success” (101) and parlay that into more confidence and pursuit of further opportunities.
Accepting the idea of an “achievement gap” is a way to reinforce the racist idea of Black intellectual inferiority. The idea was codified in a sense with the creation of the IQ test in 1905, developed by eugenicists and intended to reveal the significant differences among general intelligence between the races. The SAT was also intended to reveal the “natural intellectual ability of White people” (102). The rhetoric in the 1990s centered on closing the achievement gap and was carried on by Bush’s No Child Left Behind and Obama’s Race to the Top and Common Core.
This desire to close the gap is actually “opening the door to racist ideas” (103). Kendi muses that perhaps intellect is different than we think it is, or that perhaps it has different permutations. How can the underfunding of schools for people of color ever result in the “achievement” rates that measure intelligence?
It was Angela, a Black girl in Kendi’s government class, who told him about the Prince William County Martin Luther King Jr. essay contest. She urged him to participate and he did, writing “an anti-Black message that would have filled King with indignity” (104). He read it to Angela, who enthused over it. This was due to the fact that “the racist ideas sounded so good, so right, as racist ideas normally do” (105).
After he won the contest, Kendi’s “racist insecurity started transforming into racist conceit” (106). He applied to and got in at Florida A&M, the “biggest and baddest HBUC” (106) in the land. The university felt right to Kendi, but it wasn’t because of its academic reputation: honestly, he wrote, “I wanted to flee misbehaving Black folk” (106).
Analysis
In “Biology,” Kendi clearly overturns the idea that there is any such thing as biological difference between races. However, despite the fact that the human genome project and numerous other scientific denunciations of such a claim are well known, some people still insist on saying that the 0.1% difference between people is racially explained. This idea had credence throughout the centuries of enslavement and Jim Crow and was/is not easily dislodged. The hierarchy of race was a convenient way to explain why Whites had everything and why they were justified in keeping it; even when biological racism fell out of official academic favor, it persisted in the form of racist policies and racist ideas. Some lingering examples include the stereotypes that Black men are more well-endowed, that Black people are more physically fit than cerebral, and that Black people were more improvisational, which is why they were good at jazz. While “people from the same ethnic groups that are native to certain geographic regions typically share the same genetic profile” and are called “populations,” there is no such thing as “racial ancestry” (53).
In the subsequent chapter, “Ethnicity,” Kendi looks further at the African diaspora and how Black ethnic groups fall prey to discriminating against other Black ethnic groups. He roots this in history, explaining how slave traders touted the merits of certain African tribes over others. He explains how African Americans lambast African chiefs for “selling their own people” when that is a misunderstanding of the structure of African society; ultimately, the wariness and antipathy among African Americans and other Black peoples, such as West Indians, towards each other is ethnic racism promoted by American Whites in order to uphold the racial hierarchy.
In “Body,” Kendi delves into the racist ideas that Black people are inherently more dangerous and violent. When he was a young man, his parents instilled these ideas in him; he remembers focusing on the fighting that took place at school, on the bus, and in his neighborhood, and making conclusions about all Black people as a result of what were really just dangerous individuals. The rhetoric that surrounded Black young people in the 1990s suggested that they were being brought up to be “super-predators,” merciless gun-toting degenerates, which Kendi deftly dismisses as being both factually untrue as well as absurd given the violent White people the nation raised. The fact that certain neighborhoods have more crime than others is undeniable, but it is not race that identifies these places as such. Kendi quotes the Urban Institute: “Communities with a higher share of long-term unemployment also tend to have higher rates of crime and violence” (79). Writer Lonnae O’Neal breaks this down in an article on Kendi: “The highest instances of violent crime correspond with high unemployment and poverty, and that holds true across racial lines, Kendi found. Most white poverty, unemployment, and thus violent crimes occur in rural areas, while for blacks those ills are more concentrated in densely populated urban neighborhoods. If impoverished white communities ‘had five times more people, then that community would have five times, presumably, more violent crime.’” In an interview with PBS, Kendi spoke further about the 1990s: “I came of age in the 1990s. And if there was ever a decade in American history when black youth were considered America’s racial problem, it was the 1990s. And so black youth were constantly sort of degraded and denigrated. And we were told that we were too violent. We were told that we didn’t value education. we were told we were having too many babies out of wedlock. We were told all different types of things about what was wrong with us as a group. And, as the decade went on, I consumed many of those ideas, without even realizing it. And, ultimately, when I gave that speech 20 years ago, I expressed many of those ideas. And the whole speech, for the most part, was about all the things wrong with black youth, and how Martin Luther King Jr. would be very angry with black youth because of all the things we’re doing wrong, because we’re not living up to his dream.”
In “Culture,” Kendi writes about what he loves about Black culture and explores how cultural racism tries to degrade it. Some scholars say there is no such thing as “real” Black culture, that it is all diluted and only American. Others think it is distorted or deviant, such as the view that Ebonics is a perverted version of English. Kendi admits he had his own culturally racist views, seeing his background as a Black teenager from the urban area of Queens, New York as superior to that of the teenagers at his new school in the South. Antiracism means “[seeing] all cultures in all their differences as on the same levels, as equals. When we see cultural difference, we are seeing cultural difference—nothing more, nothing less” (91).
Finally, in “Behavior,” Kendi turns to his background as a subpar student to extrapolate how Black people’s behavior is constantly used to make claims about the entire race. Like Ta-Nehisi Coates in Between the World and Me, Kendi writes of how the young Black boy is constantly expected to fail, never gets second chances, is always letting people down, and has to be nothing short of extraordinary to succeed (i.e. only a Barack Obama, according to these stereotypes, could be president—not a regular, ordinary Black man).
