Summary
My Racist Introduction
Kendi begins by recounting how, when he was seventeen years old, he made it to the final round of the Prince William County Martin Luther King, Jr. oratorical contest. His parents showed up to cheer him on. He knew he didn’t have the grades and accomplishments like the others there, and he'd always thought he was too dumb for college. He didn’t read much in those days and didn’t care for history and literature, but perhaps, he says, if he had read about where he lived in Virginia, he’d know why people flocked to the Civil War battlefields and memorials.
Kendi went first, feeling confident. He wonders now if his poor sense of self generated his poor sense of his people, or if the causation was the opposite way around. Racist ideas make people of color think less of themselves, which makes them more vulnerable to racist ideas. Kendi always felt he was a subpar student, which the media said was rooted in his race, which then made him less motivated, and so on.
When Kendi thinks about his speech now, he admits he is filled with shame. He spoke of how Black people cause problems for themselves and how Black youth aren’t making the right choices. Everyone was clapping and cheering, especially the Black judge.
Kendi knows now he was a dupe to think that Black people themselves were the problem. This is the function of racist ideas: they manipulate people into thinking they are the problem, not the policies. He mentions Donald Trump and his comments about the characteristics of people of color, and how he always denies being racist. Denial “is the heartbeat of racism, beating across ideologies, races, and nations” (9). Even White supremacists deny that they are racists.
Kendi answers the question of what is wrong with “not being racist”: what is wrong it that it is not the same thing as being antiracist. Nonracism is neutrality, and that is not enough. Being colorblind is another problematic moniker, for people who don’t see color fall into racist passivity.
The thing to remember, Kendi counsels, is that we can all be racist one minute and antiracist they next, as they are not fixed attributes of one's identity. This book is an account of his struggle and his family’s story, exploring how people can work to change policies instead of groups of people.
Chapter 1: Definitions
At the University of Illinois in 1970, thousands of college students gathered for the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship’s Conference. Black students, in particular, were excited for the second night of the conference, when Soul Liberation would play and Black theologists would speak. Kendi’s parents, Larry and Carol, were there. They met on the bus, both having decided to attend the conference when they heard that Tom Skinner, an influential young Black liberation theologist, was speaking.
Onstage, Skinner talked about how he came to realize his original interpretation of Jesus was wrong: Jesus was actually a radical, a dangerous man, and a liberator. The crowd was ecstatic, and both Larry and Carol were rejuvenated by the sermon. They subsequently moved into the Black Power movement, the Black liberation theology movement. They read and organized programs at church and attended lectures. Once, Larry went to hear James Cone, the scholarly father of Black liberation theology, speak at the Union Theological Seminary in Harlem. Afterward, he asked Cone what the definition of a Christian is, and Cone replied, “A Christian is one who is striving for liberation” (17), which was a profoundly impactful moment for Larry.
Kendi explains that he cannot separate his parents’ religious strivings to be Christian from his own secular strivings to be antiracist. It is important in both senses to be precise in defining one's terms. Thus, Kendi defines racism as a “marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial iniquities” (18). These iniquities are when two or more racial groups are not on approximately equal footing (such as home ownership rates being higher among Whites). Racist policies are those measures that produce or sustain racial iniquity between racial groups; there are absolutely none that are neutral or nonracist.
Oftentimes, racist policies are called “systemic racism” or “structural racism,” but Kendi suggests that those terms are neither tangible nor exacting and require more explanation. “Racist policy,” in contrast, cuts to the core of the issue. “Racist discrimination” is part of carrying out policy, but focusing on this can take away from the necessary focus on racist policy and policymakers. The only way to remedy racist discrimination is through antiracist discrimination.
Kendi states that “the most threatening movement is not the alt right’s unlikely drive for a White ethnostate but the regular American’s drive for a ‘race-neutral’ one” (20); this leads to cries of “reverse discrimination.”
A “racist idea” is the idea that one racial group is superior or inferior to another; an antiracist one suggests all racial groups are equals in their apparent differences.
Kendi explains that having the definitions of racism and antiracism helps us understand the racialized world around us. Climate change, for example, disproportionately affects people of color. Life expectancy rates are higher for Whites, who can expect to live 3.5 years longer than Blacks. Voter ID laws are disenfranchising Black voters.
Racist ideas have been around since the beginning of our society, but they are not permanent; they can be shifted, but it will be hard to do so, as “being an antiracist requires persistent self-awareness, constant self-criticism, and regular self-examination” (23).
Chapter 2: Dueling Consciousness
Kendi’s mother became a missionary in Liberia, but she continued to date his father. They married eight years later and had two sons. The year Kendi was born, though, was also the year Reagan began pushing for stronger sentences for drug crimes. Though Whites consume drugs at the same rate as people of color and sell more, they are far less likely to go to jail.
Reagan was not the first to travel this racist path, for Johnson committed to a war on crime and Nixon created a war on drugs that barely tried to hide its goal of incarcerating Black activists. Black people also joined in the vilification, believing that heroin addicts, poorly raised youth, and criminals were erasing their hard-earned gains.
Calls for reform competed with calls for locking people up, and the latter usually won out. There was more shame over “Black on Black crime” than pride or “Black Power” when Kendi was born in 1982. Both his parents were poor and had climbed up the grueling ladder of education and hard work, and thus they came to believe that there were other Black people who refused to climb or liked being addicts or irresponsible loafers. The Black people of the 60s and 70s were now challenging other Black people in the 80s and 90s, and Kendi’s parents fed him the “uplift” mantra that worked for them and would putatively work for him and all other Black people.
Of course, Kendi notes, the “Reagan Revolution” only helped the people who were already powerful. Welfare programs were cut, discrimination soared, and arrest and incarceration rates went up for Black people. Americans paid little attention to this and usually saw the “deficiencies of people rather than policy” (28)—which makes sense, as people are right there in our faces, whereas policies are abstract.
Kendi next discusses the “double consciousness” theory of W.E.B. Du Bois, which articulates the difficulty in being an American and a Negro, always feeling the twoness, and having “two warring ideals” and “two unreconciled strivings.” Du Bois also believed, though, that Black people like himself needed to “liberate” other, lesser Black people and save them from barbarism.
As Kendi grew up, he was immersed in the world and rhetoric of Black self-reliance, which he now sees a double-edged sword: the abhorrence of White supremacy and paternalism but the love of Black saviors and paternalism. He sees assimilationist ideas and segregationist ideas as the two types of racist ideas: the former see people of color as children who can be instructed to be like Whites, and the latter see them as savages/animals who need to be kept apart from Whites. Assimilationist policies focus on “developing, civilizing, and integrating a racial group,” whereas segregationist policies advocate “segregating, enslaving, incarcerating, deporting, and killing” (32).
Ultimately, over the course of history, antiracist progress and racist progress happen at different times, trading back and forth. The way to be free is to be antiracist, knowing “that there is no such thing as the American body, only American bodies, racialized by power” (34).
Chapter 3: Power
Kendi planned to begin attending a new elementary school, which was rather far from his house. Black New Yorkers with money were doing what White New Yorkers were doing: separating their kids from poor Black kids. The Black third-grade teacher sat down with Kendi and his parents, talking about the school. Kendi suddenly asked if she was the only Black teacher, and she said she was. Kendi asked why that was the case, and his mother explained to the teacher that he’d been reading biographies of the Black leaders. Indeed, Kendi says that he had just entered “racial puberty” (37), realizing he was Black.
He still identifies as Black but not because race is an actual scientific category: rather, he does so because “our societies, our policies, our ideas, our histories, and our cultures have rendered race and made it matter” (37). He identifies as a person of color, as a member of the global South, and as an ally of other people marginalized and battered on account of their identities. He realizes it is ironic to have to identify racially to identify racial privileges and dangers, but the fact remains that the six races—Latinx, Asian, African, European, Indigenous, and Middle Eastern—are part of the dynamics of power. Race gives the power to categorize, elevate, downgrade, and oppress; individuals, ethnicities, and nationalities are put into monolithic races.
Kendi recounts the historical story of Prince Henry the Navigator, who sponsored Atlantic voyages to West Africa by the Portuguese, marginalizing Islamic slave traders to create a new type of slavery. Henry's biographer and apologist, Gomes de Zurara—given this task by Henry’s nephew, King Afonso V—wrote into existence the justifications for Henry’s behavior. Zurara blended together all the different peoples of Africa at the slave auctions, creating a single “race.” Black people were now deemed lost, inferior, and barbaric; according to this narrative, they needed to be saved—they were strong in body and better suited for labor than the “weak” Indians in the Americas. Zurara effectively invented a group based on race to justify Henry’s racist slave-trading policy—policy came first, not race. Then, in 1735, Carl Linnaeus’s System Naturae locked in the racial hierarchy, describing the four regions of the world and their characteristics, none of which were neutral.
Kendi did not end up attending that elementary school; instead, he went to a private Lutheran school closer to home. He had a White teacher, but he did not mind “until [he] noticed” (43).
Analysis
One of the most powerful parts of Ibram X. Kendi’s treatise on antiracism is how he weaves his own story into this work. He begins with an account of how he gave an anti-Black speech for an oratory contest even though he was a proud Black teenager. The theme of this introductory story is repeated over and over in the text as Kendi explains how he had to recognize and seek to overcome his own racist assumptions as he labored towards being an antiracist. The reader might be surprised to read that one of America’s most prolific and accomplished scholars on race, a Black man himself, would have so many anti-Black ideas to expunge and reform, but this frankness on Kendi’s part and his dissection of just how a person of color could hold racist beliefs are helpful in manifold ways: this methodology helps White readers to see how pervasive racism is, and it helps readers of color to come to terms with their own racist views they might not know they hold.
Kendi’s personal story actually begins with his parents’ story. He accounts for how they met, the intellectual and religious ideas with which they grappled, and how, as Black Americans, they dealt with racism. They were members of the Black Power social activist movement of the 1970s, embraced Black liberation theology, were active in Black churches, and raised proud Black sons. However, Kendi does not spare his parents from his assessment that they, like other middle-class Black people who’d raised themselves up from poverty, were quick to embrace anti-Black ideas (though they wouldn’t have labeled them such at the time). Throughout the book, Kendi sees how his parents enforced a fear of the Black body, looked down upon Black people who did apparently did not try as hard as they did, promoted “uplift suasion” and the idea that a Black person needed to be exceptional and a Black kid like Kendi did not get second chances, and were not progressive in terms of feminism or queer rights. Kendi does not condemn them because he’d be condemning himself, but this honesty about his upbringing helps illuminate how easy it is for Black parents, teachers, church leaders, community leaders, and intellectuals to spread anti-Black ideas—even if, again, they’d never claim to be doing such a thing.
Besides the integration of Kendi’s own history, this work also includes copious amounts of history. It is non-linear, but Kendi always contextualizes his information to support the reader’s comprehension. In this section, he goes back to the origins of racist ideas themselves, explaining how the slave trade that came first actually preceded racism: there needed to be justifications for enslaving millions of Africans, and the biographer of the Portuguese king was happy to provide the explanation that Africans were barbaric, inferior, and lost. Thus, one of the most important points of the early part of this work is that “race” is not a scientific category: it is nothing more than the invention of those seeking their self-interest above all else. Kendi is quick to point out that even though race is an invention, he identifies as Black because “our societies, our policies, our ideas, our histories, and our cultures have rendered race and made it matter” (37).
Along with history, Kendi incorporates an astonishing amount of studies, statistics, and the work of other scholars and writers. He renders all of this accessible to the reader, never going over their head but also never sugarcoating anything or oversimplifying. He is clear and precise in defining his key words and terms, which will appear innumerable times in the text. This is because precision of terminology matters: language is powerful and fungible and should not be allowed to obfuscate the reality of what is being discussed. Thus, Kendi defines racism (“marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial iniquities” [18]), racist policies (“any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups” [18]), racial discrimination (“an immediate and visible manifestation of an underlying racial policy” [19]), and racist ideas (“any idea that suggests one racial group is inferior or superior to another racial group” [20]). He tries to avoid more ambiguous terms like “systemic racism,” “structural racism,” or “institutional racism” because they require a lot more explanation before they can be properly disambiguated and defined within the context of discourse.
Finally, another of Kendi's frequently-used strategies is to tell the history of racism in America through three types of ways with which race has been dealt with, both historically and in the present day: segregation, assimilation, and antiracism. Even though assimilation was and still is a beguiling option for people who perhaps think they are doing something positive to combat anti-Black policies and ideas, it is problematic, misleading, and unsuccessful (this is discussed throughout the text, but look to the “Failures” chapter for a cogent overview of this). Only antiracism can succeed in making real progress, but it is, of course, extremely difficult. Kendi writes that “being an antiracist requires persistent self-awareness, constant self-criticism, and regular self-examination” (23). No one is permanently racist, just as few people are wholly antiracist: rather, these are like “peelable name tags that are placed and replaced based on what someone is doing or not doing supporting or expressing in each moment” (23).
