Position status — book studied as an opposing view

I do not agree with Ibram X. Kendi’s antiracist framework. I keep this book note to understand the strongest version of a philosophy opposed to my own beliefs. The description, highlights, and chapter summaries below report Kendi’s claims, not mine. My position favors equal citizenship, equality before the law, individual dignity, evidence-based causal analysis, and remedies tied to demonstrated discrimination—not racial proportionality, collective guilt, or the claim that every policy must be classified as racist or antiracist. See my actual position.

DESCRIPTION

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the National Book Award–winning author of Stamped from the Beginning comes a “groundbreaking” (Time) approach to understanding and uprooting racism and inequality in our society and in ourselves—now updated, with a new preface. “The most courageous book to date on the problem of race in the Western mind.”—The New York Times ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—The New York Times Book Review, Time, NPR, The Washington Post, Shelf Awareness, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews Antiracism is a transformative concept that reorients and reenergizes the conversation about racism—and, even more fundamentally, points us toward liberating new ways of thinking about ourselves and each other. At its core, racism is a powerful system that creates false hierarchies of human value; its warped logic extends beyond race, from the way we regard people of different ethnicities or skin colors to the way we treat people of different sexes, gender identities, and body types. Racism intersects with class and culture and geography and even changes the way we see and value ourselves. In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi takes readers through a widening circle of antiracist ideas—from the most basic concepts to visionary possibilities—that will help readers see all forms of racism clearly, understand their poisonous consequences, and work to oppose them in our systems and in ourselves. Kendi weaves an electrifying combination of ethics, history, law, and science with his own personal story of awakening to antiracism. This is an essential work for anyone who wants to go beyond the awareness of racism to the next step: contributing to the formation of a just and equitable society.

Highlights

“Ibram X. Kendi - How to Be an Antiracist” is a book that explores the concept of antiracism and how it can be applied in society. Here are the main points:

1. Racist Ideas in Education: Kendi criticizes the idea of an “achievement gap” in education, arguing that it perpetuates racist ideas. He suggests that different environments lead to different kinds of achievement, not different levels of achievement. He proposes that intelligence should be measured by how knowledgeable individuals are about their own environments and by their desire to know, rather than standardized tests.
2. Ethnic Racism: Kendi discusses the origins of ethnic racism in the slave trade, where different ethnic groups were preferred by enslavers, leading to hierarchies of value. He also discusses the racialization of ethnic groups, where they are categorized and ranked based on perceived value.
3. Immigration and Ethnic Racism: Kendi criticizes policies that favor immigrants from certain countries over others, arguing that they are based on racist ideas. He also discusses the “migrant advantage,” where immigrants tend to be more resilient and resourceful than natives, not because of their ethnicity, but because they are immigrants.
4. Violence and Racism: Kendi discusses the perception of Black neighborhoods as dangerous and the strategies used to reduce violent crime. He argues that there is no such thing as a dangerous racial group, only dangerous individuals.
5. Cultural Racism: Kendi argues for the rejection of cultural standards and the equalization of cultural differences among racial groups. He criticizes the idea of assimilation, where racial groups are expected to conform to a dominant cultural standard.
6. Behavioral Racism: Kendi discusses the idea of making individuals responsible for the perceived behavior of racial groups and vice versa. He argues for the recognition of individual behavior as real and racial group behavior as fictional.

Throughout the book, Kendi emphasizes the importance of antiracism, which involves recognizing and challenging racist ideas and policies in society.

ChatGPT Summary

The book “How to Be an Antiracist” by Ibram X. Kendi consists of 18 chapters, each focusing on a different theme related to antiracism. Here are the chapter titles:

1. Definitions: Explores the foundational concepts and definitions surrounding racism and antiracism.
2. Dueling Consciousness: Discusses the internal conflict between assimilating into a racist society and fighting against it.
3. Power: Examines how power dynamics shape and maintain racist structures.
4. Biology: Debunks the idea of biological racial differences and its implications.
5. Ethnicity: Explores the complexity of ethnic identities and their intersections with racism.
6. Body: Discusses the physical manifestations and implications of racism on the body.
7. Culture: Looks at how culture is racialized and used as a tool for discrimination.
8. Behavior: Explores the stereotypes and misconceptions about the behavior of different racial groups.
9. Color: Addresses the hierarchy and politics of skin color within and across races.
10. White: Delve into the construction and maintenance of white identity and privilege.
11. Black: Focuses on the experiences, resistance, and complexities of Black identity.
12. Class: Examines the intersection of race and socioeconomic status.
13. Space: Looks at how physical and social spaces are racially charged and segregated.
14. Gender: Discusses the intersections of race and gender, and how they compound discrimination.
15. Sexuality: Explores the intersections of race and sexuality.
16. Failure: Investigates the concept of failure within a racial context, including how societies fail to be antiracist.
17. Success: Contrasts what success means in a racist vs. an antiracist society.
18. Survival: Discusses the ongoing struggle for survival amidst a backdrop of racism.

Each chapter builds on the notion of understanding and combatting racism from different angles, providing a comprehensive guide to recognizing, understanding, and being an active part of the solution against racism【7†source】.

In Chapter 1: “Definitions” of How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi establishes the foundational concepts for understanding racism and antiracism. The chapter begins by providing specific definitions:

1. Racist: One who supports a racist policy through actions or inaction or expresses a racist idea.
2. Antiracist: One who supports an antiracist policy through actions or expresses an antiracist idea.

The chapter dives into the impact of historical Black theology and liberation movements, which influenced Kendi’s understanding of antiracism. He discusses the significance of defining terms clearly to anchor oneself in principles and actions. This section emphasizes the importance of understanding what constitutes racist and antiracist actions and policies, underlining that there is no such thing as a “nonracist” or race-neutral policy.

Kendi outlines that racism is a marriage of racist policies and ideas, producing and normalizing racial inequities. He details the difference between racial inequity (when two or more racial groups are not standing on approximately equal footing) and racial equity (when groups are on relatively equal footing). He clarifies that racist policies sustain racial inequity, while antiracist policies promote racial equity.

The chapter also criticizes the idea of “racial discrimination” as a vague term often misused to ignore the central agents of racism: racist policy and policymakers. Kendi argues against the idea of race neutrality, explaining how it often serves to disguise or justify racial inequities. He concludes by distinguishing between racist ideas (which suggest racial hierarchy) and antiracist ideas (which promote racial equality) and argues that understanding these concepts is crucial to effectively combating racism【15†source】.

In Chapter 2, “Dueling Consciousness,” of “How to Be an Antiracist,” Ibram X. Kendi discusses the internal conflict between supporting a racist policy or idea (assimilationist or segregationist) and being antiracist. He explains the difference between assimilationists, who believe a racial group is culturally or behaviorally inferior and needs to be developed, and segregationists, who consider a racial group permanently inferior and support segregation. In contrast, an antiracist believes in the equality of racial groups, supporting policies that reduce racial inequity.

The chapter reflects on Kendi’s parents’ experiences and how they influenced his understanding of racism and antiracism. It delves into the historical context of the Reagan era’s policies, illustrating how systemic issues shaped public perception and policy. Kendi narrates personal experiences, highlighting the impact of societal and racial dynamics on his family and himself. The dueling consciousness concept is exemplified through the struggle between striving to fit into a racialized society (assimilationist) and resisting and redefining one’s identity (antiracist).

Kendi further discusses the notion of double consciousness introduced by W.E.B. Du Bois, emphasizing the ongoing internal conflict between two identities: being Black and American. This dueling consciousness is not only a personal struggle but also reflects broader societal and historical conflicts over race, identity, and power.

The chapter also critiques biological racism, the idea that races are biologically different and hierarchically arranged. Kendi recounts his own journey of understanding and rejecting these ideas, advocating for a view that recognizes the cultural and historical construction of race without inherent biological differences.

Overall, Chapter 2 delves into the complex and often conflicting aspects of racial identity, policy, and consciousness, advocating for an antiracist approach that recognizes and challenges the pervasive influence of racist ideas and policies【23†source】.

In Chapter 3, “Power,” Kendi delves into how power and self-interest shape racist policies and ideas, which in turn maintain racial inequities. He underscores that racial groups are equals in all their apparent differences, and inequities between them are the result of racist policies. Kendi also discusses his own diagnosis of stage 4 cancer, drawing a poignant analogy between the societal spread of racism and the physical spread of cancer. He emphasizes that just as rigorous and painful treatments are necessary to combat cancer, similarly intensive and potentially uncomfortable measures are required to dismantle racism in society. The chapter pushes for a belief in the possibility and the necessity of creating an antiracist society, challenging the notion that racist power and policies are unchangeable or natural.

Kendi suggests that to effectively combat racism, society must adopt antiracist policies that are like chemotherapy, targeting and reducing inequities, and ensuring a regular intake of ‘healthy’ antiracist ideas to prevent a recurrence. He argues against the pervasive denial of racism, asserting that recognizing and confessing racist attitudes and policies are crucial steps towards healing. The chapter presents racism as a curable cancer that has spread throughout society, advocating for an aggressive, sustained, and hopeful fight against it【31†source】.

The fourth chapter of “How to Be an Antiracist” by Ibram X. Kendi delves deeply into the complex interplay between race, racism, and power, examining the personal and societal impacts of racist ideas and policies. Kendi discusses the dual consciousness or “dueling consciousness” within Black Americans, a concept introduced by W.E.B. Du Bois, where there’s a constant internal conflict between assimilating into a white-majority society and maintaining one’s own racial identity and pride. This conflict is further complicated by external pressures and racist policies that shape individuals’ lives and perceptions.

Kendi reflects on his own upbringing and how his parents, influenced by the prevailing societal norms and their desire to succeed within a system stacked against them, instilled in him the values of hard work and education as the path to upliftment. However, he also critically examines how these values sometimes aligned with racist ideas, promoting the notion that Black people are responsible for their own struggles rather than acknowledging the systemic barriers in place.

He discusses the Reagan era’s policies, which disproportionately affected Black communities, leading to increased poverty, unemployment, and incarceration rates. Kendi argues that the focus on individual behavior over systemic change is a common tactic to divert attention from the real causes of racial disparities.

The chapter also critiques the concept of biological racism, emphasizing that while humans may have superficial physical differences, genetically we are overwhelmingly similar. Kendi argues that acknowledging this genetic similarity is crucial in combating racist ideas that suggest a hierarchy of human value based on race.

Throughout the chapter, Kendi intertwines personal anecdotes with historical context and scholarly research, demonstrating the pervasive and enduring nature of racist ideas and policies. His narrative is a call to recognize and challenge these ideas and policies at every level, from personal beliefs to institutional practices, in order to move toward a truly antiracist society【39†source】.

Chapter 5, “Ethnicity,” in “How to Be an Antiracist” by Ibram X. Kendi, discusses the complexities and variations within racial groups, focusing on the concept of ethnicity and its significant impact on how individuals and groups experience racism. Kendi elaborates on the nuances of ethnic differences within and between racial groups, highlighting how these distinctions contribute to a diverse array of experiences and identities.

The chapter starts by recounting tragic incidents involving individuals of different ethnic backgrounds, such as Latasha Harlins, Abner Louima, and Amadou Diallo. These stories illustrate the deadly consequences of racial and ethnic biases and the systemic violence that often targets ethnic minorities.

Kendi moves on to discuss the history of slavery and how different African ethnic groups were valued and devalued by slave traders and owners. He explores the complicated relationships between African chiefs and European traders, shedding light on the diverse roles played by Africans in the slave trade.

The chapter also examines the changing demographics of the United States, particularly the increase in the Latinx immigrant population and the rising share of the U.S. Black population that is foreign-born. Kendi reflects on the tensions and interactions between different ethnic groups, such as the way West Indian immigrants and African Americans perceive each other, and the discrimination faced by various groups like the Chinese and Mexican Americans throughout American history.

Kendi critically analyzes the narratives and stereotypes associated with different ethnic groups, including the idea of the “model minority” and the discrimination and exclusion faced by Native Americans and African immigrants. He challenges the notion that certain ethnic groups are inherently more successful or problematic than others, emphasizing the role of systemic factors and historical context in shaping these perceptions.

Throughout the chapter, Kendi advocates for recognizing and embracing the rich diversity within racial groups. He argues against monolithic representations and stereotypes, urging readers to understand and appreciate the complex interplay of race and ethnicity in shaping individual and collective identities and experiences【47†source】.

Chapter 6, “Body,” of How to Be an Antiracist delves into the physical embodiment of racial distinctions and the consequences of racist policies on the body. Kendi argues that racist and antiracist policies have tangible effects on the health, longevity, and physical well-being of individuals based on their race. He illustrates this with personal and historical narratives that show how bodies of color have suffered disproportionately due to environmental hazards, health care disparities, and discriminatory policies.

Kendi shares powerful personal anecdotes, including the health struggles and premature deaths within his own family, to demonstrate the lethal consequences of systemic racism. He ties these personal experiences to broader societal issues, such as healthcare disparities, environmental racism, and the criminal justice system’s impact on the Black community. For example, he discusses the higher rates of certain diseases in African American communities and how policies and lack of access to quality healthcare contribute to these disparities.

The chapter also addresses how policies, often cloaked in neutrality or benevolence, have historically targeted or neglected certain bodies based on race. Kendi argues that seemingly race-neutral policies can have deeply racial implications, leading to a disproportionate impact on the health and well-being of non-White populations. He cites examples like voter ID laws and the war on drugs to demonstrate how policies can effectively discriminate and harm communities of color.

Kendi underscores that racist ideas lead to racist policies that harm bodies of color, advocating for the recognition and confrontation of these ideas and policies to promote physical wellbeing for all. He calls for an antiracist approach that recognizes the equality of different racial groups and actively works to dismantle policies that perpetuate health disparities. The chapter ultimately argues for an understanding of the body as a site of racial contestation and emphasizes the need for policies that ensure the health and vitality of all bodies, regardless of race【55†source】.

In Chapter 7, “Culture,” of How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi discusses the complex interplay between cultural identity, racism, and power, emphasizing the impact of cultural perceptions and policies on racial groups. He begins by exploring the harmful effects of climate change, disproportionately affecting non-White global populations, as an example of how seemingly neutral policies can have racially targeted impacts. He uses his own family’s history to illustrate the long-term consequences of racist policies on health, housing, and quality of life, emphasizing the cumulative effect of seemingly separate and even neutral policies on creating and sustaining racial inequities.

Kendi then delves into the concept of “dueling consciousness,” a term that describes the internal conflict experienced by individuals grappling with their racial identity within a racist society. He discusses the historical context of this struggle, particularly within Black American communities, and how it manifests as a tension between assimilationist and segregationist ideologies, each with its own set of policies and cultural implications.

Assimilationist ideologies, as Kendi explains, are those that view a racial group as culturally or behaviorally inferior and in need of development to reach a supposed superior standard, typically set by White cultural norms. In contrast, segregationist ideologies view certain racial groups as inherently and permanently inferior, advocating for policies that segregate and oppress these groups. Both ideologies are harmful and perpetuate racism by devaluing cultures and individuals based on their racial identity.

Kendi argues for an antiracist approach, which recognizes the equality of all racial groups and seeks to reduce racial inequity through policy change. He stresses that antiracist policies are geared towards reducing racial disparities and creating equal opportunities, unlike assimilationist or segregationist policies, which either attempt to change racial groups to fit a dominant cultural standard or further segregate and oppress them.

Throughout the chapter, Kendi emphasizes the need for understanding and confronting these cultural perceptions and their policy implications. He calls for a radical reorientation of consciousness to embrace antiracist ideas, which acknowledge the equal value and dignity of all racial groups and work towards a society where cultural diversity is celebrated rather than suppressed.

The chapter is a deep dive into the cultural dimensions of racism and antiracism, showing how cultural attitudes and policies are central to the perpetuation or dismantling of racial inequalities. Kendi’s narrative weaves personal, historical, and societal threads together to illustrate the pervasive and often subtle nature of cultural racism and the urgent need for antiracist action at every level of society【63†source】.

• Any disparity in American life has to based on discrimination. That means only the less power can be discriminated against.
• Deconstructionist

Ibram X. Kendi - How to Be an Antiracist (2019, One World) - libgen.li copy.pdf

MY RACIST INTRODUCTION (Page 5)

DEFINITIONS (Page 10)

DUELING CONSCIOUSNESS (Page 17)

President Reagan declared war on her unborn baby. “We must put drug abuse on the run through stronger law enforcement (Page 17)

The Reagan Revolution was just that: a radical revolution for the benefit of the already powerful. It further enriched high-income Americans by cutting their taxes and government regulations, installing a Christmas-tree military budget, and arresting the power of unions. (Page 19)

Americans have long been trained to see the deficiencies of people rather than policy. It’s a pretty easy mistake to make: People are in our faces. Policies are distant. We are particularly poor at seeing the policies lurking behind the struggles of people. (Page 19)

This conceptual duple reflected what W.E.B. Du Bois indelibly voiced in The Souls of Black Folk in 1903. “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others,” Du Bois wrote. He would neither “Africanize America” nor “bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism.” Du Bois wished “to be both a (Page 19)

Negro and an American.” Du Bois wished to inhabit opposing constructs. To be American is to be White. To be White is to not be a Negro. (Page 20)

What Du Bois termed double consciousness may be more precisely termed dueling consciousness. “One ever feels his two-ness,” Du Bois explained, “an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” Du Bois also explained how this war was being waged within his own dark body, wanting to be a Negro and wanting to “escape into the mass of Americans in the same way that the Irish and Scandinavians” were doing. (Page 20)

e wanted to liberate Black people from racism but he also wanted to change them, to save them from their “relic of barbarism.” (Page 20)

Assimilationist ideas are racist ideas. Assimilationists can position any racial group as the superior standard that another racial group should be measuring themselves against, the benchmark they should be trying to reach. Assimilationists typically position White people as the superior standard. (Page 20)

Black self-reliance was a double-edged sword. One side was an abhorrence of White supremacy and White paternalism, White rulers and White saviors. On the other, a love of Black rulers and Black saviors, of Black paternalism. On one side was the antiracist belief that Black (Page 20)

people were entirely capable of ruling themselves, of relying on themselves. (Page 21)

WHITE PEOPLE HAVE their own dueling consciousness, between the segregationist and the assimilationist: the slave trader and the missionary, the proslavery exploiter and the antislavery civilizer, the eugenicist and the melting pot–ter, the mass incarcerator and the mass developer, the Blue Lives Matter and the All Lives Matter, the not-racist nationalist and the not-racist American (Page 21)

The history of the racialized world is a three-way fight between assimilationists, segregationists, and antiracists. Antiracist ideas are based in the truth that racial groups are equals in all the ways they are different, assimilationist ideas are rooted in the notion that certain racial groups are culturally or behaviorally inferior, and segregationist ideas spring from a belief in genetic racial distinction and fixed hierarchy. (Page 21)

To be antiracist is to conquer the assimilationist consciousness and the segregationist consciousness. The White body no longer presents itself as the American body; the Black body no longer strives to be the American body, knowing there is no such thing as the American body, only American bodies, racialized by power. (Page 22)

POWER (Page 23)

But for all of that life-shaping power, race is a mirage, which doesn’t lessen its force. We are what we see ourselves as, whether what we see exists or not. We are what people see us as, whether what they see exists or not. What people see in themselves and others has meaning and manifests itself in ideas and actions and policies, even if what they are seeing is an illusion. Race is a mirage but one that we do well to see, while never forgetting it is a mirage, never forgetting that it’s the powerful light of racist power that makes the mirage. (Page 24)

I see myself historically and politically as a person of color, as a member of the global south, as a close ally of Latinx, East Asian, Middle Eastern, and Native peoples and all the world’s degraded peoples, from the Roma and Jews of Europe to the aboriginals of Australia to the White people battered for their religion, class, gender, transgender identity, ethnicity, sexuality, body size, age, and disability. (Page 24)

Some White people do not identify as White for the same reason they identify as not-racist: to avoid reckoning with the ways that Whiteness—even as a construction and mirage—has informed their notions of America and identity and offered them privilege, the primary one being the privilege of being inherently normal, standard, and legal. It is a racial crime to be yourself if you are not White in America. It is a racial crime to look like yourself or empower yourself if you are not White. I guess I became a criminal at seven years old. (Page 25)

first racist power and the first exclusive slave trader of the constructed race of African people. (Page 25)

Prince Henry the Navigator, the brother and then uncle of Portuguese kings, is the first character in the history of racist power. (Page 25)

My middle name is now Xolani, meaning peace, the very thing Henry’s slave traders snatched from Africa (and the Americas and Europe), the thing they snatched from my ancestor Henry. (Page 25)

Premodern Islamic slave traders, like their Christian counterparts in premodern Italy, were not pursuing racist policies—they were enslaving what we now consider to be Africans, Arabs, and Europeans alike. (Page 25)

Gomes de Zurara grouped all those peoples from Africa into a single race for that very reason: to create hierarchy, the first racist idea. (Page 26)

Prince Henry’s racist policy of slave trading came first—a cunning invention for the practical purpose of bypassing Muslim traders. After nearly two decades of slave trading, King Afonso asked Gomes de Zurara to defend the lucrative commerce in human lives, which he did through the construction of a Black race, an invented group upon which he hung racist ideas. This cause and effect—a racist power creates racist policies out of raw self-interest; the racist policies necessitate racist ideas to justify them—lingers over the life of racism (Page 27)

BIOLOGY (Page 29)

I CANNOT RECALL HER name. So very odd. I can recite the names of my Black fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade teachers. But the name of my White third-grade teacher is lost in my memory like the names of so many racist White people over the years who interrupted my peace with their sirens. (Page 29)

An antiracist treats and remembers individuals as individuals. “She acted that way,” we should say, “because she is racist.” (Page 29)

unfair punishments and overlooking (Page 29)

Scholars call what I saw a “microaggression,” a term coined by eminent Harvard psychiatrist Chester Pierce in 1970. Pierce employed the term to describe the constant verbal and nonverbal abuse racist White people unleash on Black people wherever we go, day after day. A White woman grabs her purse when a Black person sits next to her. The seat next to a Black person stays empty on a crowded bus. A White woman calls the cops at the sight of Black people barbecuing in the park. White people telling us that our firmness is anger or that our practiced talents are natural. Mistaking us for the only other Black person around. Calling the cops on our children for selling lemonade on the street. Butchering Ebonics for sport. Assuming we are the help. Assuming the help isn’t brilliant. Asking us questions about the entire Black race. Not giving us the benefit of the doubt. Calling the cops on us for running down the street. (Page 30)

psychologist Derald Wing Sue. He defines microaggressions as “brief, everyday exchanges that send denigrating messages to certain individuals because of their group membership.” (Page 30)

What other people call racial microaggressions I call racist abuse. (Page 30)

With racist teachers, misbehaving kids of color do not receive inquiry and empathy and legitimacy. We receive orders and punishments and “no excuses,” as if we are adults. The Black child is ill-treated like an adult, and the Black adult is ill-treated like a child. (Page 31)

My acceptance of biological racial distinction and rejection of biological racial hierarchy was like accepting water and rejecting its wetness. But that is precisely what I learned to do, what so many of us have learned to do in our dueling racial consciousness. (Page 32)

The naturally selected White race was winning the struggle, was evolving, was headed toward perfection, according to social Darwinists. The only three outcomes available for the “weaker” races were extinction, slavery, or assimilation, explained the social Darwinist who founded American sociology. “Many fear the first possibility for the Indians,” Albion Small co-wrote in 1894; “the second fate is often predicted for the negroes; while the third is anticipated for the Chinese and other Eastern peoples.” (Page 33)

Global outrage after the genocidal the eugenics-driven policies of Nazi Germany marginalization of biological racism within academic thought for the first time in four hundred years. Biological racism—curse theory, polygenesis, and eugenics—had held strong for that long. the mid-twentieth century led to in (Page 33)

But there is no such thing as racial ancestry. Ethnic ancestry does exist. Camara Jones, a prominent medical researcher of health disparities, explained it this way to bioethics scholar Dorothy Roberts: “People are born with ancestry that comes from their parents but are assigned a race.” People from the same ethnic groups that are native to certain geographic regions typically share the same genetic profile. Geneticists call them “populations.” When geneticists compare these ethnic populations, they find there is more genetic diversity between populations within Africa than between Africa and the rest of the world. Ethnic groups in Western Africa are more genetically similar to ethnic groups in Western Europe than to ethnic groups in Eastern Africa. Race is a genetic mirage. (Page 34)

Singular-race makers push for the end of categorizing and identifying by race. They wag their fingers at people like me identifying as Black—but the unfortunate truth is that their wellmeaning post-racial strategy makes no sense in our racist world. Race is a mirage but one that humanity has organized itself around in very real ways. Imagining away the existence of races in a racist world is as conserving and harmful as imagining away classes in a capitalistic world (Page 34)

allows the ruling races and classes to keep on ruling. (Page 35)

Terminating racial categories is potentially the last, not the first, step in the antiracist struggle (Page 35)

biological antiracism. (Page 35)

skin color is as meaningless to our underlying humanity as the clothes we wear over that skin. (Page 35)

ETHNICITY (Page 36)

Africans involved in the slave trade did not believe they were selling their own people—they were usually selling people as different to them as the Europeans waiting on the coast. (Page 38)

HROUGHOUT THE 1990S, the number of immigrants of color in the United States grew, due to the combined effects of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, the Refugee Act of 1980, and the Immigration Act of 1990. Taken together, these bills encouraged family reunification, immigration from conflict areas, and a diversity visa program that spiked immigration from countries outside Europe. Between 1980 and 2000, the Latinx immigrant population ballooned from 4.2 million to 14.1 million. As of 2015, Black immigrants accounted for 8.7 percent of the nation’s Black population, nearly triple their share in 1980. As an early-eighties baby, I witnessed this upsurge of immigrants of color firsthand. (Page 38)

West Indian immigrants tend to categorize African Americans as “lazy, unambitious, (Page 38)

uneducated, unfriendly, welfare-dependent, and lacking in family values,” Mary C. Waters found in her 1999 interview-rich study of West Indian attitudes. African Americans tended to categorize West Indians as “selfish, lacking in race awareness, being lackeys of whites, and [having] a sense of inflated superiority.” (Page 39)

Anglo-Saxons discriminating against Irish Catholics and Jews; Cuban immigrants being privileged over Mexican immigrants; the model-minority construction that includes East Asians and excludes Muslims from South Asia. It’s a history that began with early European colonizers referring to the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole as the “Five Civilized Tribes” of Native Americans, as compared to other “wild” tribes. This ranking of racialized ethnic groups within the ranking of the races creates a racial-ethnic hierarchy, a ladder of ethnic racism within the larger schema of racism. (Page 40)

ethnic racism when we express a racist idea about an ethnic group or support a racist policy toward an ethnic group. Ethnic racism, like racism itself, points to group behavior, instead of policies, as the cause of disparities between groups. (Page 40)

majority of Americans on welfare are not African American and the majority of African Americans eligible for welfare refuse it. (Page 40)

HEN STUDIES STARTED to show that the median family income of African Americans was far lower than that of foreign-born Blacks and that African Americans had higher rates of poverty and unemployment, numerous commentators wondered why Black immigrants do so much better than Blacks born in America. They also answered their own questions: Black immigrants are more motivated, more hardworking, and “more entrepreneurial than native-born blacks,” wrote one commentator in The Economist in 1996. Their success shows “that racism does not account for all, or even most, of the difficulties encountered by native-born blacks.” (Page 42)

Despite studies showing Black immigrants are, on average, the most educated group of immigrants in the United States, they earn lower wages than similarly trained non-Black immigrants and have the highest unemployment rate of any immigrant group. An ethnic racist asks, Why are Black immigrants doing better than African Americans? An ethnic antiracist asks, Why are Black immigrants not doing as well as other immigrant groups? (Page 42)

immigrants and migrants of all races tend to be more resilient and resourceful when compared with the natives of their own countries and the natives of their new countries. Sociologists call this the “migrant advantage.” (Page 42)

BODY (Page 44)

Americans today see the Black body as larger, more threatening, more potentially harmful, and more likely to require force to control than a similarly sized White body, according to researchers. No wonder the Black body had to be lynched by the thousands, deported by the tens of thousands, incarcerated by the millions, segregated by the tens of millions. (Page 45)

WE WERE UNARMED, but we knew that Blackness armed us even though we had no guns. Whiteness disarmed the cops—turned them into fearful potential victims—even when they were approaching a group of clearly outstrapped and anxious high school kids. Black people comprise 13 percent of the U.S. population. And yet, in 2015, Black bodies accounted for at least 26 percent of those killed by police, declining slightly to 24 percent in 2016, 22 percent in 2017, and 21 percent in 2018, according to The Washington Post. Unarmed Black bodies—which apparently look armed to fearful officers—are about twice as likely to be killed as unarmed White bodies. (Page 46)

A study that used National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data from 1976 to 1989 found that young Black males engaged in more violent crime than young White males. But when the researchers compared only employed young males of both races, the differences in violent behavior vanished. Or, as the Urban Institute stated in a more recent report on long-term unemployment, “Communities with a higher share of long-term unemployed workers also tend to have higher rates of crime and violence.” (Page 50)

researchers have found a much stronger and clearer correlation between violent-crime levels and unemployment levels than between violent crime and race (Page 50)

Antiracists say Black people, like all people, need more higher-paying jobs within their reach, especially Black youngsters, who have consistently had the highest rates of unemployment of any demographic group, topping 50 percent in the mid-1990s. (Page 50)

CULTURE (Page 51)

But what was the difference between Ebonics and so-called “standard” English? Ebonics had grown from the roots of African languages and modern English just as modern English had grown from Latin, Greek, and Germanic roots. Why is Ebonics broken English but English is not broken German? Why is Ebonics a dialect of English if English is not a dialect of Latin? The idea that Black languages outside Africa are broken is as culturally racist as the idea that languages inside Europe are fixed. (Page 52)

To be antiracist is to see all cultures in all their differences as on the same level, as equals. When we see cultural difference, we are seeing cultural difference—nothing more, nothing less. (Page 57)

BEHAVIOR (Page 58)

My problems with personal irresponsibility were exacerbated—or perhaps even caused—by the additional struggles that racism added to my school life, from a history of disinterested, racist teachers, to overcrowded schools, to the daily racist attacks that fell on young Black boys and girls. There’s no question that I could have hurdled that racism and kept on running. But asking every nonathletic Black person to become an Olympic hurdler, and blaming them when they can’t keep up, is racist. (Page 59)

One of the fundamental values of racism to White people is that it makes success attainable for even unexceptional Whites, while success, even moderate success, is usually reserved for extraordinary Black people. (Page 59)

Individual behaviors can shape the success of individuals. But policies determine the success of groups. And it is racist power that creates the policies that cause racial inequities. (Page 59)

Making individuals responsible for the perceived behavior of racial groups and making whole racial groups responsible for the behavior of individuals are the two ways that behavioral racism infects our perception of the world. In other words, when we believe that a racial group’s seeming success or failure redounds to each of its individual members, we’ve accepted a racist idea. (Page 59)

Every time someone racializes behavior—describes something as “Black behavior”—they are expressing a racist idea. To be an antiracist is to recognize there is no such thing as racial behavior. To be an antiracist is to recognize there is no such thing as Black behavior, let alone irresponsible Black behavior. (Page 59)

All we have are stories of individual behavior. But individual stories are only proof of the behavior of individuals. Just as race doesn’t exist biologically, race doesn’t exist behaviorally. (Page 60)

Antiracism means separating the idea of a culture from the idea of behavior. Culture defines a group tradition that a particular racial group might share but that is not shared among all individuals in that racial group or among all racial groups. Behavior defines the inherent human traits and potential that everyone shares. (Page 60)

post-traumatic slave syndrome (Page 61)

The use of standardized tests to measure aptitude and intelligence is one of the most effective racist policies ever devised to degrade Black minds and legally exclude Black bodies. We degrade Black minds every time we speak of an “academic-achievement gap” based on these numbers. The acceptance of an academic-achievement gap is just the latest method of reinforcing the oldest racist idea: Black intellectual inferiority. The idea of an achievement gap means there is a disparity in academic performance between groups of students; implicit in this idea is that academic achievement as measured by statistical instruments like test scores and dropout rates is the only form of academic “achievement.” There is an even more sinister implication in achievement-gap talk—that disparities in academic achievement accurately reflect disparities in intelligence among racial groups. Intellect is the linchpin of behavior, and the racist idea of the achievement gap is the linchpin of behavioral racism. (Page 63)

COLOR (Page 67)

Anti-Dark colorism follows the logic of behavioral racism, linking behavior to color, studies show. (Page 69)

To be an antiracist is to eliminate any beauty standard based on skin and eye color, hair texture, facial and bodily features shared by groups. To be an antiracist is to diversify our standards of beauty like our standards of culture or intelligence, to see beauty equally in all skin colors, broad and thin noses, (Page 70)

kinky and straight hair, light and dark eyes. To be an antiracist is to build and live in a beauty culture that accentuates instead of erases our natural beauty. (Page 71)

By then, singer Michael Jackson had paved the skin-bleaching boulevard traveled by rapper Lil’ Kim, baseball player Sammy Sosa, and so many more. Skin-bleaching products were raking in millions for U.S. companies. In India, “fairness” creams topped $200 million in 2014. Today, skin lighteners are used by 70 percent of women in Nigeria; 35 percent in South Africa; 59 percent in Togo; and 40 percent in China, Malaysia, the Philippines, and South Korea. (Page 73)

WHITE (Page 76)

When on December 12, 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court stopped Florida’s recount, I no longer (Page 77)

saw the United States as a democracy. (Page 78)

As Bush’s team transitioned that winter, I transitioned into hating White people. (Page 78)

Months before being assassinated, Malcolm X faced a fact many admirers of Malcolm X still refuse to face: Black people can be racist toward White people. The NOI’s White-devil idea is a classic example. Whenever someone classifies people of European descent as biologically, culturally, or behaviorally inferior, whenever someone says there is something wrong with White people as a group, someone is articulating a racist idea. (Page 79)

The only thing wrong with White people is when they embrace racist ideas and policies and then deny their ideas and policies are racist. This is not to ignore that White people have massacred and enslaved millions of indigenous and African peoples, colonized and impoverished millions of people of color around the globe as their nations grew rich, all the while producing racist ideas that blame the victims. This is to say their history of pillaging is not the result of the evil genes or cultures of White people. There’s no such thing as White genes. We must separate the warlike, greedy, bigoted, and individualist cultures of modern empire and racial capitalism (more on that later) from the cultures of White people. (Page 79)

Donald Trump’s economic policies are geared toward enriching White male power—but at the expense of most of his White male followers, along with the rest of us. (Page 80)

Of course, ordinary White people benefit from racist policies, though not nearly as much as racist power and not nearly as much as they could from an equitable society, one where the average White voter could have as much power as superrich White men to decide elections and shape policy. Where their kids’ business-class schools could resemble the first-class prep schools of today’s superrich. Where high-quality universal healthcare could save millions of White lives. Where they could no longer face the cronies of racism that attack them: sexism, ethnocentrism, homophobia, and exploitation (Page 80)

Claims of anti-White racism in response to antiracism are as old as civil rights. When Congress passed the (first) Civil Rights Act of 1866, it made Black people citizens of the United States, stipulated their civil rights, and stated that state law could not “deprive a person of any of these rights on the basis of race.” President Andrew Johnson reframed this antiracist bill as a “bill made to operate in favor of the colored against the white race.” (Page 80)

Beleaguered White racists who can’t imagine their lives not being the focus of any movement respond to “Black Lives Matter” with “All Lives Matter.” Embattled police officers who can’t imagine losing their right to racially profile and brutalize respond with “Blue Lives Matter.” (Page 81)

White supremacists are the ones supporting policies that benefit racist power against the interests of the majority of White people. White supremacists claim to be pro-White but refuse to acknowledge that climate change is having a disastrous impact on the earth White people inhabit. They oppose affirmative-action programs, despite White women being their primary beneficiaries. White supremacists rage against Obamacare even as 43 percent of the people who gained lifesaving health insurance from 2010 to 2015 were White. They heil Adolf Hitler’s Nazis, even though it was the Nazis who launched a world war that destroyed the lives of more than forty million White people and ruined Europe. They wave Confederate flags and defend Confederate monuments, even though the Confederacy started a civil war that ended with more than five hundred thousand White American lives lost—more than every other American war combined. White supremacists love what America used to be, even though America used to be—and still is—teeming with millions of struggling White people. White supremacists blame non-White people for the struggles of White people when any objective analysis of their plight primarily implicates the rich White Trumps they support. (Page 81)

Diop’s two-cradle theory suggested the harsh climate and lack of resources in the northern cradle nurtured in Europeans barbaric, individualistic, materialist, and warlike behaviors, which brought destruction to the world. The amenable climate and abundance of resources in the southern cradle nurtured the African behaviors of community, spirituality, equanimity, and peace, which brought civilization to the world. (Page 82)

Michael Bradley’s version of the same, his theory in The Iceman Inheritance that the White race’s ruthlessness is the product of its upbringing in the Ice Age. (Page 82)

I was looking for a biological theory of why White people are evil. I found it in The Isis Papers by psychiatrist Frances Cress Welsing. The global White minority’s “profound sense of numerical inadequacy and color inferiority” causes their “uncontrollable sense of hostility and aggression,” Welsing wrote. White people are defending against their own genetic annihilation. Melanin-packing “color always ‘annihilates’… the non-color, white.” Ironically, Welsing’s theory reflects fears of genetic annihilation that White supremacists around the Western world have been expressing these days in their fears of “white genocide”—an idea with a deep history, as in the work of eugenicists like Lothrop Stoddard and his 1920 bestseller, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy. (Page 82)

BLACK (Page 84)

POWERLESS DEFENSE: The illusory, concealing, disempowering, and racist idea that Black people can’t be racist because Black people don’t have power. (Page 84)

I learned in that office that day that every time I say something is wrong with Black people, I am simultaneously separating myself from them, essentially saying “them niggers.” When I do this, I am being a racist. (Page 86)

This powerless defense, as I call it, emerged in the wake of racist Whites dismissing antiracist policies and ideas as racist in the late 1960s. In subsequent decades, Black voices critical of White racism defended themselves from these charges by saying, “Black people can’t be racist, because Black people don’t have power.” (Page 86)

powerless defense underestimates Black people and overestimates White people. (Page 86)

The powerless defense strips Black policymakers and managers of all their power. The powerless defense says the more than 154 African Americans who have served in Congress from 1870 to 2018 had no legislative power. It says none of the thousands of state and local Black politicians have any lawmaking power. It says U.S. Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas never had the power to put his vote to antiracist purposes. The powerless defense says the more than seven hundred Black judges on state courts and more than two hundred Black judges on federal courts have had no power during the trials and sentencing processes that built our system of mass incarceration. It says the more than fifty-seven thousand Black police officers do not have the power to brutalize and kill the Black body. It says the three thousand Black police chiefs, assistant chiefs, and commanders have no power over the officers under their command. The powerless defense says the more than forty thousand full-time Black faculty at U.S. colleges and universities in 2016 did not have the power to pass and fail Black students, hire and tenure Black faculty, or shape the minds of Black people. It says the world’s eleven Black billionaires and the 380,000 Black millionaire families in the United States have no economic power, to use in racist or antiracist ways. It says the sixteen Black CEOs who’ve run Fortune 500 companies since 1999 had no power to diversify their workforces. When a Black man stepped into the most powerful office in the world in 2009, his policies were often excused by apologists who said he didn’t have executive power. As if none of his executive orders were carried out, neither of his Black attorneys general had any power to roll back mass incarceration, or his Black national security adviser had no power. The truth is: Black people can be racist because Black people do have power, even if limited. (Page 87)

Ironically, the only way that White power can gain full control is by convincing us that White people already have all the power. If we accept the idea that we have no power, we are falling under the sort of mind control that will, in fact, rob us of any power to resist. (Page 87)

The saying “Black people can’t be racist” reproduces the false duality of racist and not-racist promoted by White racists to deny their racism. It merges Black people with White Trump voters who are angry about being called racist but who want to express racist views and support their racist policies while being identified as not-racist, no matter what they say or do. By this theory, Black people can hate them niggers, value Light people over Dark people, support anti-Latinx immigration policies, defend the anti-Native team mascots, back bans against Middle Eastern Muslims, and still escape charges of racism. By this theory, Latinx, Asians, and Natives can fear unknown Black bodies, support mass-incarcerating policies, and still escape charges of racism. By this theory, I can look upon White people as devils and aliens and still escape charges of racism. (Page 88)

CLASS (Page 93)

Poor people are a class, Black people a race. Black poor people are a race-class. When we say poor people are lazy, we are expressing an elitist idea. When we say Black people are lazy, we are expressing a racist idea. When we say Black poor people are lazier than poor Whites, White elites, and Black elites, we are speaking at the intersection of elitist and racist ideas—an ideological intersection that forms class racism. (Page 94)

Class racism is as ripe among White Americans—who castigate poor Whites as “White trash”—as it is in Black America, where racist Blacks degrade poor Blacks as “them niggers” who live in the ghetto. (Page 94)

DARK GHETTO WAS a groundbreaking study of the Black poor during President Johnson’s war on poverty in the 1960s, when scholarship on poverty was ascendant, like the work of anthropologist Oscar Lewis. Lewis argued that the children of impoverished people, namely poor people of color, were raised on behaviors that prevented their escape from poverty, perpetuating generations of poverty. He introduced the term “culture of poverty” in a 1959 ethnography of Mexican families. Unlike other economists, who explored the role of policy in the “cycle of poverty”—predatory exploitation moving in lockstep with meager income and opportunities, which kept even the hardest-working people in poverty and made poverty expensive—Lewis reproduced the elitist idea that poor behaviors keep poor people poor. “People with a culture of poverty,” Lewis wrote, “are a marginal people who know only their own troubles, their own local conditions, their own neighborhood, their own way of life.” (Page 94)

Something was making poor people poor, according to this idea. And it was welfare. Welfare “transforms the individual from a dignified, industrious, self-reliant spiritual being into a dependent animal creature without his knowing it,” U.S. senator Barry Goldwater wrote in The Conscience of the Conservative in 1960. Goldwater and his ideological descendants said little to nothing about rich White people who depended on the welfare of inheritances, tax cuts, government contracts, hookups, and bailouts. They said little to nothing about the White middle class depending on the welfare of the New Deal, the GI Bill, subsidized suburbs, and exclusive White networks. Welfare for middle- and upper-income people remained out of the discourse on “handouts,” as welfare for the Black poor became the true oppressor in the conservative version of the oppression-inferiority thesis. “The evidence of this failure is all around us,” wrote Heritage Foundation president Kay Coles James in 2018. “Being black and the daughter of a former welfare recipient, I know firsthand the unintended harm welfare has caused.” (Page 95)

This stereotype of the hopeless, defeated, unmotivated poor Black is without evidence. Recent research shows, in fact, that poor Blacks are more optimistic about their prospects than poor Whites are. (Page 95)

But it is impossible to know racism without understanding its intersection with capitalism. As Martin Luther King said in his critique of capitalism in 1967, “It means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated.” (Page 96)

Capitalism emerged during what world-systems theorists term the “long sixteenth century,” a cradling period that begins around 1450 with Portugal (and Spain) sailing into the unknown Atlantic. Prince Henry’s Portugal birthed conjoined twins—capitalism and racism—when it initiated the transatlantic slave trade of African people. These newborns looked up with tender eyes to their ancient siblings of sexism, imperialism, ethnocentrism, and homophobia. The conjoined twins developed different personalities through the new class and racial formations of the modern world. As the principal customers of Portuguese slave traders, first in their home country and then in their American colonies, Spain adopted and raised the toddlers among the genocides of Native Americans that laid the foundational seminaries and cemeteries on which Western Europe’s Atlantic empire grew in the sixteenth century. Holland and France and England overtook each other as hegemons of the slave trade, raising the conjoined twins into their vigorous adolescence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The conjoined twins entered adulthood through Native and Black and Asian and White slavery and forced labor in the Americas, which powered industrial revolutions from Boston to London that financed stillgreater empires in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The hot and cold wars in the twentieth century over resources and markets, rights and powers, weakened the conjoined twins—but eventually they would grow stronger under the guidance of the United States, the European Union, China, and the satellite nations beholden to them, colonies in everything but name. The conjoined twins are again struggling to stay alive and thrive as their own offspring—inequality, war, and climate change—threaten to kill them, and all of us, off. (Page 96)

poverty rate (Page 96)

unemployment (Page 96)

wage gap (Page 96)

median net worth (Page 96)

median wealth (Page 96)

Africa’s unprecedented capitalist growth over the past two decades has enriched foreign investors and a handful of Africans, while the number of people living in extreme poverty is growing in Sub-Saharan Africa. (Page 97)

Attributing these inequities solely to capitalism is as faulty as attributing them solely to racism. Believing these inequities will be eliminated through eliminating capitalism is as faulty as believing these inequities will be eliminated through eliminating racism. Rolling back racism in a capitalist nation can eliminate the inequities between the Black and White poor, middleincome Latinx and Asians, rich Whites and Natives. Antiracist policies in the 1960s and 1970s narrowed these inequities on some measures. But antiracist policies alone cannot eliminate the inequities between rich and poor Asians or between rich Whites and “White trash”—the inequities between race-classes. As racial disparities within the classes narrowed in recent decades, the economic inequities within the races have broadened, as have the class-racist ideas justifying those inequities. (Page 97)

Antiracist policies cannot eliminate class racism without anticapitalist policies. Anticapitalism cannot eliminate class racism without antiracism. Case in point is the persistent racism AfroCubans faced in socialist Cuba after revolutionaries eliminated capitalism there in 1959, as chronicled by historian Devyn Spence Benson. Revolutionaries demanded Afro-Cubans assimilate into an imagined post-racial Cuba—“Not Blacks, but Citizens”—built on White Cuban social norms and racist ideas after a three-year campaign against racism abruptly ended in 1961. (Page 97)

Karl Marx once wrote, “the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, (Page 97)

signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.” Marx recognized the birth of the conjoined twins. (Page 98)

Du Bois conceived of an antiracist anticapitalism (Page 98)

I keep using the term “anticapitalist” as opposed to socialist or communist to include the people who publicly or privately question or loathe capitalism but do not identify as socialist or communist. I use “anticapitalist” because conservative defenders of capitalism regularly say their liberal and socialist opponents are against capitalism. They say efforts to provide a safety net for all people are “anticapitalist.” They say attempts to prevent monopolies are “anticapitalist.” They say efforts that strengthen weak unions and weaken exploitative owners are “anticapitalist.” They say plans to normalize worker ownership and regulations protecting consumers, workers, and environments from big business are “anticapitalist.” They say laws taxing the richest more than incomes are the middle class, redistributing pilfered wealth, and guaranteeing basic “anticapitalist.” They say wars to end poverty are “anticapitalist.” They say campaigns to remove the profit motive from essential life sectors like education, healthcare, utilities, mass media, and incarceration are “anticapitalist.” (Page 98)

In doing so, these conservative defenders are defining capitalism. They define capitalism as the freedom to exploit people into economic ruin; the freedom to assassinate unions; the freedom to prey on unprotected consumers, workers, and environments; the freedom to value quarterly profits over climate change; the freedom to undermine small businesses and cushion corporations; the freedom from competition; the freedom not to pay taxes; the freedom to heave the tax burden onto the middle and lower classes; the freedom to commodify everything and (Page 98)

everyone; the freedom to keep poor people poor and middle-income people struggling to stay middle income, and make rich people richer. 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. (Page 99)

Most of these poor adults live in non-White countries that were subjected to centuries of slave trading and colonizing and resource dispossessing, which created the modern wealth of the West. The wealth extraction continues today via foreign companies that own or control key natural resources in the global south, taken through force with the threat of “economic sanctions” or granted by “elected” politicians. Racial capitalism makes countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo one of the richest countries in the world belowground and one of the poorest countries in the world aboveground. (Page 99)

To love capitalism is to end up loving racism. (Page 99)

Capitalism is essentially racist; racism is essentially capitalist. (Page 99)

racial capitalism will live into another epoch of theft and rapacious inequity, especially if activists naïvely fight the conjoined twins independently, as if they are not the same. (Page 100)

SPACE (Page 102)

WE CALLED OUR African American studies space a Black space—it was, after all, governed primarily by Black bodies, Black thoughts, Black cultures, and Black histories. Of course, the spaces at Temple University governed primarily by White bodies, White thoughts, White cultures, and White histories were not labeled White. They hid the Whiteness of their spaces behind the veil of color blindness. (Page 102)

Americans lost trillions during the Great Recession, which was largely triggered by financial crimes of staggering enormity. Estimated losses from white-collar crimes are believed to be between $300 and $600 billion per year, according to the FBI. By comparison, near the height of violent crime in 1995, the FBI reported the combined costs of burglary and robbery to be $4 billion. (Page 103)

Riley had pulled out the familiar weapon safeguarding space racism and menacing Black spaces: unfairly comparing Black spaces to substantially richer White spaces. The endowment of the richest HBCU, Howard, was five times less than UT Austin’s endowment in 2016, never mind being thirty-six times less than the endowment of a Stanford or Yale. The racial wealth gap produces a giving gap. For public HBCUs, the giving gap extends to state-funding gaps, as racist policies steer more funds to HWCUs, like the current “performance based” state models. (Page 105)

Banks remain twice as likely to offer loans to White entrepreneurs than to Black entrepreneurs. Customers avoid Black businesses like they are the “ghetto,” like the “White man’s ice is colder,” as antiracists have joked for years. I knew this then. But my dueling consciousness still led me to think like one young Black writer wrote in Blavity in 2017: “On an intellectual level, I know that Black people have been denied equal access to capital, training, and physical space. But does that inequitable treatment excuse bad service?” Does not good service, like every other commodity, typically cost more money? How can we acknowledge the clouds of racism over Black spaces and be shocked when it rains on our heads? (Page 106)

e integrationist strategy—the placing of White and non-White bodies in the same spaces— is thought to cultivate away the barbarism of people of color and the racism of White people. The integrationist strategy expects Black bodies to heal in proximity to Whites who haven’t yet stopped fighting them. After enduring slavery’s violence, Frazier and his brethren had enough. They desired to separate, not from Whites but from White racism. Separation is not always segregation. The antiracist desire to separate from racists is different from the segregationist desire to separate from “inferior” Blacks. (Page 107)

Whenever Black people voluntarily gather among themselves, integrationists do not see spaces of Black solidarity created to separate Black people from racism. They see spaces of White hate. They do not see spaces of cultural solidarity, of solidarity against racism. They see spaces of segregation against White people. Integrationists do not see these spaces as the movement of Black people toward Black people. Integrationists think about them as a movement away from White people. They then equate that movement away from White people with the White segregationist movement away from Black people. Integrationists equate spaces for the survival of Black bodies with spaces for the survival of White supremacy. (Page 107)

Separate but equal covered up the segregationist policies that diverted resources toward exclusively White spaces. (Page 107)

What really made the schools unequal were the dramatically unequal resources provided to them, not the mere fact of racial separation. The Supreme Court justices deciding both Plessy and Brown avowed the segregationist lie that the “Negro and white schools involved have been equalized, or are being equalized,” to quote Justice Warren. By 1973, when the resource inequities between the public schools had become too obvious to deny, the Supreme Court ruled, in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, that property-tax allocations yielding inequities in public schools do not violate the equal-protection clause of the U.S. Constitution. (Page 108)

lower expectations for non-White students. (Page 108)

Barack Obama wrote. “Only white culture could be neutral and objective. Only white culture could be nonracial.” Integration (into Whiteness) became racial progress. (Page 109)

The percentage of Southern Black students attending integrated White schools jumped from zero in 1954 to 23 percent in 1969 to 44 percent in 1989 before falling back to 23 percent in 2011. The “academic-achievement gap” followed a similar roller coaster, closing with the integration of White schools, before opening back up, proving that “African-American students who attended integrated schools fared better academically than those left behind in segregated schools,” Kirp argued. Standardized tests “proved” White students and White spaces were smarter. And yet, what if the scoring gap closed because, as Black students integrated White schools, more students received the same education and test prep? (Page 109)

Through lynching Black cultures, integrationists are, in the end, more harmful to Black bodies than segregationists are. (Page 109)

Americans have seen the logical conclusion of segregationist strategy, from slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration and border walls. The logical conclusion of antiracist strategy is (Page 109)

open and equal access to all public accommodations, open access to all integrated White spaces, integrated Middle Eastern spaces, integrated Black spaces, integrated Latinx spaces, integrated Native spaces, and integrated Asian spaces that are as equally resourced as they are culturally different. All these spaces adjoin civic spaces of political and economic and cultural power, from a House of Representatives to a school board to a newspaper editorial board where no race predominates, where shared antiracist power predominates. This is diversity, something integrationists value only in name. (Page 110)

Antiracist strategy fuses desegregation with a form of integration and racial solidarity. Desegregation: eliminating all barriers to all racialized spaces. To be antiracist is to support the voluntary integration of bodies attracted by cultural difference, a shared humanity. Integration: resources rather than bodies. To be an antiracist is to champion resource equity by challenging the racist policies that produce resource inequity. Racial solidarity: openly identifying, supporting, and protecting integrated racial spaces. To be antiracist is to equate and nurture difference among racial groups (Page 110)

GENDER (Page 111)

To be antiracist is to reject not only the hierarchy of races but of race-genders. To be feminist is to reject not only the hierarchy of genders but of race-genders. To truly be antiracist is to be feminist. To truly be feminist is to be antiracist. To be antiracist (and feminist) is to level the different race-genders, is to root the inequities between the equal race-genders in the policies of gender racism. (Page 115)

The intersection of racism and sexism, in some cases, oppresses White women. For example, sexist notions of “real women” as weak and racist notions of White women as the idealized woman intersect to produce the genderracist idea that the pinnacle of womanhood is the weak White woman. This is the gender racism that caused millions of men and women to hate the strong White woman running for president in 2016, Hillary Clinton. Or to give another example, the opposite of the gender racism of the unvirtuous hypersexual Black woman is the virtuous asexual White woman, a racial construct that has constrained and controlled the White woman’s sexuality (as it nakedly tainted the Black woman’s sexuality as un-rape-able). (Page 116)

A theory for Black women is a theory for humanity. No wonder Black feminists have been saying from the beginning that when humanity becomes serious about the freedom of Black women, humanity becomes serious about the freedom of humanity. (Page 117)

SEXUALITY (Page 118)

Homophobia cannot be separated from racism. (Page 118)

FAILURE (Page 123)

Incorrect conceptions of race as a social construct (as opposed to a power construct), of racial history as a singular march of racial progress (as opposed to a duel of antiracist and racist progress), of the race problem as rooted in ignorance and hate (as opposed to powerful selfinterest)—all come together to produce solutions bound to fail. Terms and sayings like “I’m not racist” and “race neutral” and “post-racial” and “color-blind” and “only one race, the human race” and “only racists speak about race” and “Black people can’t be racist” and “White people are evil” are bound to fail in identifying and eliminating racist power and policy. (Page 123)

To fight for mental and moral changes after policy is changed means fighting alongside growing benefits and the dissipation of fears, making it possible for antiracist power to succeed. To fight for mental and moral change as a prerequisite for policy change is to fight against growing fears and apathy, making it almost impossible for antiracist power to succeed (Page 127)

The original problem of racism has not been solved by suasion. Knowledge is only power if knowledge is put to the struggle for power. Changing minds is not a movement. Critiquing racism is not activism. Changing minds is not activism. An activist produces power and policy change, not mental change. If a person has no record of power or policy change, then that person is not an activist. (Page 127)

What if antiracists constantly self-critiqued our own ideas? What if we blamed our ideologies and methods, studied our ideologies and methods, refined our ideologies and methods again and again until they worked? When will we finally stop the insanity of doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result? Self-critique allows change. Changing shows flexibility. Antiracist power must be flexible to match the flexibility of racist power, propelled only by the craving for power to shape policy in their inequitable interests. Racist power believes in by any means necessary. We, their challengers, typically do not, not even some of those inspired by Malcolm X. We care the most about the moral and ideological and financial purity of our ideologies and strategies and fundraising and leaders and organizations. We care less about bringing equitable results for people in dire straits, as we say we are purifying ourselves for the people in dire straits, as our purifying keeps the people in dire straits. As we critique the privilege and inaction of racist power, we show our privilege and inaction by critiquing every effective strategy, ultimately justifying our inaction on the comfortable seat of privilege. Anything but flexible, we are too often bound by ideologies that are bound by failed strategies of racial change. (Page 130)

We use the terms “demonstration” and “protest” interchangeably, at our own peril, like we interchangeably use the terms “mobilizing” and “organizing.” A protest is organizing people for a prolonged campaign that forces racist power to change a policy. A demonstration is mobilizing people momentarily to publicize a problem. Speakers and placards and posts at marches, rallies, petitions, and viral hashtags demonstrate the problem. Demonstrations are, not surprisingly, a favorite of suasionists. Demonstrations annoy power in the way children crying about something they will never get annoy parents. Unless power cannot economically or politically or professionally afford bad press—as power could not during the Cold War, as power cannot during election season, as power cannot close to bankruptcy—power typically ignores demonstrations. (Page 131)

The most effective protests create an environment whereby changing the racist policy becomes in power’s self-interest, like desegregating businesses because the sit-ins are driving away customers, like increasing wages to restart production, like giving teachers raises to resume schooling, like passing a law to attract a well-organized force of donors or voters. But it is difficult to create that environment, since racist power makes laws that illegalize most protest threats. Organizing and protesting are much harder and more impactful than mobilizing and demonstrating. Seizing power is much harder than protesting power and demonstrating its excesses. (Page 131)

SUCCESS (Page 132)

The term “institutionally racist policies” is more concrete than “institutional racism.” The term “racist policies” is more concrete than “institutionally racist policies,” since “institutional” and “policies” are redundant: Policies are institutional. But I still occasionally use the terms “institutional racism” and “systemic racism” and “structural racism” and “overt” and “covert.” They are like my first language of racism. But when we realize old words do not exactly and clearly convey what we are trying to describe, we should turn to new words. I struggle to concretely explain what “institutional racism” means to the Middle Eastern small businessman, the Black service worker, the White teacher, the Latinx nurse, the Asian factory worker, and the Native store clerk who do not take the courses on racism, do not read the books on racism, do not go to the lectures on racism, do not watch the specials on racism, do not listen to the podcasts on racism, do not attend the rallies against racism. (Page 135)

Policymakers and policies make societies and institutions, not the other way around. The United States is a racist nation because its policymakers and policies have been racist from the beginning. The conviction that racist policymakers can be overtaken, and racist policies can be changed, and the racist minds of their victims can be changed, is disputed only by those invested in preserving racist policymakers, policies, and habits of thinking. (Page 135)

SURVIVAL (Page 139)

The history of racist ideas is the history of powerful policymakers erecting racist policies out of self-interest, then producing racist ideas to defend and rationalize the inequitable effects of their policies, while everyday people consume those racist ideas, which in turn sparks ignorance and hate. Treating ignorance and hate and expecting racism to shrink suddenly seemed like treating a cancer patient’s symptoms and expecting the tumors to shrink. The body politic might feel better momentarily from the treatment—from trying to eradicate hate and ignorance—but as long as the underlying cause remains, the tumors grow, the symptoms return, and inequities spread like cancer cells, threatening the life of the body politic. Educational and moral suasion is not only a failed strategy. It is a suicidal strategy. (Page 140)

racist policies leading to racist ideas, not the other way around, as we have commonly thought (Page 140)

Race and racism are power constructs of the modern world. For roughly two hundred thousand years, before race and racism were constructed in the fifteenth century, humans saw color but did not group the colors into continental races, did not commonly attach negative and positive characteristics to those colors and rank the races to justify racial inequity, to reinforce racist power and policy. Racism is not even six hundred years old. It’s a cancer that we’ve caught early. But racism is one of the fastest-spreading and most fatal cancers humanity has ever known. It is hard to find a place where its cancer cells are not dividing and multiplying. There is nothing I see in our world today, in our history, giving me hope that one day antiracists will win the fight, that one day the flag of antiracism will fly over a world of equity. 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. (Page 145)

Important

Summary (Mine) — State the Ideas of the book in own words (Interrogating Texts)

Important

Summary (AI)

“Ibram X. Kendi - How to Be an Antiracist” is a book that explores the concept of antiracism and how it can be applied in society. Here are the main points:

1. Racist Ideas in Education: Kendi criticizes the idea of an “achievement gap” in education, arguing that it perpetuates racist ideas. He suggests that different environments lead to different kinds of achievement, not different levels of achievement. He proposes that intelligence should be measured by how knowledgeable individuals are about their own environments and by their desire to know, rather than standardized tests.
2. Ethnic Racism: Kendi discusses the origins of ethnic racism in the slave trade, where different ethnic groups were preferred by enslavers, leading to hierarchies of value. He also discusses the racialization of ethnic groups, where they are categorized and ranked based on perceived value.
3. Immigration and Ethnic Racism: Kendi criticizes policies that favor immigrants from certain countries over others, arguing that they are based on racist ideas. He also discusses the “migrant advantage,” where immigrants tend to be more resilient and resourceful than natives, not because of their ethnicity, but because they are immigrants.
4. Violence and Racism: Kendi discusses the perception of Black neighborhoods as dangerous and the strategies used to reduce violent crime. He argues that there is no such thing as a dangerous racial group, only dangerous individuals.
5. Cultural Racism: Kendi argues for the rejection of cultural standards and the equalization of cultural differences among racial groups. He criticizes the idea of assimilation, where racial groups are expected to conform to a dominant cultural standard.
6. Behavioral Racism: Kendi discusses the idea of making individuals responsible for the perceived behavior of racial groups and vice versa. He argues for the recognition of individual behavior as real and racial group behavior as fictional.

Throughout the book, Kendi emphasizes the importance of antiracism, which involves recognizing and challenging racist ideas and policies in society.

ChatGPT Summary

The book “How to Be an Antiracist” by Ibram X. Kendi consists of 18 chapters, each focusing on a different theme related to antiracism. Here are the chapter titles:

1. Definitions: Explores the foundational concepts and definitions surrounding racism and antiracism.
2. Dueling Consciousness: Discusses the internal conflict between assimilating into a racist society and fighting against it.
3. Power: Examines how power dynamics shape and maintain racist structures.
4. Biology: Debunks the idea of biological racial differences and its implications.
5. Ethnicity: Explores the complexity of ethnic identities and their intersections with racism.
6. Body: Discusses the physical manifestations and implications of racism on the body.
7. Culture: Looks at how culture is racialized and used as a tool for discrimination.
8. Behavior: Explores the stereotypes and misconceptions about the behavior of different racial groups.
9. Color: Addresses the hierarchy and politics of skin color within and across races.
10. White: Delve into the construction and maintenance of white identity and privilege.
11. Black: Focuses on the experiences, resistance, and complexities of Black identity.
12. Class: Examines the intersection of race and socioeconomic status.
13. Space: Looks at how physical and social spaces are racially charged and segregated.
14. Gender: Discusses the intersections of race and gender, and how they compound discrimination.
15. Sexuality: Explores the intersections of race and sexuality.
16. Failure: Investigates the concept of failure within a racial context, including how societies fail to be antiracist.
17. Success: Contrasts what success means in a racist vs. an antiracist society.
18. Survival: Discusses the ongoing struggle for survival amidst a backdrop of racism.

Each chapter builds on the notion of understanding and combatting racism from different angles, providing a comprehensive guide to recognizing, understanding, and being an active part of the solution against racism【7†source】.

In Chapter 1: “Definitions” of How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi establishes the foundational concepts for understanding racism and antiracism. The chapter begins by providing specific definitions:

1. Racist: One who supports a racist policy through actions or inaction or expresses a racist idea.
2. Antiracist: One who supports an antiracist policy through actions or expresses an antiracist idea.

The chapter dives into the impact of historical Black theology and liberation movements, which influenced Kendi’s understanding of antiracism. He discusses the significance of defining terms clearly to anchor oneself in principles and actions. This section emphasizes the importance of understanding what constitutes racist and antiracist actions and policies, underlining that there is no such thing as a “nonracist” or race-neutral policy.

Kendi outlines that racism is a marriage of racist policies and ideas, producing and normalizing racial inequities. He details the difference between racial inequity (when two or more racial groups are not standing on approximately equal footing) and racial equity (when groups are on relatively equal footing). He clarifies that racist policies sustain racial inequity, while antiracist policies promote racial equity.

The chapter also criticizes the idea of “racial discrimination” as a vague term often misused to ignore the central agents of racism: racist policy and policymakers. Kendi argues against the idea of race neutrality, explaining how it often serves to disguise or justify racial inequities. He concludes by distinguishing between racist ideas (which suggest racial hierarchy) and antiracist ideas (which promote racial equality) and argues that understanding these concepts is crucial to effectively combating racism【15†source】.

In Chapter 2, “Dueling Consciousness,” of “How to Be an Antiracist,” Ibram X. Kendi discusses the internal conflict between supporting a racist policy or idea (assimilationist or segregationist) and being antiracist. He explains the difference between assimilationists, who believe a racial group is culturally or behaviorally inferior and needs to be developed, and segregationists, who consider a racial group permanently inferior and support segregation. In contrast, an antiracist believes in the equality of racial groups, supporting policies that reduce racial inequity.

The chapter reflects on Kendi’s parents’ experiences and how they influenced his understanding of racism and antiracism. It delves into the historical context of the Reagan era’s policies, illustrating how systemic issues shaped public perception and policy. Kendi narrates personal experiences, highlighting the impact of societal and racial dynamics on his family and himself. The dueling consciousness concept is exemplified through the struggle between striving to fit into a racialized society (assimilationist) and resisting and redefining one’s identity (antiracist).

Kendi further discusses the notion of double consciousness introduced by W.E.B. Du Bois, emphasizing the ongoing internal conflict between two identities: being Black and American. This dueling consciousness is not only a personal struggle but also reflects broader societal and historical conflicts over race, identity, and power.

The chapter also critiques biological racism, the idea that races are biologically different and hierarchically arranged. Kendi recounts his own journey of understanding and rejecting these ideas, advocating for a view that recognizes the cultural and historical construction of race without inherent biological differences.

Overall, Chapter 2 delves into the complex and often conflicting aspects of racial identity, policy, and consciousness, advocating for an antiracist approach that recognizes and challenges the pervasive influence of racist ideas and policies【23†source】.

In Chapter 3, “Power,” Kendi delves into how power and self-interest shape racist policies and ideas, which in turn maintain racial inequities. He underscores that racial groups are equals in all their apparent differences, and inequities between them are the result of racist policies. Kendi also discusses his own diagnosis of stage 4 cancer, drawing a poignant analogy between the societal spread of racism and the physical spread of cancer. He emphasizes that just as rigorous and painful treatments are necessary to combat cancer, similarly intensive and potentially uncomfortable measures are required to dismantle racism in society. The chapter pushes for a belief in the possibility and the necessity of creating an antiracist society, challenging the notion that racist power and policies are unchangeable or natural.

Kendi suggests that to effectively combat racism, society must adopt antiracist policies that are like chemotherapy, targeting and reducing inequities, and ensuring a regular intake of ‘healthy’ antiracist ideas to prevent a recurrence. He argues against the pervasive denial of racism, asserting that recognizing and confessing racist attitudes and policies are crucial steps towards healing. The chapter presents racism as a curable cancer that has spread throughout society, advocating for an aggressive, sustained, and hopeful fight against it【31†source】.

The fourth chapter of “How to Be an Antiracist” by Ibram X. Kendi delves deeply into the complex interplay between race, racism, and power, examining the personal and societal impacts of racist ideas and policies. Kendi discusses the dual consciousness or “dueling consciousness” within Black Americans, a concept introduced by W.E.B. Du Bois, where there’s a constant internal conflict between assimilating into a white-majority society and maintaining one’s own racial identity and pride. This conflict is further complicated by external pressures and racist policies that shape individuals’ lives and perceptions.

Kendi reflects on his own upbringing and how his parents, influenced by the prevailing societal norms and their desire to succeed within a system stacked against them, instilled in him the values of hard work and education as the path to upliftment. However, he also critically examines how these values sometimes aligned with racist ideas, promoting the notion that Black people are responsible for their own struggles rather than acknowledging the systemic barriers in place.

He discusses the Reagan era’s policies, which disproportionately affected Black communities, leading to increased poverty, unemployment, and incarceration rates. Kendi argues that the focus on individual behavior over systemic change is a common tactic to divert attention from the real causes of racial disparities.

The chapter also critiques the concept of biological racism, emphasizing that while humans may have superficial physical differences, genetically we are overwhelmingly similar. Kendi argues that acknowledging this genetic similarity is crucial in combating racist ideas that suggest a hierarchy of human value based on race.

Throughout the chapter, Kendi intertwines personal anecdotes with historical context and scholarly research, demonstrating the pervasive and enduring nature of racist ideas and policies. His narrative is a call to recognize and challenge these ideas and policies at every level, from personal beliefs to institutional practices, in order to move toward a truly antiracist society【39†source】.

Chapter 5, “Ethnicity,” in “How to Be an Antiracist” by Ibram X. Kendi, discusses the complexities and variations within racial groups, focusing on the concept of ethnicity and its significant impact on how individuals and groups experience racism. Kendi elaborates on the nuances of ethnic differences within and between racial groups, highlighting how these distinctions contribute to a diverse array of experiences and identities.

The chapter starts by recounting tragic incidents involving individuals of different ethnic backgrounds, such as Latasha Harlins, Abner Louima, and Amadou Diallo. These stories illustrate the deadly consequences of racial and ethnic biases and the systemic violence that often targets ethnic minorities.

Kendi moves on to discuss the history of slavery and how different African ethnic groups were valued and devalued by slave traders and owners. He explores the complicated relationships between African chiefs and European traders, shedding light on the diverse roles played by Africans in the slave trade.

The chapter also examines the changing demographics of the United States, particularly the increase in the Latinx immigrant population and the rising share of the U.S. Black population that is foreign-born. Kendi reflects on the tensions and interactions between different ethnic groups, such as the way West Indian immigrants and African Americans perceive each other, and the discrimination faced by various groups like the Chinese and Mexican Americans throughout American history.

Kendi critically analyzes the narratives and stereotypes associated with different ethnic groups, including the idea of the “model minority” and the discrimination and exclusion faced by Native Americans and African immigrants. He challenges the notion that certain ethnic groups are inherently more successful or problematic than others, emphasizing the role of systemic factors and historical context in shaping these perceptions.

Throughout the chapter, Kendi advocates for recognizing and embracing the rich diversity within racial groups. He argues against monolithic representations and stereotypes, urging readers to understand and appreciate the complex interplay of race and ethnicity in shaping individual and collective identities and experiences【47†source】.

Chapter 6, “Body,” of How to Be an Antiracist delves into the physical embodiment of racial distinctions and the consequences of racist policies on the body. Kendi argues that racist and antiracist policies have tangible effects on the health, longevity, and physical well-being of individuals based on their race. He illustrates this with personal and historical narratives that show how bodies of color have suffered disproportionately due to environmental hazards, health care disparities, and discriminatory policies.

Kendi shares powerful personal anecdotes, including the health struggles and premature deaths within his own family, to demonstrate the lethal consequences of systemic racism. He ties these personal experiences to broader societal issues, such as healthcare disparities, environmental racism, and the criminal justice system’s impact on the Black community. For example, he discusses the higher rates of certain diseases in African American communities and how policies and lack of access to quality healthcare contribute to these disparities.

The chapter also addresses how policies, often cloaked in neutrality or benevolence, have historically targeted or neglected certain bodies based on race. Kendi argues that seemingly race-neutral policies can have deeply racial implications, leading to a disproportionate impact on the health and well-being of non-White populations. He cites examples like voter ID laws and the war on drugs to demonstrate how policies can effectively discriminate and harm communities of color.

Kendi underscores that racist ideas lead to racist policies that harm bodies of color, advocating for the recognition and confrontation of these ideas and policies to promote physical wellbeing for all. He calls for an antiracist approach that recognizes the equality of different racial groups and actively works to dismantle policies that perpetuate health disparities. The chapter ultimately argues for an understanding of the body as a site of racial contestation and emphasizes the need for policies that ensure the health and vitality of all bodies, regardless of race【55†source】.

In Chapter 7, “Culture,” of How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi discusses the complex interplay between cultural identity, racism, and power, emphasizing the impact of cultural perceptions and policies on racial groups. He begins by exploring the harmful effects of climate change, disproportionately affecting non-White global populations, as an example of how seemingly neutral policies can have racially targeted impacts. He uses his own family’s history to illustrate the long-term consequences of racist policies on health, housing, and quality of life, emphasizing the cumulative effect of seemingly separate and even neutral policies on creating and sustaining racial inequities.

Kendi then delves into the concept of “dueling consciousness,” a term that describes the internal conflict experienced by individuals grappling with their racial identity within a racist society. He discusses the historical context of this struggle, particularly within Black American communities, and how it manifests as a tension between assimilationist and segregationist ideologies, each with its own set of policies and cultural implications.

Assimilationist ideologies, as Kendi explains, are those that view a racial group as culturally or behaviorally inferior and in need of development to reach a supposed superior standard, typically set by White cultural norms. In contrast, segregationist ideologies view certain racial groups as inherently and permanently inferior, advocating for policies that segregate and oppress these groups. Both ideologies are harmful and perpetuate racism by devaluing cultures and individuals based on their racial identity.

Kendi argues for an antiracist approach, which recognizes the equality of all racial groups and seeks to reduce racial inequity through policy change. He stresses that antiracist policies are geared towards reducing racial disparities and creating equal opportunities, unlike assimilationist or segregationist policies, which either attempt to change racial groups to fit a dominant cultural standard or further segregate and oppress them.

Throughout the chapter, Kendi emphasizes the need for understanding and confronting these cultural perceptions and their policy implications. He calls for a radical reorientation of consciousness to embrace antiracist ideas, which acknowledge the equal value and dignity of all racial groups and work towards a society where cultural diversity is celebrated rather than suppressed.

The chapter is a deep dive into the cultural dimensions of racism and antiracism, showing how cultural attitudes and policies are central to the perpetuation or dismantling of racial inequalities. Kendi’s narrative weaves personal, historical, and societal threads together to illustrate the pervasive and often subtle nature of cultural racism and the urgent need for antiracist action at every level of society【63†source】.

Important

MAIN IDEAS, TAKEAWAYS & SIMILARITIES

• Any disparity in American life has to based on discrimination. That means only the less power can be discriminated against.
• Deconstructionist

Important

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

IbramX._Kendi-How_to_Be_an_Antiracist(2019One_World)-_libgen.li_copy 1.pdf (file not included in this release)

Important

PREVIEW (Interrogating Texts)

Important

HIGHLIGHTS

ChatGPT Summary

MY RACIST INTRODUCTION (Page 5)

DEFINITIONS (Page 10)

DUELING CONSCIOUSNESS (Page 17)

POWER (Page 23)

BIOLOGY (Page 29)

ETHNICITY (Page 36)

BODY (Page 44)

CULTURE (Page 51)

BEHAVIOR (Page 58)

COLOR (Page 67)

WHITE (Page 76)

BLACK (Page 84)

CLASS (Page 93)

SPACE (Page 102)

GENDER (Page 111)

SEXUALITY (Page 118)

FAILURE (Page 123)

SUCCESS (Page 132)

SURVIVAL (Page 139)

MY RACIST INTRODUCTION (Page 5)

DEFINITIONS (Page 10)

DUELING CONSCIOUSNESS (Page 17)

President Reagan declared war on her unborn baby. “We must put drug abuse on the run through stronger law enforcement (Page 17)

The Reagan Revolution was just that: a radical revolution for the benefit of the already powerful. It further enriched high-income Americans by cutting their taxes and government regulations, installing a Christmas-tree military budget, and arresting the power of unions. (Page 19)

Americans have long been trained to see the deficiencies of people rather than policy. It’s a pretty easy mistake to make: People are in our faces. Policies are distant. We are particularly poor at seeing the policies lurking behind the struggles of people. (Page 19)

This conceptual duple reflected what W.E.B. Du Bois indelibly voiced in The Souls of Black Folk in 1903. “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others,” Du Bois wrote. He would neither “Africanize America” nor “bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism.” Du Bois wished “to be both a (Page 19)

Negro and an American.” Du Bois wished to inhabit opposing constructs. To be American is to be White. To be White is to not be a Negro. (Page 20)

What Du Bois termed double consciousness may be more precisely termed dueling consciousness. “One ever feels his two-ness,” Du Bois explained, “an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” Du Bois also explained how this war was being waged within his own dark body, wanting to be a Negro and wanting to “escape into the mass of Americans in the same way that the Irish and Scandinavians” were doing. (Page 20)

e wanted to liberate Black people from racism but he also wanted to change them, to save them from their “relic of barbarism.” (Page 20)

Assimilationist ideas are racist ideas. Assimilationists can position any racial group as the superior standard that another racial group should be measuring themselves against, the benchmark they should be trying to reach. Assimilationists typically position White people as the superior standard. (Page 20)

Black self-reliance was a double-edged sword. One side was an abhorrence of White supremacy and White paternalism, White rulers and White saviors. On the other, a love of Black rulers and Black saviors, of Black paternalism. On one side was the antiracist belief that Black (Page 20)

people were entirely capable of ruling themselves, of relying on themselves. (Page 21)

WHITE PEOPLE HAVE their own dueling consciousness, between the segregationist and the assimilationist: the slave trader and the missionary, the proslavery exploiter and the antislavery civilizer, the eugenicist and the melting pot–ter, the mass incarcerator and the mass developer, the Blue Lives Matter and the All Lives Matter, the not-racist nationalist and the not-racist American (Page 21)

The history of the racialized world is a three-way fight between assimilationists, segregationists, and antiracists. Antiracist ideas are based in the truth that racial groups are equals in all the ways they are different, assimilationist ideas are rooted in the notion that certain racial groups are culturally or behaviorally inferior, and segregationist ideas spring from a belief in genetic racial distinction and fixed hierarchy. (Page 21)

To be antiracist is to conquer the assimilationist consciousness and the segregationist consciousness. The White body no longer presents itself as the American body; the Black body no longer strives to be the American body, knowing there is no such thing as the American body, only American bodies, racialized by power. (Page 22)

POWER (Page 23)

But for all of that life-shaping power, race is a mirage, which doesn’t lessen its force. We are what we see ourselves as, whether what we see exists or not. We are what people see us as, whether what they see exists or not. What people see in themselves and others has meaning and manifests itself in ideas and actions and policies, even if what they are seeing is an illusion. Race is a mirage but one that we do well to see, while never forgetting it is a mirage, never forgetting that it’s the powerful light of racist power that makes the mirage. (Page 24)

I see myself historically and politically as a person of color, as a member of the global south, as a close ally of Latinx, East Asian, Middle Eastern, and Native peoples and all the world’s degraded peoples, from the Roma and Jews of Europe to the aboriginals of Australia to the White people battered for their religion, class, gender, transgender identity, ethnicity, sexuality, body size, age, and disability. (Page 24)

Some White people do not identify as White for the same reason they identify as not-racist: to avoid reckoning with the ways that Whiteness—even as a construction and mirage—has informed their notions of America and identity and offered them privilege, the primary one being the privilege of being inherently normal, standard, and legal. It is a racial crime to be yourself if you are not White in America. It is a racial crime to look like yourself or empower yourself if you are not White. I guess I became a criminal at seven years old. (Page 25)

first racist power and the first exclusive slave trader of the constructed race of African people. (Page 25)

Prince Henry the Navigator, the brother and then uncle of Portuguese kings, is the first character in the history of racist power. (Page 25)

My middle name is now Xolani, meaning peace, the very thing Henry’s slave traders snatched from Africa (and the Americas and Europe), the thing they snatched from my ancestor Henry. (Page 25)

Premodern Islamic slave traders, like their Christian counterparts in premodern Italy, were not pursuing racist policies—they were enslaving what we now consider to be Africans, Arabs, and Europeans alike. (Page 25)

Gomes de Zurara grouped all those peoples from Africa into a single race for that very reason: to create hierarchy, the first racist idea. (Page 26)

Prince Henry’s racist policy of slave trading came first—a cunning invention for the practical purpose of bypassing Muslim traders. After nearly two decades of slave trading, King Afonso asked Gomes de Zurara to defend the lucrative commerce in human lives, which he did through the construction of a Black race, an invented group upon which he hung racist ideas. This cause and effect—a racist power creates racist policies out of raw self-interest; the racist policies necessitate racist ideas to justify them—lingers over the life of racism (Page 27)

BIOLOGY (Page 29)

I CANNOT RECALL HER name. So very odd. I can recite the names of my Black fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-grade teachers. But the name of my White third-grade teacher is lost in my memory like the names of so many racist White people over the years who interrupted my peace with their sirens. (Page 29)

An antiracist treats and remembers individuals as individuals. “She acted that way,” we should say, “because she is racist.” (Page 29)

unfair punishments and overlooking (Page 29)

Scholars call what I saw a “microaggression,” a term coined by eminent Harvard psychiatrist Chester Pierce in 1970. Pierce employed the term to describe the constant verbal and nonverbal abuse racist White people unleash on Black people wherever we go, day after day. A White woman grabs her purse when a Black person sits next to her. The seat next to a Black person stays empty on a crowded bus. A White woman calls the cops at the sight of Black people barbecuing in the park. White people telling us that our firmness is anger or that our practiced talents are natural. Mistaking us for the only other Black person around. Calling the cops on our children for selling lemonade on the street. Butchering Ebonics for sport. Assuming we are the help. Assuming the help isn’t brilliant. Asking us questions about the entire Black race. Not giving us the benefit of the doubt. Calling the cops on us for running down the street. (Page 30)

psychologist Derald Wing Sue. He defines microaggressions as “brief, everyday exchanges that send denigrating messages to certain individuals because of their group membership.” (Page 30)

What other people call racial microaggressions I call racist abuse. (Page 30)

With racist teachers, misbehaving kids of color do not receive inquiry and empathy and legitimacy. We receive orders and punishments and “no excuses,” as if we are adults. The Black child is ill-treated like an adult, and the Black adult is ill-treated like a child. (Page 31)

My acceptance of biological racial distinction and rejection of biological racial hierarchy was like accepting water and rejecting its wetness. But that is precisely what I learned to do, what so many of us have learned to do in our dueling racial consciousness. (Page 32)

The naturally selected White race was winning the struggle, was evolving, was headed toward perfection, according to social Darwinists. The only three outcomes available for the “weaker” races were extinction, slavery, or assimilation, explained the social Darwinist who founded American sociology. “Many fear the first possibility for the Indians,” Albion Small co-wrote in 1894; “the second fate is often predicted for the negroes; while the third is anticipated for the Chinese and other Eastern peoples.” (Page 33)

Global outrage after the genocidal the eugenics-driven policies of Nazi Germany marginalization of biological racism within academic thought for the first time in four hundred years. Biological racism—curse theory, polygenesis, and eugenics—had held strong for that long. the mid-twentieth century led to in (Page 33)

But there is no such thing as racial ancestry. Ethnic ancestry does exist. Camara Jones, a prominent medical researcher of health disparities, explained it this way to bioethics scholar Dorothy Roberts: “People are born with ancestry that comes from their parents but are assigned a race.” People from the same ethnic groups that are native to certain geographic regions typically share the same genetic profile. Geneticists call them “populations.” When geneticists compare these ethnic populations, they find there is more genetic diversity between populations within Africa than between Africa and the rest of the world. Ethnic groups in Western Africa are more genetically similar to ethnic groups in Western Europe than to ethnic groups in Eastern Africa. Race is a genetic mirage. (Page 34)

Singular-race makers push for the end of categorizing and identifying by race. They wag their fingers at people like me identifying as Black—but the unfortunate truth is that their wellmeaning post-racial strategy makes no sense in our racist world. Race is a mirage but one that humanity has organized itself around in very real ways. Imagining away the existence of races in a racist world is as conserving and harmful as imagining away classes in a capitalistic world (Page 34)

allows the ruling races and classes to keep on ruling. (Page 35)

Terminating racial categories is potentially the last, not the first, step in the antiracist struggle (Page 35)

biological antiracism. (Page 35)

skin color is as meaningless to our underlying humanity as the clothes we wear over that skin. (Page 35)

ETHNICITY (Page 36)

Africans involved in the slave trade did not believe they were selling their own people—they were usually selling people as different to them as the Europeans waiting on the coast. (Page 38)

HROUGHOUT THE 1990S, the number of immigrants of color in the United States grew, due to the combined effects of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, the Refugee Act of 1980, and the Immigration Act of 1990. Taken together, these bills encouraged family reunification, immigration from conflict areas, and a diversity visa program that spiked immigration from countries outside Europe. Between 1980 and 2000, the Latinx immigrant population ballooned from 4.2 million to 14.1 million. As of 2015, Black immigrants accounted for 8.7 percent of the nation’s Black population, nearly triple their share in 1980. As an early-eighties baby, I witnessed this upsurge of immigrants of color firsthand. (Page 38)

West Indian immigrants tend to categorize African Americans as “lazy, unambitious, (Page 38)

uneducated, unfriendly, welfare-dependent, and lacking in family values,” Mary C. Waters found in her 1999 interview-rich study of West Indian attitudes. African Americans tended to categorize West Indians as “selfish, lacking in race awareness, being lackeys of whites, and [having] a sense of inflated superiority.” (Page 39)

Anglo-Saxons discriminating against Irish Catholics and Jews; Cuban immigrants being privileged over Mexican immigrants; the model-minority construction that includes East Asians and excludes Muslims from South Asia. It’s a history that began with early European colonizers referring to the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole as the “Five Civilized Tribes” of Native Americans, as compared to other “wild” tribes. This ranking of racialized ethnic groups within the ranking of the races creates a racial-ethnic hierarchy, a ladder of ethnic racism within the larger schema of racism. (Page 40)

ethnic racism when we express a racist idea about an ethnic group or support a racist policy toward an ethnic group. Ethnic racism, like racism itself, points to group behavior, instead of policies, as the cause of disparities between groups. (Page 40)

majority of Americans on welfare are not African American and the majority of African Americans eligible for welfare refuse it. (Page 40)

HEN STUDIES STARTED to show that the median family income of African Americans was far lower than that of foreign-born Blacks and that African Americans had higher rates of poverty and unemployment, numerous commentators wondered why Black immigrants do so much better than Blacks born in America. They also answered their own questions: Black immigrants are more motivated, more hardworking, and “more entrepreneurial than native-born blacks,” wrote one commentator in The Economist in 1996. Their success shows “that racism does not account for all, or even most, of the difficulties encountered by native-born blacks.” (Page 42)

Despite studies showing Black immigrants are, on average, the most educated group of immigrants in the United States, they earn lower wages than similarly trained non-Black immigrants and have the highest unemployment rate of any immigrant group. An ethnic racist asks, Why are Black immigrants doing better than African Americans? An ethnic antiracist asks, Why are Black immigrants not doing as well as other immigrant groups? (Page 42)

immigrants and migrants of all races tend to be more resilient and resourceful when compared with the natives of their own countries and the natives of their new countries. Sociologists call this the “migrant advantage.” (Page 42)

BODY (Page 44)

Americans today see the Black body as larger, more threatening, more potentially harmful, and more likely to require force to control than a similarly sized White body, according to researchers. No wonder the Black body had to be lynched by the thousands, deported by the tens of thousands, incarcerated by the millions, segregated by the tens of millions. (Page 45)

WE WERE UNARMED, but we knew that Blackness armed us even though we had no guns. Whiteness disarmed the cops—turned them into fearful potential victims—even when they were approaching a group of clearly outstrapped and anxious high school kids. Black people comprise 13 percent of the U.S. population. And yet, in 2015, Black bodies accounted for at least 26 percent of those killed by police, declining slightly to 24 percent in 2016, 22 percent in 2017, and 21 percent in 2018, according to The Washington Post. Unarmed Black bodies—which apparently look armed to fearful officers—are about twice as likely to be killed as unarmed White bodies. (Page 46)

A study that used National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data from 1976 to 1989 found that young Black males engaged in more violent crime than young White males. But when the researchers compared only employed young males of both races, the differences in violent behavior vanished. Or, as the Urban Institute stated in a more recent report on long-term unemployment, “Communities with a higher share of long-term unemployed workers also tend to have higher rates of crime and violence.” (Page 50)

researchers have found a much stronger and clearer correlation between violent-crime levels and unemployment levels than between violent crime and race (Page 50)

Antiracists say Black people, like all people, need more higher-paying jobs within their reach, especially Black youngsters, who have consistently had the highest rates of unemployment of any demographic group, topping 50 percent in the mid-1990s. (Page 50)

CULTURE (Page 51)

But what was the difference between Ebonics and so-called “standard” English? Ebonics had grown from the roots of African languages and modern English just as modern English had grown from Latin, Greek, and Germanic roots. Why is Ebonics broken English but English is not broken German? Why is Ebonics a dialect of English if English is not a dialect of Latin? The idea that Black languages outside Africa are broken is as culturally racist as the idea that languages inside Europe are fixed. (Page 52)

To be antiracist is to see all cultures in all their differences as on the same level, as equals. When we see cultural difference, we are seeing cultural difference—nothing more, nothing less. (Page 57)

BEHAVIOR (Page 58)

My problems with personal irresponsibility were exacerbated—or perhaps even caused—by the additional struggles that racism added to my school life, from a history of disinterested, racist teachers, to overcrowded schools, to the daily racist attacks that fell on young Black boys and girls. There’s no question that I could have hurdled that racism and kept on running. But asking every nonathletic Black person to become an Olympic hurdler, and blaming them when they can’t keep up, is racist. (Page 59)

One of the fundamental values of racism to White people is that it makes success attainable for even unexceptional Whites, while success, even moderate success, is usually reserved for extraordinary Black people. (Page 59)

Individual behaviors can shape the success of individuals. But policies determine the success of groups. And it is racist power that creates the policies that cause racial inequities. (Page 59)

Making individuals responsible for the perceived behavior of racial groups and making whole racial groups responsible for the behavior of individuals are the two ways that behavioral racism infects our perception of the world. In other words, when we believe that a racial group’s seeming success or failure redounds to each of its individual members, we’ve accepted a racist idea. (Page 59)

Every time someone racializes behavior—describes something as “Black behavior”—they are expressing a racist idea. To be an antiracist is to recognize there is no such thing as racial behavior. To be an antiracist is to recognize there is no such thing as Black behavior, let alone irresponsible Black behavior. (Page 59)

All we have are stories of individual behavior. But individual stories are only proof of the behavior of individuals. Just as race doesn’t exist biologically, race doesn’t exist behaviorally. (Page 60)

Antiracism means separating the idea of a culture from the idea of behavior. Culture defines a group tradition that a particular racial group might share but that is not shared among all individuals in that racial group or among all racial groups. Behavior defines the inherent human traits and potential that everyone shares. (Page 60)

post-traumatic slave syndrome (Page 61)

The use of standardized tests to measure aptitude and intelligence is one of the most effective racist policies ever devised to degrade Black minds and legally exclude Black bodies. We degrade Black minds every time we speak of an “academic-achievement gap” based on these numbers. The acceptance of an academic-achievement gap is just the latest method of reinforcing the oldest racist idea: Black intellectual inferiority. The idea of an achievement gap means there is a disparity in academic performance between groups of students; implicit in this idea is that academic achievement as measured by statistical instruments like test scores and dropout rates is the only form of academic “achievement.” There is an even more sinister implication in achievement-gap talk—that disparities in academic achievement accurately reflect disparities in intelligence among racial groups. Intellect is the linchpin of behavior, and the racist idea of the achievement gap is the linchpin of behavioral racism. (Page 63)

COLOR (Page 67)

Anti-Dark colorism follows the logic of behavioral racism, linking behavior to color, studies show. (Page 69)

To be an antiracist is to eliminate any beauty standard based on skin and eye color, hair texture, facial and bodily features shared by groups. To be an antiracist is to diversify our standards of beauty like our standards of culture or intelligence, to see beauty equally in all skin colors, broad and thin noses, (Page 70)

kinky and straight hair, light and dark eyes. To be an antiracist is to build and live in a beauty culture that accentuates instead of erases our natural beauty. (Page 71)

By then, singer Michael Jackson had paved the skin-bleaching boulevard traveled by rapper Lil’ Kim, baseball player Sammy Sosa, and so many more. Skin-bleaching products were raking in millions for U.S. companies. In India, “fairness” creams topped $200 million in 2014. Today, skin lighteners are used by 70 percent of women in Nigeria; 35 percent in South Africa; 59 percent in Togo; and 40 percent in China, Malaysia, the Philippines, and South Korea. (Page 73)

WHITE (Page 76)

When on December 12, 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court stopped Florida’s recount, I no longer (Page 77)

saw the United States as a democracy. (Page 78)

As Bush’s team transitioned that winter, I transitioned into hating White people. (Page 78)

Months before being assassinated, Malcolm X faced a fact many admirers of Malcolm X still refuse to face: Black people can be racist toward White people. The NOI’s White-devil idea is a classic example. Whenever someone classifies people of European descent as biologically, culturally, or behaviorally inferior, whenever someone says there is something wrong with White people as a group, someone is articulating a racist idea. (Page 79)

The only thing wrong with White people is when they embrace racist ideas and policies and then deny their ideas and policies are racist. This is not to ignore that White people have massacred and enslaved millions of indigenous and African peoples, colonized and impoverished millions of people of color around the globe as their nations grew rich, all the while producing racist ideas that blame the victims. This is to say their history of pillaging is not the result of the evil genes or cultures of White people. There’s no such thing as White genes. We must separate the warlike, greedy, bigoted, and individualist cultures of modern empire and racial capitalism (more on that later) from the cultures of White people. (Page 79)

Donald Trump’s economic policies are geared toward enriching White male power—but at the expense of most of his White male followers, along with the rest of us. (Page 80)

Of course, ordinary White people benefit from racist policies, though not nearly as much as racist power and not nearly as much as they could from an equitable society, one where the average White voter could have as much power as superrich White men to decide elections and shape policy. Where their kids’ business-class schools could resemble the first-class prep schools of today’s superrich. Where high-quality universal healthcare could save millions of White lives. Where they could no longer face the cronies of racism that attack them: sexism, ethnocentrism, homophobia, and exploitation (Page 80)

Claims of anti-White racism in response to antiracism are as old as civil rights. When Congress passed the (first) Civil Rights Act of 1866, it made Black people citizens of the United States, stipulated their civil rights, and stated that state law could not “deprive a person of any of these rights on the basis of race.” President Andrew Johnson reframed this antiracist bill as a “bill made to operate in favor of the colored against the white race.” (Page 80)

Beleaguered White racists who can’t imagine their lives not being the focus of any movement respond to “Black Lives Matter” with “All Lives Matter.” Embattled police officers who can’t imagine losing their right to racially profile and brutalize respond with “Blue Lives Matter.” (Page 81)

White supremacists are the ones supporting policies that benefit racist power against the interests of the majority of White people. White supremacists claim to be pro-White but refuse to acknowledge that climate change is having a disastrous impact on the earth White people inhabit. They oppose affirmative-action programs, despite White women being their primary beneficiaries. White supremacists rage against Obamacare even as 43 percent of the people who gained lifesaving health insurance from 2010 to 2015 were White. They heil Adolf Hitler’s Nazis, even though it was the Nazis who launched a world war that destroyed the lives of more than forty million White people and ruined Europe. They wave Confederate flags and defend Confederate monuments, even though the Confederacy started a civil war that ended with more than five hundred thousand White American lives lost—more than every other American war combined. White supremacists love what America used to be, even though America used to be—and still is—teeming with millions of struggling White people. White supremacists blame non-White people for the struggles of White people when any objective analysis of their plight primarily implicates the rich White Trumps they support. (Page 81)

Diop’s two-cradle theory suggested the harsh climate and lack of resources in the northern cradle nurtured in Europeans barbaric, individualistic, materialist, and warlike behaviors, which brought destruction to the world. The amenable climate and abundance of resources in the southern cradle nurtured the African behaviors of community, spirituality, equanimity, and peace, which brought civilization to the world. (Page 82)

Michael Bradley’s version of the same, his theory in The Iceman Inheritance that the White race’s ruthlessness is the product of its upbringing in the Ice Age. (Page 82)

I was looking for a biological theory of why White people are evil. I found it in The Isis Papers by psychiatrist Frances Cress Welsing. The global White minority’s “profound sense of numerical inadequacy and color inferiority” causes their “uncontrollable sense of hostility and aggression,” Welsing wrote. White people are defending against their own genetic annihilation. Melanin-packing “color always ‘annihilates’… the non-color, white.” Ironically, Welsing’s theory reflects fears of genetic annihilation that White supremacists around the Western world have been expressing these days in their fears of “white genocide”—an idea with a deep history, as in the work of eugenicists like Lothrop Stoddard and his 1920 bestseller, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy. (Page 82)

BLACK (Page 84)

POWERLESS DEFENSE: The illusory, concealing, disempowering, and racist idea that Black people can’t be racist because Black people don’t have power. (Page 84)

I learned in that office that day that every time I say something is wrong with Black people, I am simultaneously separating myself from them, essentially saying “them niggers.” When I do this, I am being a racist. (Page 86)

This powerless defense, as I call it, emerged in the wake of racist Whites dismissing antiracist policies and ideas as racist in the late 1960s. In subsequent decades, Black voices critical of White racism defended themselves from these charges by saying, “Black people can’t be racist, because Black people don’t have power.” (Page 86)

powerless defense underestimates Black people and overestimates White people. (Page 86)

The powerless defense strips Black policymakers and managers of all their power. The powerless defense says the more than 154 African Americans who have served in Congress from 1870 to 2018 had no legislative power. It says none of the thousands of state and local Black politicians have any lawmaking power. It says U.S. Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas never had the power to put his vote to antiracist purposes. The powerless defense says the more than seven hundred Black judges on state courts and more than two hundred Black judges on federal courts have had no power during the trials and sentencing processes that built our system of mass incarceration. It says the more than fifty-seven thousand Black police officers do not have the power to brutalize and kill the Black body. It says the three thousand Black police chiefs, assistant chiefs, and commanders have no power over the officers under their command. The powerless defense says the more than forty thousand full-time Black faculty at U.S. colleges and universities in 2016 did not have the power to pass and fail Black students, hire and tenure Black faculty, or shape the minds of Black people. It says the world’s eleven Black billionaires and the 380,000 Black millionaire families in the United States have no economic power, to use in racist or antiracist ways. It says the sixteen Black CEOs who’ve run Fortune 500 companies since 1999 had no power to diversify their workforces. When a Black man stepped into the most powerful office in the world in 2009, his policies were often excused by apologists who said he didn’t have executive power. As if none of his executive orders were carried out, neither of his Black attorneys general had any power to roll back mass incarceration, or his Black national security adviser had no power. The truth is: Black people can be racist because Black people do have power, even if limited. (Page 87)

Ironically, the only way that White power can gain full control is by convincing us that White people already have all the power. If we accept the idea that we have no power, we are falling under the sort of mind control that will, in fact, rob us of any power to resist. (Page 87)

The saying “Black people can’t be racist” reproduces the false duality of racist and not-racist promoted by White racists to deny their racism. It merges Black people with White Trump voters who are angry about being called racist but who want to express racist views and support their racist policies while being identified as not-racist, no matter what they say or do. By this theory, Black people can hate them niggers, value Light people over Dark people, support anti-Latinx immigration policies, defend the anti-Native team mascots, back bans against Middle Eastern Muslims, and still escape charges of racism. By this theory, Latinx, Asians, and Natives can fear unknown Black bodies, support mass-incarcerating policies, and still escape charges of racism. By this theory, I can look upon White people as devils and aliens and still escape charges of racism. (Page 88)

CLASS (Page 93)

Poor people are a class, Black people a race. Black poor people are a race-class. When we say poor people are lazy, we are expressing an elitist idea. When we say Black people are lazy, we are expressing a racist idea. When we say Black poor people are lazier than poor Whites, White elites, and Black elites, we are speaking at the intersection of elitist and racist ideas—an ideological intersection that forms class racism. (Page 94)

Class racism is as ripe among White Americans—who castigate poor Whites as “White trash”—as it is in Black America, where racist Blacks degrade poor Blacks as “them niggers” who live in the ghetto. (Page 94)

DARK GHETTO WAS a groundbreaking study of the Black poor during President Johnson’s war on poverty in the 1960s, when scholarship on poverty was ascendant, like the work of anthropologist Oscar Lewis. Lewis argued that the children of impoverished people, namely poor people of color, were raised on behaviors that prevented their escape from poverty, perpetuating generations of poverty. He introduced the term “culture of poverty” in a 1959 ethnography of Mexican families. Unlike other economists, who explored the role of policy in the “cycle of poverty”—predatory exploitation moving in lockstep with meager income and opportunities, which kept even the hardest-working people in poverty and made poverty expensive—Lewis reproduced the elitist idea that poor behaviors keep poor people poor. “People with a culture of poverty,” Lewis wrote, “are a marginal people who know only their own troubles, their own local conditions, their own neighborhood, their own way of life.” (Page 94)

Something was making poor people poor, according to this idea. And it was welfare. Welfare “transforms the individual from a dignified, industrious, self-reliant spiritual being into a dependent animal creature without his knowing it,” U.S. senator Barry Goldwater wrote in The Conscience of the Conservative in 1960. Goldwater and his ideological descendants said little to nothing about rich White people who depended on the welfare of inheritances, tax cuts, government contracts, hookups, and bailouts. They said little to nothing about the White middle class depending on the welfare of the New Deal, the GI Bill, subsidized suburbs, and exclusive White networks. Welfare for middle- and upper-income people remained out of the discourse on “handouts,” as welfare for the Black poor became the true oppressor in the conservative version of the oppression-inferiority thesis. “The evidence of this failure is all around us,” wrote Heritage Foundation president Kay Coles James in 2018. “Being black and the daughter of a former welfare recipient, I know firsthand the unintended harm welfare has caused.” (Page 95)

This stereotype of the hopeless, defeated, unmotivated poor Black is without evidence. Recent research shows, in fact, that poor Blacks are more optimistic about their prospects than poor Whites are. (Page 95)

But it is impossible to know racism without understanding its intersection with capitalism. As Martin Luther King said in his critique of capitalism in 1967, “It means ultimately coming to see that the problem of racism, the problem of economic exploitation, and the problem of war are all tied together. These are the triple evils that are interrelated.” (Page 96)

Capitalism emerged during what world-systems theorists term the “long sixteenth century,” a cradling period that begins around 1450 with Portugal (and Spain) sailing into the unknown Atlantic. Prince Henry’s Portugal birthed conjoined twins—capitalism and racism—when it initiated the transatlantic slave trade of African people. These newborns looked up with tender eyes to their ancient siblings of sexism, imperialism, ethnocentrism, and homophobia. The conjoined twins developed different personalities through the new class and racial formations of the modern world. As the principal customers of Portuguese slave traders, first in their home country and then in their American colonies, Spain adopted and raised the toddlers among the genocides of Native Americans that laid the foundational seminaries and cemeteries on which Western Europe’s Atlantic empire grew in the sixteenth century. Holland and France and England overtook each other as hegemons of the slave trade, raising the conjoined twins into their vigorous adolescence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The conjoined twins entered adulthood through Native and Black and Asian and White slavery and forced labor in the Americas, which powered industrial revolutions from Boston to London that financed stillgreater empires in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The hot and cold wars in the twentieth century over resources and markets, rights and powers, weakened the conjoined twins—but eventually they would grow stronger under the guidance of the United States, the European Union, China, and the satellite nations beholden to them, colonies in everything but name. The conjoined twins are again struggling to stay alive and thrive as their own offspring—inequality, war, and climate change—threaten to kill them, and all of us, off. (Page 96)

poverty rate (Page 96)

unemployment (Page 96)

wage gap (Page 96)

median net worth (Page 96)

median wealth (Page 96)

Africa’s unprecedented capitalist growth over the past two decades has enriched foreign investors and a handful of Africans, while the number of people living in extreme poverty is growing in Sub-Saharan Africa. (Page 97)

Attributing these inequities solely to capitalism is as faulty as attributing them solely to racism. Believing these inequities will be eliminated through eliminating capitalism is as faulty as believing these inequities will be eliminated through eliminating racism. Rolling back racism in a capitalist nation can eliminate the inequities between the Black and White poor, middleincome Latinx and Asians, rich Whites and Natives. Antiracist policies in the 1960s and 1970s narrowed these inequities on some measures. But antiracist policies alone cannot eliminate the inequities between rich and poor Asians or between rich Whites and “White trash”—the inequities between race-classes. As racial disparities within the classes narrowed in recent decades, the economic inequities within the races have broadened, as have the class-racist ideas justifying those inequities. (Page 97)

Antiracist policies cannot eliminate class racism without anticapitalist policies. Anticapitalism cannot eliminate class racism without antiracism. Case in point is the persistent racism AfroCubans faced in socialist Cuba after revolutionaries eliminated capitalism there in 1959, as chronicled by historian Devyn Spence Benson. Revolutionaries demanded Afro-Cubans assimilate into an imagined post-racial Cuba—“Not Blacks, but Citizens”—built on White Cuban social norms and racist ideas after a three-year campaign against racism abruptly ended in 1961. (Page 97)

Karl Marx once wrote, “the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, (Page 97)

signalized the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production.” Marx recognized the birth of the conjoined twins. (Page 98)

Du Bois conceived of an antiracist anticapitalism (Page 98)

I keep using the term “anticapitalist” as opposed to socialist or communist to include the people who publicly or privately question or loathe capitalism but do not identify as socialist or communist. I use “anticapitalist” because conservative defenders of capitalism regularly say their liberal and socialist opponents are against capitalism. They say efforts to provide a safety net for all people are “anticapitalist.” They say attempts to prevent monopolies are “anticapitalist.” They say efforts that strengthen weak unions and weaken exploitative owners are “anticapitalist.” They say plans to normalize worker ownership and regulations protecting consumers, workers, and environments from big business are “anticapitalist.” They say laws taxing the richest more than incomes are the middle class, redistributing pilfered wealth, and guaranteeing basic “anticapitalist.” They say wars to end poverty are “anticapitalist.” They say campaigns to remove the profit motive from essential life sectors like education, healthcare, utilities, mass media, and incarceration are “anticapitalist.” (Page 98)

In doing so, these conservative defenders are defining capitalism. They define capitalism as the freedom to exploit people into economic ruin; the freedom to assassinate unions; the freedom to prey on unprotected consumers, workers, and environments; the freedom to value quarterly profits over climate change; the freedom to undermine small businesses and cushion corporations; the freedom from competition; the freedom not to pay taxes; the freedom to heave the tax burden onto the middle and lower classes; the freedom to commodify everything and (Page 98)

everyone; the freedom to keep poor people poor and middle-income people struggling to stay middle income, and make rich people richer. 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. (Page 99)

Most of these poor adults live in non-White countries that were subjected to centuries of slave trading and colonizing and resource dispossessing, which created the modern wealth of the West. The wealth extraction continues today via foreign companies that own or control key natural resources in the global south, taken through force with the threat of “economic sanctions” or granted by “elected” politicians. Racial capitalism makes countries like the Democratic Republic of the Congo one of the richest countries in the world belowground and one of the poorest countries in the world aboveground. (Page 99)

To love capitalism is to end up loving racism. (Page 99)

Capitalism is essentially racist; racism is essentially capitalist. (Page 99)

racial capitalism will live into another epoch of theft and rapacious inequity, especially if activists naïvely fight the conjoined twins independently, as if they are not the same. (Page 100)

SPACE (Page 102)

WE CALLED OUR African American studies space a Black space—it was, after all, governed primarily by Black bodies, Black thoughts, Black cultures, and Black histories. Of course, the spaces at Temple University governed primarily by White bodies, White thoughts, White cultures, and White histories were not labeled White. They hid the Whiteness of their spaces behind the veil of color blindness. (Page 102)

Americans lost trillions during the Great Recession, which was largely triggered by financial crimes of staggering enormity. Estimated losses from white-collar crimes are believed to be between $300 and $600 billion per year, according to the FBI. By comparison, near the height of violent crime in 1995, the FBI reported the combined costs of burglary and robbery to be $4 billion. (Page 103)

Riley had pulled out the familiar weapon safeguarding space racism and menacing Black spaces: unfairly comparing Black spaces to substantially richer White spaces. The endowment of the richest HBCU, Howard, was five times less than UT Austin’s endowment in 2016, never mind being thirty-six times less than the endowment of a Stanford or Yale. The racial wealth gap produces a giving gap. For public HBCUs, the giving gap extends to state-funding gaps, as racist policies steer more funds to HWCUs, like the current “performance based” state models. (Page 105)

Banks remain twice as likely to offer loans to White entrepreneurs than to Black entrepreneurs. Customers avoid Black businesses like they are the “ghetto,” like the “White man’s ice is colder,” as antiracists have joked for years. I knew this then. But my dueling consciousness still led me to think like one young Black writer wrote in Blavity in 2017: “On an intellectual level, I know that Black people have been denied equal access to capital, training, and physical space. But does that inequitable treatment excuse bad service?” Does not good service, like every other commodity, typically cost more money? How can we acknowledge the clouds of racism over Black spaces and be shocked when it rains on our heads? (Page 106)

e integrationist strategy—the placing of White and non-White bodies in the same spaces— is thought to cultivate away the barbarism of people of color and the racism of White people. The integrationist strategy expects Black bodies to heal in proximity to Whites who haven’t yet stopped fighting them. After enduring slavery’s violence, Frazier and his brethren had enough. They desired to separate, not from Whites but from White racism. Separation is not always segregation. The antiracist desire to separate from racists is different from the segregationist desire to separate from “inferior” Blacks. (Page 107)

Whenever Black people voluntarily gather among themselves, integrationists do not see spaces of Black solidarity created to separate Black people from racism. They see spaces of White hate. They do not see spaces of cultural solidarity, of solidarity against racism. They see spaces of segregation against White people. Integrationists do not see these spaces as the movement of Black people toward Black people. Integrationists think about them as a movement away from White people. They then equate that movement away from White people with the White segregationist movement away from Black people. Integrationists equate spaces for the survival of Black bodies with spaces for the survival of White supremacy. (Page 107)

Separate but equal covered up the segregationist policies that diverted resources toward exclusively White spaces. (Page 107)

What really made the schools unequal were the dramatically unequal resources provided to them, not the mere fact of racial separation. The Supreme Court justices deciding both Plessy and Brown avowed the segregationist lie that the “Negro and white schools involved have been equalized, or are being equalized,” to quote Justice Warren. By 1973, when the resource inequities between the public schools had become too obvious to deny, the Supreme Court ruled, in San Antonio Independent School District v. Rodriguez, that property-tax allocations yielding inequities in public schools do not violate the equal-protection clause of the U.S. Constitution. (Page 108)

lower expectations for non-White students. (Page 108)

Barack Obama wrote. “Only white culture could be neutral and objective. Only white culture could be nonracial.” Integration (into Whiteness) became racial progress. (Page 109)

The percentage of Southern Black students attending integrated White schools jumped from zero in 1954 to 23 percent in 1969 to 44 percent in 1989 before falling back to 23 percent in 2011. The “academic-achievement gap” followed a similar roller coaster, closing with the integration of White schools, before opening back up, proving that “African-American students who attended integrated schools fared better academically than those left behind in segregated schools,” Kirp argued. Standardized tests “proved” White students and White spaces were smarter. And yet, what if the scoring gap closed because, as Black students integrated White schools, more students received the same education and test prep? (Page 109)

Through lynching Black cultures, integrationists are, in the end, more harmful to Black bodies than segregationists are. (Page 109)

Americans have seen the logical conclusion of segregationist strategy, from slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration and border walls. The logical conclusion of antiracist strategy is (Page 109)

open and equal access to all public accommodations, open access to all integrated White spaces, integrated Middle Eastern spaces, integrated Black spaces, integrated Latinx spaces, integrated Native spaces, and integrated Asian spaces that are as equally resourced as they are culturally different. All these spaces adjoin civic spaces of political and economic and cultural power, from a House of Representatives to a school board to a newspaper editorial board where no race predominates, where shared antiracist power predominates. This is diversity, something integrationists value only in name. (Page 110)

Antiracist strategy fuses desegregation with a form of integration and racial solidarity. Desegregation: eliminating all barriers to all racialized spaces. To be antiracist is to support the voluntary integration of bodies attracted by cultural difference, a shared humanity. Integration: resources rather than bodies. To be an antiracist is to champion resource equity by challenging the racist policies that produce resource inequity. Racial solidarity: openly identifying, supporting, and protecting integrated racial spaces. To be antiracist is to equate and nurture difference among racial groups (Page 110)

GENDER (Page 111)

To be antiracist is to reject not only the hierarchy of races but of race-genders. To be feminist is to reject not only the hierarchy of genders but of race-genders. To truly be antiracist is to be feminist. To truly be feminist is to be antiracist. To be antiracist (and feminist) is to level the different race-genders, is to root the inequities between the equal race-genders in the policies of gender racism. (Page 115)

The intersection of racism and sexism, in some cases, oppresses White women. For example, sexist notions of “real women” as weak and racist notions of White women as the idealized woman intersect to produce the genderracist idea that the pinnacle of womanhood is the weak White woman. This is the gender racism that caused millions of men and women to hate the strong White woman running for president in 2016, Hillary Clinton. Or to give another example, the opposite of the gender racism of the unvirtuous hypersexual Black woman is the virtuous asexual White woman, a racial construct that has constrained and controlled the White woman’s sexuality (as it nakedly tainted the Black woman’s sexuality as un-rape-able). (Page 116)

A theory for Black women is a theory for humanity. No wonder Black feminists have been saying from the beginning that when humanity becomes serious about the freedom of Black women, humanity becomes serious about the freedom of humanity. (Page 117)

SEXUALITY (Page 118)

Homophobia cannot be separated from racism. (Page 118)

FAILURE (Page 123)

Incorrect conceptions of race as a social construct (as opposed to a power construct), of racial history as a singular march of racial progress (as opposed to a duel of antiracist and racist progress), of the race problem as rooted in ignorance and hate (as opposed to powerful selfinterest)—all come together to produce solutions bound to fail. Terms and sayings like “I’m not racist” and “race neutral” and “post-racial” and “color-blind” and “only one race, the human race” and “only racists speak about race” and “Black people can’t be racist” and “White people are evil” are bound to fail in identifying and eliminating racist power and policy. (Page 123)

To fight for mental and moral changes after policy is changed means fighting alongside growing benefits and the dissipation of fears, making it possible for antiracist power to succeed. To fight for mental and moral change as a prerequisite for policy change is to fight against growing fears and apathy, making it almost impossible for antiracist power to succeed (Page 127)

The original problem of racism has not been solved by suasion. Knowledge is only power if knowledge is put to the struggle for power. Changing minds is not a movement. Critiquing racism is not activism. Changing minds is not activism. An activist produces power and policy change, not mental change. If a person has no record of power or policy change, then that person is not an activist. (Page 127)

What if antiracists constantly self-critiqued our own ideas? What if we blamed our ideologies and methods, studied our ideologies and methods, refined our ideologies and methods again and again until they worked? When will we finally stop the insanity of doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result? Self-critique allows change. Changing shows flexibility. Antiracist power must be flexible to match the flexibility of racist power, propelled only by the craving for power to shape policy in their inequitable interests. Racist power believes in by any means necessary. We, their challengers, typically do not, not even some of those inspired by Malcolm X. We care the most about the moral and ideological and financial purity of our ideologies and strategies and fundraising and leaders and organizations. We care less about bringing equitable results for people in dire straits, as we say we are purifying ourselves for the people in dire straits, as our purifying keeps the people in dire straits. As we critique the privilege and inaction of racist power, we show our privilege and inaction by critiquing every effective strategy, ultimately justifying our inaction on the comfortable seat of privilege. Anything but flexible, we are too often bound by ideologies that are bound by failed strategies of racial change. (Page 130)

We use the terms “demonstration” and “protest” interchangeably, at our own peril, like we interchangeably use the terms “mobilizing” and “organizing.” A protest is organizing people for a prolonged campaign that forces racist power to change a policy. A demonstration is mobilizing people momentarily to publicize a problem. Speakers and placards and posts at marches, rallies, petitions, and viral hashtags demonstrate the problem. Demonstrations are, not surprisingly, a favorite of suasionists. Demonstrations annoy power in the way children crying about something they will never get annoy parents. Unless power cannot economically or politically or professionally afford bad press—as power could not during the Cold War, as power cannot during election season, as power cannot close to bankruptcy—power typically ignores demonstrations. (Page 131)

The most effective protests create an environment whereby changing the racist policy becomes in power’s self-interest, like desegregating businesses because the sit-ins are driving away customers, like increasing wages to restart production, like giving teachers raises to resume schooling, like passing a law to attract a well-organized force of donors or voters. But it is difficult to create that environment, since racist power makes laws that illegalize most protest threats. Organizing and protesting are much harder and more impactful than mobilizing and demonstrating. Seizing power is much harder than protesting power and demonstrating its excesses. (Page 131)

SUCCESS (Page 132)

The term “institutionally racist policies” is more concrete than “institutional racism.” The term “racist policies” is more concrete than “institutionally racist policies,” since “institutional” and “policies” are redundant: Policies are institutional. But I still occasionally use the terms “institutional racism” and “systemic racism” and “structural racism” and “overt” and “covert.” They are like my first language of racism. But when we realize old words do not exactly and clearly convey what we are trying to describe, we should turn to new words. I struggle to concretely explain what “institutional racism” means to the Middle Eastern small businessman, the Black service worker, the White teacher, the Latinx nurse, the Asian factory worker, and the Native store clerk who do not take the courses on racism, do not read the books on racism, do not go to the lectures on racism, do not watch the specials on racism, do not listen to the podcasts on racism, do not attend the rallies against racism. (Page 135)

Policymakers and policies make societies and institutions, not the other way around. The United States is a racist nation because its policymakers and policies have been racist from the beginning. The conviction that racist policymakers can be overtaken, and racist policies can be changed, and the racist minds of their victims can be changed, is disputed only by those invested in preserving racist policymakers, policies, and habits of thinking. (Page 135)

SURVIVAL (Page 139)

The history of racist ideas is the history of powerful policymakers erecting racist policies out of self-interest, then producing racist ideas to defend and rationalize the inequitable effects of their policies, while everyday people consume those racist ideas, which in turn sparks ignorance and hate. Treating ignorance and hate and expecting racism to shrink suddenly seemed like treating a cancer patient’s symptoms and expecting the tumors to shrink. The body politic might feel better momentarily from the treatment—from trying to eradicate hate and ignorance—but as long as the underlying cause remains, the tumors grow, the symptoms return, and inequities spread like cancer cells, threatening the life of the body politic. Educational and moral suasion is not only a failed strategy. It is a suicidal strategy. (Page 140)

racist policies leading to racist ideas, not the other way around, as we have commonly thought (Page 140)

Race and racism are power constructs of the modern world. For roughly two hundred thousand years, before race and racism were constructed in the fifteenth century, humans saw color but did not group the colors into continental races, did not commonly attach negative and positive characteristics to those colors and rank the races to justify racial inequity, to reinforce racist power and policy. Racism is not even six hundred years old. It’s a cancer that we’ve caught early. But racism is one of the fastest-spreading and most fatal cancers humanity has ever known. It is hard to find a place where its cancer cells are not dividing and multiplying. There is nothing I see in our world today, in our history, giving me hope that one day antiracists will win the fight, that one day the flag of antiracism will fly over a world of equity. 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. (Page 145)