Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in How to Be an Antiracist, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Racism vs. Antiracism
Activism and Social Transformation
Intersectionality
The History of Racist Ideas and Policies
Summary
Analysis
The powerless defense is the racist idea that Black people can’t be racist because they don’t hold any power in society.
The powerless defense works hand-in-hand with the idea that there is no such thing as anti-white racism: both depend on the assumption that racism is something that only white people do to only people of color, when the reality is far more complex.
Themes
As a young adult, Kendi visited the Tallahassee Democrat newspaper office to defend his incendiary article. The editor emphasized that he thought he was better than other Black people—or, as he put it, “them niggers.” Kendi recalls a famous comedy set in which Chris Rock said, “I love Black people, but I hate niggers.” He explains that Black people often treat other Black people’s bad behavior as a sign that they belong to an inferior sub-group of Black people. This is exactly like what behavioral racists do when they view an individual Black person’s bad behavior as reflective of their Blackness. In fact, most Black Americans blamed causes besides racism for racial inequity in 2003 and 2013 (but no longer in 2017). Lots of Black people—including the newspaper editor—are themselves anti-Black racists.
The newspaper editor’s words, as well as Chris Rock’s comedy set, recall Kendi’s speech in his high school oratorial contest: they all repeat offensive slurs and racist stereotypes about Black people while simultaneously claiming to be the exception. In this way, they both deny and advance behavioral racism. Just like colorism and ethnic racism, this is an example of how racism occurs between different subgroups of Black people. This is enough to show that the powerless defense is too simplistic: it’s clearly possible for Black people to support racist policies and express racist ideas targeted at other Black people.
Themes
Kendi used to believe in the “powerless defense,” the idea that only white people can be racist because only white people have power. This is actually a racist idea that lets powerful people of color avoid taking antiracist action and diminishes the power that lack people do have (while exaggerating white people’s power). In reality, everyone has some power, and some Black people have a lot of it—there are Black congresspeople, judges, police officers, university professors, billionaires, CEOs, and presidents. White people have most of the power, but not all of it.
The powerless defense is based on the assumption that race is the only thing that determines someone’s power. In reality, it’s one among many factors, and many powerful people of color actually use their influence to perpetuate racism rather than undermine it. As a result, the powerless defense ends up defending and perpetuating racism, while preventing people of color from seeing their power to drive social change.
Themes
The powerless defense makes it impossible to call out Black racists, like Ken Blackwell, the Ohio official who helped suppress Black votes for the Bush and Trump campaigns. The powerless defense also claims that Black people are “not racist,” which is impossible—according to Kendi’s definition of racism, they’re either racist or antiracist.
Kendi’s definitions of racism and antiracism can help people overcome the powerless defense, because they depend on the effects of an individual’s words and actions—not on that individual’s race.
Themes
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Black anti-Black racism has a long history, starting with the enslaved writer Leo Africanus, who wrote about the supposed savagery and stupidity of African people. The earliest known slave memoir celebrated slavery and Christianity, and Denmark Vesey’s famous 1822 slave revolt was crushed because a slave decided to defend white racism and report on Vesey’s plans. Light-skinned writers like William Hannibal Thomas also advanced racist ideas about darker-skinned Black people. In the 20th and 21st centuries, many of the police officers responsible for the worst crimes against Black people have themselves been Black. Similarly, Black politicians concerned about “Black on Black crime” specifically sought to imprison Black criminals to suggest that they were addressing the problem. And when Ronald Reagan directed funds away from social programs that benefited Black Americans, he hired Black officials to oversee and publicly defend the process.
Although it may seem strange that enslaved Black people would sell each other out in the 18th and 19th centuries, they did so for the same reasons as Europeans who invented the first racist ideas: for self-interest. Racist power structures reward them for turning against other Black people, and through their collaboration, racist policies get an air of legitimacy: because certain Black officials are supporting a policy or idea, many people assume that the Black community as a whole defends them. This assumption is behaviorally racist, but so is much of the population, so it tends to dispel criticism of racist power. Powerful Black people’s contributions to racism are another good reason to separate the opposition between racism and antiracism from the distinction between white people and people of color.
Themes
Kendi returns to his conversation with the newspaper editor, who shuts down his column. As the antiracist voice in Kendi’s dueling consciousness starts winning out over the assimilationist one, he adds a major in African American studies. He learns that history was not a conflict between white and Black people but “between racists and antiracists.”
Through missteps and disagreements, Kendi gradually refines his ideas about race and learns to shed his assimilationist assumptions. Specifically, by learning to see history as a conflict “between racists and antiracists”—or between racist progress and antiracist progress—he realizes that people’s side in the battle is not fixed. In other words, white people can fight for antiracism and Black people for racism—and, most importantly, everyone is capable of transforming or switching sides.
Themes
