How to Be an Antiracist: Chapter 12: Class Summary & Analysis

Kendi defines a class racist as someone who racializes certain socioeconomic groups or supports racial capitalist policies. Meanwhile, an antiracist anti-capitalist opposes racial capitalism.

When Kendi started graduate school, he moved to a lively and diverse but dangerous “ghetto” neighborhood in Philadelphia. Black migrants from the South moved there during the 20th century, before the white population left for government-subsidized suburbs where Black people legally couldn’t live. Like all American ghettoes, it was created by government policy. But now, the word “ghetto” is associated with poor Black people and antisocial behavior.

“Black poor” is what Kendi calls a race-class, defined by both racialization (Black) and economic class (poor). Class racism combines elitist ideas about poor people with racist ideas about certain groups, and these ideas then support elitist and racist policies. Antiracists respond to class racist concepts like “white trash” and “ghetto Blacks” by insisting that these groups are equal to all others. Their troubles stem from policy, not personal or cultural inferiority, as elite classes might suggest.

In the 1950s, anthropologist Oscar Lewis blamed marginalization on a “culture of poverty,” an idea that’s still popular today. Other scholars, like Kenneth Clark, saw that oppressive policies actually created intergenerational poverty. Some policymakers interpreted this argument as meaning that welfare was oppressive and needed to be withdrawn. Like many elite Black people, Clark indirectly supported this by viewing poor Black people’s culture as degraded and inferior due to oppression. Barack Obama frequently echoes this idea. Ultimately, like racist white people, these Black elites attack poor Black people in order to feel a sense of superiority.

In Philadelphia, Kendi realized that the ghetto was formed through racial capitalism, the alliance between racism and capitalism. Martin Luther King Jr. pointed this out in 1967, but few people listened. Capitalism and racism were born together, through the transatlantic slave trade and European colonization. These policies were designed to turn a profit and were justified through racism. They ultimately led to war and genocide.

Now, stark racial inequities in poverty, unemployment, wages, and wealth show that racial capitalism continues as before. And these inequities are worsening: globally, the income gap between rich (mostly white) nations and poor (mostly non-white) nations has tripled in the last 50 years. In the United States, white people have much greater social mobility and wealth, even when controlling for income. This is, in part, because poor white people tend to live in otherwise middle-class neighborhoods, while poor Black people tend to live in segregated neighborhoods where everyone is poor and Black.

Kendi concludes that antiracists cannot address racial inequities without also being anti-capitalists, and anti-capitalists cannot address class inequities without being antiracists. For instance, many socialist groups have historically focused on white workers but wrongly excluded people of color, whose concerns they reduced to “identity politics.” But Karl Marx clearly saw that capitalism and racism were like “conjoined twins,” and W.E.B. Du Bois began formulating the idea of racial capitalism while reading Marx. The generation of antiracist anti-capitalist activists who immediately followed Du Bois faced persecution in the 1950s but rose up in the 1960s. This mindset became prominent again in the 2010s, after the Great Recession.

In today’s political discourse, conservatives frequently reject certain policies as “anticapitalist.” These include anti-poverty programs, labor union protections, and higher taxes on the rich. This suggests that they define capitalism as the freedom to exploit others, without restraint, for profit. In contrast, many liberals define capitalism as a belief in the power of well-regulated markets. Kendi agrees with these liberals’ goals, but their definition of capitalism is historically inaccurate. Markets existed long before capitalism and have never been fair under it. Capitalism only began when Europeans started using power constructs like race to divide and conquer people around the globe. Western countries  only built wealth because of slavery, colonialism, and the mass extraction of natural resources from colonized countries.

While Kendi’s mom and dad were nervous about him moving to the poor Black neighborhood, Kendi considered urban poverty the most authentic form of Blackness. So his consciousness was dueling between “Black is Beautiful” and “Black is Misery.” He was really acting in a racist way: he wanted the neighborhood to make him more Black. Genuine antiracism, however, requires seeing poor and elite Black culture as equals. Like many Black scholars, Kendi wrongly viewed elite Black culture as corrupt, inauthentic, and socially irresponsible. But it wasn’t—for instance, the Black elite led the civil rights movement.