How to Be an Antiracist: Chapter 16: Failure Summary & Analysis

Kendi defines an activist as someone with who advocates for changes in power structures or policy. He flashes back to his experience running a Black Student Union meeting at Temple University in 2007.

Kendi argues that understanding racism requires explaining why antiracism has failed in the past. He’s tried to do this throughout the book, like by pointing out that race is a power construct, not a social construct, and by rejecting the idea that it’s possible to be “not racist.” Ultimately, policy solutions to racism have to be intersectional, behaviorally and culturally antiracist, and anti-capitalist to be successful. Most solutions aren’t, because they’re based on “popular racial ideologies” that keep replicating the same mistakes and sometimes even worsen the problem. For instance, Black people have spent centuries trying to improve their behavior in order to convince white people to give up power. This “uplift” strategy will never work.

Kendi remembers a dinner date with his girlfriend Sadiqa, an easygoing, brilliant, antiracist doctor. On their date, they saw a white man grotesquely fondle a statue of the Buddha. Horrified, Sadiqa commented, “at least he’s not Black.” She meant that if a Black person did that, their actions would reinforce white people’s prejudice against Black people. Kendi now sees that this uplift-style thinking was misguided: Black people aren’t responsible for making white people “less racist.” Rather, racist people should stop blaming individual behavior on a whole group. But for Black people, unlearning “uplift-suasion ideology” can take years.

Kendi points out that many people promote uplift-suasion ideology because of personal biases. For example, the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison promoted it because he spent his life in the church and in the publishing industry, which tended to believe that people and society can change through education and self-reflection. But this has never worked: most people do not abandon racist ideas when they are presented with logic and reason. And these people’s racist ideas aren’t the cause of racial inequity: racist power is. In other words, policymakers and powerful people implement racist policies and spread racist ideas because it benefits them, so it’s impossible to stop these policies and ideas by appealing to their moral conscience. For example, Lincoln only freed the slaves because it was necessary to unite the country and end the Civil War.

W.E.B. Du Bois spent decades arguing that equality required educating white people, until he eventually realized that the facts did not persuade anyone. But white antiracist leaders continued to believe the same thing for decades, and even today, many people wrongly think that the civil rights movement succeeded because it educated white people. But this isn’t not true: racist people in positions of power agreed to pass civil rights laws because they worried that racist discrimination would hurt the U.S.’s standing on the world stage. Although this has largely been forgotten, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. fully recognized that racism is about power, not morality or knowledge. Policy always changes first, and then hearts and minds can change. For that reason, effective activism has to focus on policy change.

Kendi flashes back to the Black Student Union meeting he was leading. He was trying to help the Jena 6, a group of six Black men who were unfairly convicted of assault for beating up a white student, just days after that student hung nooses from a tree as a racist threat. Kendi wonders how much he was willing to sacrifice in order to save the Jena 6. He admits that, like most people, his so-called activism was about feeling better about himself, not creating change. When he proposed starting a national protest movement, the other students worried that they would get arrested, and Kendi lashed out at them. This protected his feeling of righteousness but lost their support.

Kendi thought he was being radical, but his strategy was the opposite: it helped people do nothing and reject change. Genuine antiracism isn’t about purity, it’s about courage—which means responding to fear with strength, when racist power relies on people responding to fear with cowardice. Kendi was being cowardly when he decided that all the other students misunderstood racism and needed to be educated. In reality, he was just blaming them for his own failure to persuade. Now, he understands that antiracists should critique and improve their strategies rather than blaming others for their failures. When they put purity before equity, activists justify inaction and cling to their own privilege. They should measure themselves by the policy changes they produce, not the ideas they believe in.

The Black Student Union held a demonstration—not a protest—for the Jena 6. A protest is a long-term campaign for policy change, while a demonstration is a temporary campaign to gain attention and publicity. But demonstrations usually fail, and the most they can do is “help people find the antiracist power within,” which means helping them understand their own racism, learn to see different races as equals, and take action against racist policies. They can also support protest movements by channeling resources, attention, and emotional support to them. But protests are the real agents of change. They give racist people in positions of power self-interested reasons to replace racist policies with antiracist ones. While difficult and dangerous, protest is the only kind of activism that truly creates change.