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
Kendi and Sadiqa eventually got married, went on a spectacular honeymoon, and moved into their new house. Then, Sadiqa learned that she had breast cancer. She and Kendi were devastated. Sadiqa spent a year in treatment but recovered. However, Kendi’s mom got diagnosed with a less severe form of breast cancer shortly after.
After presenting a vision of antiracist transformation in society as a whole in the last two chapters, Kendi now returns to the level of the individual. After finishing his book, readers will have to decide how to push for antiracism on this same level.
Themes
The whole time Sadiqa and Kendi’s mom were fighting cancer, Kendi was working on Stamped from the Beginning, which meant sifting through an endless pile of racist ideas. Although he became a professor because he thought that knowledge could solve racism, he realized that racist ideas are really about defending racist policies, the real drivers of inequity. Just like it’s impossible to treat cancer by focusing just on the outward symptoms, he realized, it’s impossible to solve racism by only responding to hate and ignorance. After publishing his book and going on a lecture tour, Kendi decided to start focusing his research on policy. He founded the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University, where he hoped to build research teams to understand and propose alternatives to racist policies.
Sadiqa and Kendi’s mother’s personal tragedies helped Kendi see that he should strive to influence people’s real lives with his research—and that policy impacts real life in a way that ideas simply do not. It’s important to fight racist ideas, because people cannot push for antiracist policies until they learn to identify and reject racist ideas. However, stopping at the level of ideas lets racism continue. True antiracist activism means emphasizing policy and pushing people who are stuck at the level of ideas.
Themes
Kendi started receiving racist threats, and his health started worsening, but he ignored both and kept working for the rest of 2017. But by early 2018, he was too sick to keep working, and he learned that he had late-stage colon cancer. When Sadiqa, Kendi’s mom, and Kendi’s dad fought cancer, Kendi always wondered why they had to, not him. Now, he had an 88 percent chance of dying within five years.
When Kendi also got cancer and learned that it was overwhelmingly likely to kill him, his research took on a new sense of urgency and significance. Although both were painful, seeing his loved ones suffer cancer was not like his own mortality.
Themes
Kendi sees racism as society’s equivalent of stage-four metastatic cancer. It multiplies bigotries and inequities, threatening democracy and human society as a whole. After centuries, many people still deny that it exists. After receiving his diagnosis, Kendi had trouble accepting that he was probably going to die. But antiracism helped him understand: just like he had serious cancer and would probably die, but could survive, society has a serious racism problem and will likely fail to solve it—but it could do so. Rather than giving up, Kendi put all the energy he could muster into fighting for survival. And America can do the same to replace its racism with antiracism.
After rejecting the idea that illness is a useful metaphor for racism in the previous chapter, Kendi now recognizes that his fight against cancer truly is a useful metaphor for society’s fight against racism. In fact, he came to this realization in the opposite direction: his antiracism helped him adapt to having cancer. The similarities between cancer and racism highlight the difficult odds that people face against each, but also people’s capacity to overcome those odds. Both cancer and racism spread and worsen over time, and people have to accept that these problems exist in order to fight them.
Themes
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Kendi wrote this book during a punishing chemotherapy regimen that left him barely able to get out of bed. But to heal, he had to accept and work through the pain. Ultimately, he was among the lucky 12 percent who survive. He thinks that society can survive racism too. If we could save countless lives by diverting public resources towards cancer research and prevention, then we can address racial inequities by dedicating public resources and time to fighting racist policy. Antiracist policy is like chemotherapy, and education and public discourse can help society stay healthy and prevent racism from relapsing.
Kendi’s unlikely survival supports the metaphorical connection between cancer and racism by suggesting that society truly can become antiracist. But he also points out that there are real empirical links between them: cancer research is a priority for American society because it affects everyone, and yet racism is largely ignored at the level of national policy. In part, this is because it’s much easier to identify cancer as a villain than racism—which comes from other people who are also citizens of the same nation. This explains why Kendi focuses on eradicating racism, not fighting racist people, who can change over time.
Themes
First, though, it’s necessary to believe that an antiracist society is possible. Racism is only a 600-year-old power construct, and while it’s vicious and fast-spreading, it’s beatable. Still, Kendi doesn’t have hope because he thinks that antiracism is likely to win—he has hope because it’s impossible to win without it. Freedom requires that people fight, even against all odds.
Kendi argues for hope, but not necessarily optimism: racism has usually prevailed in the past, but can still be defeated in the future. If antiracists are too optimistic, they risk getting discouraged when things do not go as they imagined. But if they give up hope, they will simply stop fighting, which will make an antiracist future impossible.
Themes
