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 defines biological racists as those whose words or actions express the notion that there are meaningful biological differences among racial groups, which justify ranking them in a hierarchy of value. Biological antiracists, on the other hand, reject the idea that racial differences are biological or genetic.
Biological racism is the first and most historically powerful of the several kinds of racist ideas that Kendi describes in the following chapters. Here, he defines biological racism in terms of what ideas people express, not in terms of what they directly say. This is because people often implicitly believe in biologically racist ideas that they would never publicly defined. Sometimes, they might not even realize that their thinking is biologically racist.
Themes
Kendi doesn’t remember his racist, white third-grade teacher’s name. He remembers her as just another white person, but he now realizes that the problem wasn’t her whiteness—it was her racism. Kendi’s teacher punished and ignored her Black students while showering her white students with attention and praise. Such racism from teachers is common—Kendi cites this as the reason why Black kids are suspended four times as often as white kids in the United States. Kendi remembers that one of his classmates, a shy Black girl, raised her hand for the first time—the teacher saw and ignored her.
Again, Kendi’s childhood memories show how racism is woven into everyday life in the United States, to the point that discrimination from authority figures is just part of growing up for Black students. Notably, Kendi’s teacher didn’t seem to understand that she was favoring the white students—her racist preference was practically an unconscious reflex. She thus represents of the numerous Americans who express racist ideas and support racist policies without realizing what they’re doing. One of Kendi’s goals is to help his readers uncover and transform their own racist assumptions.
Themes
This is what scholars call a “microaggression”: the constant, everyday racist abuse that people of color suffer. Kendi prefers the term “racial abuse” because “microaggression” has become politically charged, and the prefix “micro” wrongly implies that constant abuse is no big deal.
Just like the term “structural racism” and calls for equality instead of equity, Kendi believes that the word “microaggression” is too complicated for its own good. He prefers to use direct and unambiguous terminology because he wants to make antiracism clear and accessible to people, so that it can be a widespread popular movement (not an obscure academic theory).
Themes
After his teacher ignored the shy Black girl, Kendi was furious and staged a protest: after church, he refused to return to class. He knows that his teacher would have approached him empathetically if he were white, but instead she viewed his actions “as misbehavior, not distress.” She grabbed him and called the principal. He notes that he saw Black and white kids as like “a different species,” which is the hallmark of biological racism. Biological racists believe that there are meaningful biological differences among races and that there is a “hierarchy of value” based on these differences. Many people casually believe in the first half of the equation without realizing that it implies the second. For instance, they might believe that Black people are naturally better athletes and musical improvisers.
When Kendi tries to protest, racist stereotypes cut off his teacher’s ability to emphasize with him. According to these stereotypes, an unruly white child is suffering problems and needs consolation, while an unruly Black childhood is misbehaving and needs punishment. With these assumptions, racist adults are willing to blame circumstances for white people’s problems while blaming Black people for their own problems. Meanwhile, Kendi admits that he, too, thought of races as “species” at this age, which shows how easy it is to fall into biologically racist thinking.
Themes
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Although the Bible teaches that all humans share ancestry, the Bible still became the basis for biological racism. Many Europeans interpreted the story of Canaan—who was cursed and doomed to slavery—to characterize dark skin as evidence of the Curse and thus justify their enslavement of Black people. Others proclaimed that American Indians were not descended from Adam (the biblical first man and father of humankind) at all.
This complicated and improbable interpretation of the Bible shows how flexible racist thinking can be: once a person committed to the idea of a racial hierarchy, they can easily find clues that confirm their suspicions. The idea that Black people are cursed to slavery isn’t logical, but it served to justify racist Europeans’ opinions that non-white people were naturally inferior.
Themes
After 19th-century biologist Charles Darwin showed that humans do share a common ancestor, race became a question of science rather than religion. Still, Europeans argued that they were the most evolved branch of humanity. Scientists promoted eugenics, or selective breeding to promote white genes and eliminate non-white genes. This was the foundation of the Nazis’ racial policy, and it was only widely rejected after World War II. In other words, biological racism spent 400 years in the mainstream, which explains its profound influence on popular culture. Even after the Human Genome Project showed that all humans’ genes are 99.9 percent identical, people continue to argue that race affects genes and behavior. In reality, “racial ancestry” does not exist. And ethnic ancestry, while real, doesn’t support theories of race—for instance, West African groups are genetically closer to Western European groups than East African groups.
Race has no scientific basis, yet the centuries-long prevalence of eugenics shows how powerfully the idea of race captivates people and twists their thinking. It even makes expert scientists violate their disciplines’ most basic assumptions and values. Although many scientists spent their lives trying to map out exact racial divisions, none of them were successful, because they were trying to find biological proof for a purely social idea. Because there is no such thing as “racial ancestry,” it is impossible to explain observed differences among racial groups through genetics. This is why it would be wrong, for instance, to say that Black people are naturally better athletes: this argument implies that there is some unique genetic category of Black people, when in reality, there isn’t. If racial groups were based on genetic similarity, West Africans and Western Europeans would be part of the same racial group. But in reality, the only genes that all Black people share are the ones that all human beings share.
Themes
While those who believe in genetic racial differences are segregationists, people who use biology to justify ignoring race are assimilationists. Even though race is an illusion, the world is still organized around it, and it’s impossible to address racial inequities without talking about race. Kendi believes that getting rid of racial categories is the last step in achieving racial equity, not the first.
Here, Kendi is talking about the assimilationist argument that, because everyone is part of the same human race, it makes no sense to talk about racial differences or inequities. Kendi doesn’t want people to use biology to enforce racial divisions, but he also doesn’t want people to use biology to say that race doesn’t or cannot exist. Race is social, not biological, so biology should totally stay out of conversations about race. In Kendi’s view, it’s necessary to recognize the social reality of race and racism, but genetics and biology are irrelevant.
Themes
In third grade, after his protest in the church, Kendi was surprised when the principal addressed him with genuine empathy. Kendi’s mother later told him to be careful when protesting. But it worked: the principal persuaded Kendi’s teacher to stop punishing non-white students so harshly. Still, Kendi soon switched schools, where he was exposed to an entirely new racial dynamic.
Kendi’s protest worked—as a young child, he had far more power to stop racism than he realized. His principal’s response to the situation shows how antiracist educators can radically improve educational experiences of students for color. And his teacher’s response shows that even committed, habitual racists can change their ways and move toward antiracism with the right support.
Themes
