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 ethnic racism and ethnic antiracism, which involve policies and ideas that create inequities among “racialized ethnic groups,” not just races.
In this chapter, Kendi talks about inequities among “racialized ethnic groups” (rather than just ethnicities). He uses this phrase because he wants to emphasize how race and ethnic identity intersect to produce different experiences within the same racial group.
Themes
Kendi remembers teasing other students in middle school, and then he remembers being confused after the verdict of the O.J. Simpson trial. Even if they thought O.J. was guilty, the adults in his community knew that the criminal justice system treats Black Americans unfairly, especially by failing to prosecute police officers who murder Black people. The police view Black people the same way, whether they grew up in the United States or immigrated there. But Kendi and his U.S.-born peers didn’t: they made cruel jokes about Black immigrant kids, like their Ghanaian classmate Kwame.
While the O.J. Simpson trial is about race, Kendi’s jokes about Kwame are about ethnicity. Both Kendi and Kwame are Black, but Kendi is African American, while Kwame is a Ghanaian immigrant. In general, ethnicity refers to a group’s shared cultural or national heritage. While race is an all-encompassing taxonomy that tries to fit everybody into a certain set of categories, ethnicity describes the way people themselves think about their cultural background. People can have more than one ethnic identity, and there is no fixed set of ethnic categories.
Themes
These ethnically racist jokes originated in slavery: enslavers divided Africa into various ethnic groups and invented complex pseudoscientific explanations for why certain groups were stronger, weaker, or better suited for different kinds of work. Meanwhile, Kendi and his friends blamed Africans like Kwame for selling “their own people” into slavery. Of course, this animosity is based on the modern idea that all Africans belong to the same race, whereas during the slave trade, Africans had no concept of race: they defined themselves by ethnic groups.
Just like all other racist ideas, ethnic racism begins as a way for powerful people to justify and sustain their power. Then, ethnically racist ideas take on a life of their own as they begin to circulate in society. There is a direct link between the jokes Kendi made in the early 1990s and the pseudoscientific classification used to justify slavery centuries ago. Kendi misunderstood the actual history of Africans’ participation in slavery because, like most Americans, he assumed that the concept of race is timeless and natural, rather than understanding that it wasn’t invented until the slave trade began.
Themes
For several decades, the majority of immigrants to the United States have been non-white. Kendi grew up surrounded by West Indian immigrants, but there was a gulf between them and the African American community. The groups clashed and held negative stereotypes about each other. Notably, his parents never grew up around Black immigrants, who only came to the United States because the government made a concerted effort to reverse its previous racist preference for Northern Europeans from the 1880s through 1965. At the time that Kendi was writing How to be an Antiracist, Donald Trump’s administration was trying to return to this older policy, based the racist idea that being American means being white.
The nuanced relationships between different immigrant and ethnic communities often get lost in national debates about race. But it goes the other way too: racism has always strongly influenced immigration policy in the United States and therefore shaped the nation’s ethnic composition. In other words, Kendi emphasizes that racist policies are not an exception in U.S. history, but rather the foundation of this history. Donald Trump’s attempts to reverse open immigration are an example of what Kendi calls “racist progress”—the creation of new racist policies and ideas for new political contexts. In order to stop this, antiracists also need to develop innovative new strategies for identifying and responding to racist progress.
Themes
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In the United States today, African and West Indian immigrants are viewed as Black. This is a result of complex and specific patterns of racialization throughout American history, which have always created ethnic hierarchies within racial hierarchies (like the hierarchy of Anglo-Saxon people above Irish and Jewish people, although all are white). The constant question “Where are you from?” often shows how pervasive specifically ethnic racism can be. Kendi frequently gets this question from people who assume that, as a respected professor, he must be an immigrant and not African American.
Racialization is the process by which individuals (or entire ethnic groups) get assigned to a specific racial category. The fact that these categories shift over time is another piece of evidence that race is a social category, not a biological one. Specifically, the ethnic hierarchy within each racial hierarchy shifts depending on power structures—which shows that it's just another example of a racist idea.
Themes
Kendi frequently sees ethnic racism among his students. After one Ghanaian American student delivered a monologue full of degrading stereotypes about African American people, Kendi asked him what stereotypes British people held about Ghanaian people. The student realized that his beliefs about African American people followed the same pattern. He absorbed these ideas from the West African people surrounding him, who in turn absorbed them from white Americans. Remembering how he harassed Kwame in eighth grade, Kendi concludes that ethnic racism is always based on a double standard: people dish it out and suffer it at the same time, without seeing that others’ false ideas about them are the same as their own false ideas about other groups.
Kendi makes it clear that even committed antiracist students fall back into racist patterns of thinking about ethnicity. This suggests that, while they might understand specific racist ideas, they do not see the deeper pattern that makes these ideas racist: they establish a hierarchy of human value. This leads people to both suffer and perpetuate ethnic racism, simply because they assume that ethnicities can be ranked hierarchically, even if they know that races cannot.
Themes
Many ethnically racist ideas are widely popular. For instance, Black immigrants have higher average incomes than African Americans, which is often viewed as evidence that racism does not really exist. (Other disparities disprove this claim: despite being the most educated immigrant group, Black people suffer the highest unemployment among immigrants.) Black immigrants’ success is not about ethnic superiority. Rather, it is because of immigrant self-selection: migrants tend to care more about economic advancement and/or have more resources to draw upon, compared to non-migrants. All over the world, immigrants are “more resilient and resourceful” than native-born residents because of self-selection. Ultimately, ethnic racism—like when Kendi yelled “Ref-u-gee!” at Kwame in eighth grade—only divides native-born and immigrant communities, which harms both sides.
With his of counterexample comparing Black and non-Black immigrants, Kendi points out that comparing Black immigrants to African American people says nothing about Black people’s equity with other groups in the United States. Instead, it just proves that there are variations in achievement between different ethnicities within the umbrella of the Black race. The principle of immigrant self-selection might seem like a stereotype, but it’s borne out by evidence, and it clearly explains the observed effect. It doesn’t make logical sense to say that Black people are hardworking, because someone’s race tells us nothing about their personal qualities. Someone’s decision to emigrate, on the other hand, does: since they are making a difficult, deliberate choice to improve their lives, they’re likely to be willing to do other difficult things to improve their lives. However, Kendi emphasizes that their higher rates of achievement do not make them superior to non-immigrants—rather, he thinks that all human beings are inherently valuable.
Themes
