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
Colorism is a set of policies and supporting ideas that sustain inequities between light-skinned and dark-skinned people, while color antiracism supports equity between them.
Although colorism exists within various racial groups, Kendi focuses this chapter on colorism in the Black community. Like race itself, lightness and darkness are not absolute or biological categories. Rather, they’re socially constructed by those in positions of power.
Themes
Kendi remembers attending Florida A&M’s homecoming football game and watching its world-famous marching band perform. His roommate Clarence was intelligent and driven, and he also had light skin and hazel eyes. Meanwhile, Kendi wore light-colored contact lenses but had his hair in cornrows. He didn’t realize it, but his colored contacts were a way to look less Black and closer to the colorist “post-racial beauty ideal” of lightness, which has been called “white beauty repackaged with dark hair.”
Kendi’s style demonstrates that he continued to suffer from a dueling consciousness in college. He wanted to be light-skinned because it was considered cool and desirable, but also wanted to be dark-skinned and dismantle the hierarchy that labeled lightness as more desirable. The first is assimilationist, while the second is antiracist. The light-skinned “post-racial beauty ideal” shows how racist and antiracist progress often go hand-in-hand: while actually being white is no longer part of the American beauty standard, looking white still is.
Themes
Even if light-skinned and dark-skinned people are all Black, these are distinct racialized subgroups. It’s not just about skin color: darkness also encompasses kinkier hair textures and larger facial features. Although inequity across color lines (or colorism) is often forgotten, antiracists must recognize and address it. There are clear disparities between light and dark-skinned Black people in health, education, and employment. Light-skinned and dark-skinned immigrants and Latinx Americans suffer similar inequities. Dark-skinned Black youth even get punished more harshly in school and the justice system than light-skinned people do.
Just as the inequities between white and Black people suggest that racist policies are at work, the inequities between light-skinned and dark-skinned Black people suggest that racist policies specifically target dark-skinned people to a greater extent than light-skinned people. These inequities are also a reminder that racism is also alive and well within communities of color.
Themes
At FAMU, Kendi’s peers generally preferred dating light-skinned women with straight hair. So did he: his first girlfriend was light-skinned, and her dark-skinned roommate got no attention from men. Over time, this colorism bothered Kendi so much that he broke up with his girlfriend, started only dating dark-skinned women, and became prejudiced against anyone who did not share his preference. Like many dark-skinned people, he flipped the hierarchy around: dark-skinned people often say that light-skinned people aren’t “Black enough.” But just like race, lightness and darkness have no biological basis. Real antiracism isn’t about flipping beauty standards around, but rather about diversifying them, like our ideas of culture and intelligence. Antiracists appreciate everyone’s natural beauty.
Kendi made the common mistake of preserving the central idea of racism (that one group is superior to another), simply flipping it to put the subordinate group at the top and the dominant group at the bottom. Now, years later, he sees that people should respond to hierarchies by rejecting the principle of hierarchy altogether, not just moving different groups up and down the latter. His friends’ refusal to date dark-skinned women is an excellent small-scale example of an informal racist policy, which produces inequities even though it is not a formal law.
Themes
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Colorism has a long history: enslaved light-skinned people were generally assigned to less physically demanding roles on American plantations, and racist ideas developed to justify this. Some considered light-skinned people superior, and deserving of more refined work, because they were closer to whiteness. Others considered dark people purer and therefore stronger, which meant that they were better-suited for manual labor. Similarly, the “tragic mulatto” trope implied that light-skinned people were originally white but poisoned by a some Black blood in their family line.
Like all the other dimensions of racism that Kendi explores in this book, colorism was originally a tactic for dividing and controlling groups of people. The colorist ideas of the past—that light-skinned people are somehow blessed with whiteness, while dark-skinned people are “pure”—are the foundation for the colorist ideas that Kendi and his friends believed in college. Modern-day colorist ideas descend directly from those of the past.
Themes
After emancipation, light-skinned people took after white segregationists and invented absurd laws to exclude dark-skinned people from their clubs and political organizations. W.E.B. Du Bois initially denied that there was a color line within the Black race, until he noticed the NAACP ignoring the problems faced by dark-skinned people and heard its light-skinned chairman call dark-skinned people inferior. He also saw Black people straightening their hair and lightening their skin. It took until the Black Power movement for people (like Kendi’s father) to start taking pride in darkness. Of course, some overdid it and inverted the color hierarchy instead of fighting it. Still, lightness is privileged over darkness today: around the world, skin-bleaching is incredibly popular among non-white people.
Light-skinned segregationists turned the same policies that oppressed them against dark-skinned people. In fact, this follows the same principle as Kendi and the Black Power activists who simply inverted the colorist hierarchy by declaring dark-skinned people more beautiful than light-skinned people. In both these cases, instead of choosing to fight inequities, groups decided that they’d rather create different inequities for their own benefit. Similar colorist inequities around the world suggest that white supremacy has helped make lightness desirable almost everywhere.
Themes
Kendi returns to the marching band’s performance during the FAMU football game. It absolutely dazzled him, and the whole crowd went wild. Later, Kendi had to tell Clarence his “latest epiphany.”
Kendi’s astonishment at the marching band and his“ latest epiphany” suggest that college was an important period of personal transformation for him. This underlines his belief that everyone is capable of change and deserves the opportunity to do so.
Themes
