Before writing How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi was an award-winning historian who studied how racist ideas have transformed over the centuries. In this book, he repeatedly references what he calls “racist progress”: racism’s capacity to adapt to new social contexts by generating new racist ideas and policy strategies. But at the same time as racism’s ideas, language, and policy proposals evolve, its basic ideological assumptions and political goals largely stay the same. By studying history and revealing these fundamental patterns, Kendi seeks to help activists understand how racism is evolving in the present and achieve “antiracist progress”—or adapt their own strategies to the times.
In general, racist ideas evolve over time to become more indirect and therefore harder to combat. The first racist ideas and policies were blatant and unapologetic. During the transatlantic slave trade and the conquest of the Americas, European leaders simply decided that non-white people were not fully human and then used this belief to justify enslaving and killing them. Since the people they subjugated had virtually no power, explorers, enslavers, and colonizers had little reason to disguise their horrific ideas. Eventually, however, racist ideas and policies became strategies for policymakers and racist elites to maintain power. Over the years, they became more indirect. For instance, Kendi argues that today’s “post-racial” ideology—or the idea that we have defeated racism and do not need to think about race—is actually a very dangerous racist idea. By suggesting that racism no longer exists, “post-racial” ideology implies that racist policies don’t either. In turn, it implies that the racial inequities that still exist can’t be the product of racist policies. Rather, post-racial ideology blames inequities on people’s inherent racial differences. In other words, it is a more complicated version of the same thing racists have always believed: that people, not policies, cause racial inequities. This shows that, as antiracists make steady progress towards identifying and refuting racist ideas, racists have also made progress: they now disguise racism by claiming to be “not racist.”
But Kendi demonstrates that, even as they evolve over time, racist policies essentially fall into two ideological camps—assimilationism and segregationism—while racist ideas usually focus on biology, culture, and behavior. Kendi argues that many people struggle with a dueling consciousness—or a conflict between two opposing ideologies—when seeking solutions to racial inequity. Black people are caught between antiracism and assimilationism, or the idea that socially subordinate groups should imitate the dominant group in order to improve and be successful. (This is based on the racist assumption that the subordinate group is less powerful because it is not like the dominant group.) Meanwhile, many white people get stuck between assimilationism and segregationism, which is the idea that certain groups are inferior and cannot change, and thus have to be permanently separated from superior groups. Across time and place, Kendi argues, all of racism’s innovative new proposals ultimately fall into these two camps. For instance, segregationists initially defended slavery, then proposed sending freed slaves back to Africa, then implemented Jim Crow segregation. Since the 1980s, they’ve implemented the War on Drugs, a set of policies that disproportionately affects people of color and has led to their mass incarceration for nonviolent drug offense. While their precise mechanisms have changed, ultimately these segregationist policies are all doing the same thing: trying to exclude Black people from the American political community. Understanding this trend helps antiracists identify and call it out in the future.
Similarly, Kendi points out that, even as racist ideas evolve, they usually rely on the assumption that groups are unequal in terms of biology, culture, or behavior. For instance, slaveowners argued that Black people were inherently lazy or stupid because they were unwilling to work, while abolitionists argued that slavery made Black people lazy and stupid. Over a century later, in the 1990s, Kendi strongly believed that Black teenagers like him were inherently unintelligent, lazy students. The central racist idea remains the same: Black people behave in an inferior way, which justifies their inferior status in society (whether as slaves, disenfranchised people, or a poor urban underclass). Yet Kendi believes that there is no coherent argument for the biological, cultural, or behavioral superiority of one racial group. One race cannot be biologically superior to another, because race is not a measurable scientific category. While there are discernible cultural differences among different racial groups, Kendi explains, there is no way to coherently argue that one culture is superior to another. “Racial group behavior” is an incoherent concept because behavior is something that individuals do, not something that races do.
While Kendi focuses on racism’s evolution, his work’s implication is clear: antiracists also have to evolve if they want a fighting chance at building a just future. This is why Kendi compares various metaphors for racism in his last three chapters: different antiracist ideas are suitable for different times and places. For instance, while the idea of institutional racism was useful in the 1960s, now the term confuses people more than it helps them. This is why Kendi uses the more straightforward concept of racist policy. Similarly, Kendi remembers lashing out at a scholar who compared racism to a disease—Kendi preferred to view it as an organ, a permanent and essential part of the body that represents America. But then he realized that, if racism is essential to America, then people can’t beat it. After Kendi, his mother, and his wife Sadiqa all survived cancer over the course of a few short years, he realized that the disease metaphor is useful for antiracists today. Racism is severe and deadly, and it spreads rapidly, just like cancer metastasizes. But just as chemotherapy and surgery can cure cancer, antiracists gaining power and policy can theoretically cure racism. There’s no guarantee of beating it, but Kendi insists that it’s possible—so both cancer patients and antiracists must balance a realistic assessment of the powerful forces they face with a sense of unfailing courage and hope.
Related Themes from Other Texts
The History of Racist Ideas and Policies ThemeTracker
The History of Racist Ideas and Policies Quotes in How to Be an Antiracist
What's the problem with being “not racist”? It is a claim that signifies neutrality: “I am not a racist, but neither am I aggressively against racism.” But there is no neutrality in the racism struggle. The opposite of “racist” isn't “not racist.” It is “antiracist.” What's the difference? One endorses either the idea of a racial hierarchy as a racist, or racial equality as an antiracist. One either believes problems are rooted in groups of people, as a racist, or locates the roots of problems in power and policies, as an antiracist. One either allows racial inequities to persevere, as a racist, or confronts racial inequities, as an antiracist.
History duels: the undeniable history of antiracist progress, the undeniable history of racist progress. Before and after the Civil War, before and after civil rights, before and after the first Black presidency, the White consciousness duels. The White body defines the American body. The White body segregates the Black body from the American body. The White body instructs the Black body to assimilate into the American body. The White body rejects the Black body assimilating into the American body—and history and consciousness duel anew.
I do not pity my seven-year-old self for identifying racially as Black. I still identify as Black. Not because I believe Blackness, or race, is a meaningful scientific category but because our societies, our policies, our ideas, our histories, and our cultures have rendered race and made it matter. I am among those who have been degraded by racist ideas, suffered under racist policies, and who have nevertheless endured and built movements and cultures to resist or at least persist through this madness.
Prince Henry's racist policy of slave trading came first—a cunning invention for the practical purpose of bypassing Muslim traders. After nearly two decades of slave trading, King Afonso asked Gomes de Zurara to defend the lucrative commerce in human lives, which he did through the construction of a Black race, an invented group upon which he hung racist ideas. This cause and effect—a racist power creates racist policies out of raw self-interest; the racist policies necessitate racist ideas to justify them—lingers over the life of racism.
How can I get upset at immigrants from Africa and South America for looking down on African Americans when African Americans have historically looked down on immigrants from Africa and South America? How can I critique their ethnic racism and ignore my ethnic racism? That is the central double standard in ethnic racism: loving one’s position on the ladder above other ethnic groups and hating one's position below that of other ethnic groups. It is angrily trashing the racist ideas about one's own group but happily consuming the racist ideas about other ethnic groups. It is failing to recognize that racist ideas we consume about others came from the same restaurant and the same cook who used the same ingredients to make different degrading dishes for us all.
Enslaved Africans formulated new languages in nearly every European colony in the Americas […] In every one of these countries, racist power—those in control of government, academia, education, and media—has demeaned these African languages as dialects, as “broken” or “improper” or “nonstandard” French, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, or English. Assimilationists have always urged Africans in the Americas to forget the “broken” languages of our ancestors and master the apparently “fixed” languages of Europeans—to speak “properly.” […] The idea that Black languages outside Africa are broken is as culturally racist as the idea that languages inside Europe are fixed.
To be antiracist is to see all cultures in all their differences as on the same level, as equals. When we see cultural difference, we are seeing cultural difference—nothing more, nothing less.
To be an antiracist is to recognize there is no such thing as racial behavior. To be an antiracist is to recognize there is no such thing as Black behavior, let alone irresponsible Black behavior. Black behavior is as fictitious as Black genes. There is no “Black gene.” No one has ever scientifically established a single “Black behavioral trait.” No evidence has ever been produced, for instance, to prove that Black people are louder, angrier, nicer, funnier, lazier, less punctual, more immoral, religious, or dependent; that Asians are more subservient; that Whites are greedier. All we have are stories of individual behavior. But individual stories are only proof of the behavior of individuals. Just as race doesn’t exist biologically, race doesn’t exist behaviorally.
The use of standardized tests to measure aptitude and intelligence is one of the most effective racist policies ever devised to degrade Black minds and legally exclude Black bodies. We degrade Black minds every time we speak of an “academic-achievement gap” based on these numbers. The acceptance of an academic-achievement gap is just the latest method of reinforcing the oldest racist idea: Black intellectual inferiority. The idea of an achievement gap means there is a disparity in academic performance between groups of students; implicit in this idea is that academic achievement as measured by statistical instruments like test scores and dropout rates is the only form of academic “achievement.” There is an even more sinister implication in achievement-gap talk—that disparities in academic achievement accurately reflect disparities in intelligence among racial groups. Intellect is the linchpin of behavior, and the racist idea of the achievement gap is the linchpin of behavioral racism.
Whenever someone classifies people of European descent as biologically, culturally, or behaviorally inferior, whenever someone says there is something wrong with White people as a group, someone is articulating a racist idea.
The only thing wrong with White people is when they embrace racist ideas and policies and then deny their ideas and policies are racist. This is not to ignore that White people have massacred and enslaved millions of indigenous and African peoples, colonized and impoverished millions of people of color around the globe as their nations grew rich, all the while producing racist ideas that blame the victims. This is to say their history of pillaging is not the result of the evil genes or cultures of White people. There’s no such thing as White genes. We must separate the warlike, greedy, bigoted, and individualist cultures of modern empire and racial capitalism (more on that later) from the cultures of White people.
Racist ideas are constantly produced to cage the power of people to resist. Racist ideas make Black people believe White people have all the power, elevating them to gods. And so Black segregationists lash out at these all-powerful gods as fallen devils, as I did in college, while Black assimilationists worship their all-powerful White angels, strive to become them, to curry their favor, reproducing their racist ideas and defending their racist policies.
To love capitalism is to end up loving racism. To love racism is to end up loving capitalism. The conjoined twins are two sides of the same destructive body. The idea that capitalism is merely free markets, competition, free trade, supplying and demanding, and private ownership of the means of production operating for a profit is as whimsical and ahistorical as the White-supremacist idea that calling something racist is the primary form of racism. Popular definitions of capitalism, like popular racist ideas, do not live in historical or material reality. Capitalism is essentially racist; racism is essentially capitalist. They were birthed together from the same unnatural causes, and they shall one day die together from unnatural causes. Or racial capitalism will live into another epoch of theft and rapacious inequity, especially if activists naïvely fight the conjoined twins independently, as if they are not the same.
King’s nightmare is a product of the dueling Brown decision. The court rightly undermined the legitimacy of segregated White spaces that hoard public resources, exclude all non-Whites, and are wholly dominated by White peoples and cultures. But the court also reinforced the legitimacy of integrated White spaces that hoard public resources, include some non-Whites, and are generally, though not wholly, dominated by White peoples and cultures. White majorities, White power, and White culture dominate both the segregated and the integrated, making both White. But the unspoken veil claims there is no such thing as integrated White spaces, or for that matter integrated Black spaces that are underresourced, include some non-Blacks, and are generally, though not wholly, dominated by Black peoples and cultures. The court ruled Black spaces, segregated or integrated, inherently unequal and inferior.
The logical conclusion of antiracist strategy is open and equal access to all public accommodations, open access to all integrated White spaces, integrated Middle Eastern spaces, integrated Black spaces, integrated Latinx spaces, integrated Native spaces, and integrated Asian spaces that are as equally resourced as they are culturally different. All these spaces adjoin civic spaces of political and economic and cultural power, from a House of Representatives to a school board to a newspaper editorial board where no race predominates, where shared antiracist power predominates. This is diversity, something integrationists value only in name.
To understand why racism lives is to understand the history of antiracist failure—why people have failed to create antiracist societies. To understand the racial history of failure is to understand failed solutions and strategies. To understand failed solutions and strategies is to understand their cradles: failed racial ideologies.
Over time, the source of racist ideas became obvious, but I had trouble acknowledging it. The source did not fit my conception of racism, my racial ideology, my racial identity. I became a college professor to educate away racist ideas, seeing ignorance as the source of racist ideas, seeing racist ideas as the source of racist policies, seeing mental change as the principal solution, seeing myself, an educator, as the primary solver.
Racism is one of the fastest-spreading and most fatal cancers humanity has ever known. It is hard to find a place where its cancer cells are not dividing and multiplying. There is nothing I see in our world today, in our history giving me hope that one day antiracists will win the fight, that one day the flag of antiracism will fly over a world of equity. What gives me hope is a simple truism. Once we lose hope, we are guaranteed to lose. But if we ignore the odds and fight to create an antiracist world, then we give humanity a chance to one day survive, a chance to live in communion, a chance to be forever free.
