How to Be an Antiracist

Kendi continues sharing his family’s story to highlight discussion of the differences between assimilation, segregation, and antiracism. Born in 1982 during former President Ronald Reagan’s infamous War on Drugs, Kendi understood from an early age that by giving law enforcement more power, Reagan targeted poor Black communities with drug charges resulting in increased rates of incarceration.

This led to the societal belief that Blackness and criminality were one and the same—a notion that other middle-class Black people came to believe as well. Kendi calls this the true “Black on Black crime” (25). He shares how his family members also became susceptible to these beliefs. Through education and hard work, his parents were able to overcome their hardships in the poor rural South and in Northern urban projects. They came to believe that other Black people who were not able to elevate themselves socially simply did not work hard enough.

By introducing the concepts of assimilation and segregation, Kendi illustrates two racist motivations that promise either progress or oppression but achieve the same inequitable result. Segregation is the belief that “a permanently inferior racial group can never be developed and is supporting policy that segregates away that racial group” (24). Assimilation also embodies this belief of a racial group’s inherent cultural or behavioral inferiority while “supporting cultural or behavioral enrichment programs to develop that racial group” (24).

While segregation resembles a more familiar form of racism, Kendi proposes that assimilation is a liberal form of racism that both White and Black people can exercise. Kendi refers to W.E.B. Du Bois’s writing on “double consciousness,” which he renames “dueling consciousness” (28) to more accurately reflect the racial dilemma Black communities must face. Du Bois’s double consciousness refers to a desire to assimilate by “looking at one’s self through the eyes of another racial group” (29), which includes seeing oneself through White people’s eyes. Kendi critiques this identification with Whiteness as assimilationist. It is part of the dueling consciousness to which he refers—a battle between a desire to identify with White ideals and to have an antiracist perspective. He argues that to be antiracist is “to emancipate oneself from the dueling consciousness” (33).

Kendi recalls an early memory visiting the Grace Lutheran School in New York with his parents. Greeted by the only Black teacher in the school, Kendi astutely noted the disparity between the shortage of Black teachers for the majority Black students. When Kendi asked the Black teacher why this was the case, she became flustered and could not answer. Kendi’s mother explained that “[Kendi] is very much aware of being Black” (37).

Kendi’s awareness of his Blackness at an early age helped establish his understanding that race is historically and politically situated. He cites Prince Henry—the 15th century Portuguese explorer and Kendi’s namesake— as responsible for facilitating the mass trade of African slaves through Portugal and for creating the earliest system of racial categorization underlying contemporary racism.

In 1453, Prince Henry’s biographer, Gomes de Zurara, wrote The Chronicle of the Discovery and Conquest of Guinea, detailing the Portuguese explorer’s dealings with the African slave trade. In his descriptions of different Africans that the explorer encountered, he characterized their worth based on the lightness of their skins, dubbing “one single group of people, worthy of enslavement” (40). When Portuguese King Alfonso asked Zurara to share why the African slave trade was so lucrative, Zurara used racist ideas he fashioned to naturalize the idea of African enslavement.

In 1482, French poet Jacques de Brézé was the first to use the term “race,” referencing it in a hunting poem. Then in 1606, the French diplomat Jean Nicot—notable for bringing tobacco to France—defined race as “descent” (40). Nicot writes, “[…]it is said that a man, a horse, a dog, or another animal is from a good or bad race” (40). These racialized sentiments were adopted throughout the Americas among Portuguese and other European colonizing forces.

During the Age of Enlightenment, other racial identities were forged by the Linnaeus taxonomy. Carl Linnaeus organized the people of the world into racial categories of White, Red, Yellow, and Black, positioning the homo sapiens europaeus—White Europeans—as the racial category with the best physical and social qualities.

Kendi concludes his personal and historical account of racist terminology by arguing that racism was never about ignorance; it is tied to a legacy where “the self-interest of racist power” (42) funneled racist ideas into racist policies impacting nonwhite people.