48 pages • 1 hour read
Ibram X. KendiHow to Be an Antiracist
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 16-18Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 16 Summary: “Failure”
In 2007, Kendi spoke at Temple University’s Black Student Union meeting to plan an action for the release of the Jena 6. The Jena 6 were six Black boys accused of beating a White boy after nooses were hung at a schoolyard tree in Jena, Louisiana as a warning to Black students. The Jena 6 faced an all-White jury where one of the boys was found guilty and assigned a 22-year sentence. Kendi, along with the other Black students at the meeting, were furious about the racist verdict. Kendi proposed a national action that would include a mass automobile caravan to Washington D.C., occupying the streets leading to the White House to apply pressure on the administration. Although others challenged his idea as it posed too much of a safety risk, Kendi remained adamant. He realizes now that his unwillingness to hear other people’s justifiable fear of arrest was “not radical at all” (211).
In reflecting on this experience in graduate school, Kendi discusses the major flaws of efforts towards social change. For him, the best antiracist strategies attack racism as a source of power, but the type of change most people are accustomed to is “uplift suasion” (202). Uplift suasion misplaces the burden of fixing racism on the marginalized people. This notion ignores the harms of systems and policies perpetuating racism, placing the responsibility of social change on those most impacted. Different Black thinkers and figures throughout history have leaned on moral and educational suasion, thinking that appealing to the morals and education of racists would result in change. However, racism is an issue of power and changing the hearts and minds of racists alone does not lead to a change in power.
Kendi defines an activist as “[o]ne who has a record of power or policy change” (201). He believes antiracist activist work is concerned with changing the structures of power or altering racist policy. This is how racist ideas can transform. Kendi also distinguishes the two types of work that activists participate in, protests and demonstrations, expressing that while demonstrations are about “mobilizing people momentarily to publicize a problem” (215), protests are about “organizing people for a prolonged campaign that forces racist power to change a policy” (215). He believes the most effective demonstrations are those that “help people find the antiracist power within” (215), which includes offering human and financial resources and encouraging people to join causes, organizations, and campaigns to prolong the work.
Kendi shares that one of most important virtues of this work is to challenge the failure doctrine—the inability to recognize flaws in strategies for antiracist change. He encourages the reader to examine “the mirror of self-blame” (213) and to look at failed strategies for change with greater clarity of the racist obstacles ahead.
Chapter 17 Summary: “Success”
Kendi warmly recalls his friend Caridad, a colleague at SUNY Oneonta where he taught as a dissertation fellow in Black history. Kendi occupied Caridad’s husband Ralph’s post after he passed away from metastatic cancer. Together, they attended a talk by finance scholar Boyce Watkins who described racism as a disease. Kendi openly challenged him, insisting that racism was more like an organ when he stated, “Isn’t racism essential for America to function?” (218).
He acknowledges he was not a very good scholar at the time, and his question suggests a pessimism he now contests. He is now more open to the idea of racism as a disease with a potential cure. He considers Caridad an example of someone who makes this feel possible. Caridad nurtured her Black and Latinx students as an Afro-Latina professor and encouraged deep reflection without Kendi’s tendency towards “ideological attacks” (218). He feels he has much to learn from people like Caridad who taught him antiracist work is not accomplished by lashing out and losing sight of the goal to transform antiracist policies.
Kendi’s early definition of racism came from Black Power activist Kwame Toure and political scientist Charles Hamilton’s book Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. They introduced Kendi to the term “institutional racism” (219), which refers to both overt and covert acts of racism perpetuated by White individuals—as well as White society at large—toward Black communities. Although Kendi once subscribed to this term, he now sees its proliferation through his earlier thinking and realizes it obscures the source of racism and the pathway towards a solution. By thinking about racism as “unseen and unseeable” (221), it perpetuates the notion that racism is an abstract concept and therefore, hard to solve. Therefore, he prefers thinking about racist policy and works towards creating antiracist policy as he believes “[r]acism has always been terminal and curable” (223).
After the death of Trayvon Martin—a Black youth who was racially profiled and shot by George Zimmerman—and the exoneration of his murderer, Kendi relentlessly pursued research for his book, Stamped from the Beginning. His research involved examining historical examples of brutal racist actions against Black people, the effects of which would eventually lead to his failing health. He declared, “I kept most of the toxic trash in my gut between 2012 and 2015” (227).
Chapter 18 Summary: “Survival”
Shortly before they were to be married, Kendi’s wife Sadiqa was diagnosed with cancer. During her illness and treatment, Kendi poured all his energy into his research on racism, and soon, he could not help but think of racism and cancer as the same thing. He believes the source of racism is “self-interest” (229) and not ignorance or hate, so the idea of trying to fix ignorance or hate is like “treating a cancer patient’s symptoms and expecting the tumors to shrink” (230). Since this realization, Kendi has reoriented himself in his research where he is no longer focused on changing racist minds but is concerned with undoing racist policies. This led him to build the Antiracist Research and Policy Center in 2017.
When Kendi started the Antiracist Research and Policy Center, he had to contend with racist attacks such as a White man hanging Confederate flags throughout campus. In addition, his own health was failing. A doctor’s visit revealed he had Stage 4 colon cancer. In reflecting on his diagnosis, he realizes his denial about his health circumstances was very much like the way the world denied racism. He describes racism as a “metastatic cancer” (234) spreading throughout history with dire consequences. To deny its effects is “suicidal” (234).
Despite his diagnosis, Kendi eventually became determined to fight and pursued rigorous treatment. After much fighting, he was cancer-free. Kendi compares his ability to survive cancer to the fight to end racism, declaring, “[w]e can survive metastatic racism” (237). He suggests that Americans end racism the same way they treat cancer with “the chemotherapy or immunotherapy of antiracist policies that shrink the tumors of racial inequities, that kill undetectable cancer cells” (237). While he has witnessed so much racist violence in his lifetime, he has little hope that racism can be cured, but he knows that hope is important for the world to have “a chance to be forever free” (238).
Chapters 16-18 Analysis
These concluding chapters grapple with some of the most challenging experiences of Kendi’s life to offer a powerful metaphor for racism. Kendi’s struggles with cancer, within his family and in his own body, led him to believe that cancer is the most apt comparison for how racism operates. Ironically, he once challenged Boyce Watkins when the finance scholar used this metaphor, and though he felt strongly that Watkins’s description of racism as a disease was misplaced, his personal dealings with it reveals a deeper understanding of how cancer manifests and spreads. He believes that racism is like “metastatic cancer” (234) which is a form of cancer that spreads from one region of the body to another, in the same way history repeats and causes further harm over time. He argues the denial of racism’s cancerous effect is detrimental to the fate of Black people.
While these chapters take on a noticeably graver tone, Kendi’s concluding thoughts on racism and cancer are also tentative in their hopefulness. He believes that racism, like cancer, is both “terminal and curable,” which presents an interesting bind for the pursuit of antiracist policies in his life’s work. He also believes racism will not likely end and yet the loss of hope for its end would lead to something far more devastating. That Kendi and his wife both survived their cancer struggles suggests that hope for healing is necessary for any chance of treatment—even if the chances are slim. His narrative of his survival offers some hope that racism, too, can be “cured.”
This uneasy relationship between a commitment to antiracist work and hopefulness is a key theme across a number of works by antiracist writers. For example, in 2015, shortly after the publication of Between the World and Me, Atlantic editor-in-chief James Bennet asked Ta-Nehisi Coates if he had hope that America will ever overcome racism. Of slaves whose parents and grandparents were slaves, and who had every reason to believe their children and grandchildren would be too, Coates said, “There was no real hope within their individual life span of ending enslavement—the most brutal form of degradation in this country’s history. There was nothing in their life that said, ‘This will end in my lifetime. I will see the end of this.’ And they struggled. And they resisted.” (“In Conversation with Ta-Nehisi Coates. The Atlantic, 16 Oct. 2015, www.theatlantic.com/video/index/410815/in-conversation-with-ta-nehisi-coates/.) Thus, both Coates and Kendi believe in the importance of resistance, even when the evidence suggests there is little reason for optimism.
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