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 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 7 Summary: “Culture”
Kendi grew up in Southside Queens, where he dreamed of becoming a star basketball player. Kendi’s adolescence was marked by this dream and a passion for Queens-raised hip hop artists and rappers; when he eventually moved to Manassas, Virginia, he thought what he learned from Queens was the superior form of Black culture. He was surprised to find that Northern Virginia Black culture was very different, and he arrogantly asserted himself; he believed this attitude cost him a spot on the junior varsity basketball team. As an adult, Kendi understands that his belief in the superiority of Northern Black culture over Southern Black culture is no different than a belief in the superiority of Northern White culture over Northern Black culture. They are both forms of cultural racism.
Kendi uses language as an example through which Black people in the US come to share a common culture. The use of Ebonics has always been looked down upon as a form of “broken,” “improper,” or “nonstandard” English (83). Wall Street Journal reporter Jason Riley once argued that Ebonics denigrates Black American culture as it condones “delinquency and thuggery” (84).
However, enslaved African people in the early US forged Ebonics as a separate language from White slaveowners, much in the same way that Jamaican Patois and Haitian Creole were forged. This is different from what scholars—such as Franz Boas—argue, which is that African American culture is “essentially European” (86) and imitative. According to Wade Nobles, African Americans pursued a “deep structure of culture” (86) where aspects of White European life could be adapted fully into African American culture without direct reference to the colonizing source. For instance, despite the influence of European Christianity, African American Christianity has grown into its own unique religious culture.
Kendi disputes sociologist Nathan Glazer’s assertion that African Americans have “no values and culture to guard and protect” (86). By understanding the deep structure of Black culture, one can see the many forms it can take.
Chapter 8 Summary: “Behavior”
When Kendi started high school at Stonewall Jackson in Virginia, he was disinterested in school and received bad grades. His parents forced him to take International Baccalaureate classes; however, he did not find support from White and Asian students, feeling isolated as one of the few Black students in the room.
Encouraged by a classmate, he entered the Prince William County Martin Luther King Jr. oratorical contest. In response to the prompt, “What would be Dr. King’s message for the millennium?”, he wrote what he dubbed to be a racist speech that recited all the stereotypes about Black youth behavior. Kendi based the speech more on contemporary anti-Black interpretations of King—which tend to blame and shame Black youths for their supposedly irresponsible and criminal behavior—rather than on King’s own writings and speeches. He won the contest—an effort of which he remains ashamed in adulthood.
Kendi wonders why Black people are forced to be exceptional when White people are permitted to fail without the same consequences. Reverend Jamie Johnson, the director of faith-based center in US President Trump’s Department of Homeland Security once declared, “America’s Black community…has turned America’s major cities into slums” (94). One Black individual’s actions characterize the entirety of the Black community; according to Kendi, this generalizing reference to “Black behavior” (94) is racist.
Proslavery theorists before the US Civil War used the notion of inherent deficiencies among Black people to argue that freedom led to Black mediocrity. According to this concept, freed Black people, cut off from their “civilizing masters” (95), did not do as well as their enslaved counterparts. Abolitionists maintained these views through the “oppression-inferiority thesis” (96), which applied racist stereotypes to Black people due to enslavement. The oppression-inferiority thesis argued that Black people possessed an enslaved mindset and tended towards mediocrity due to the history of their oppression.
Well-intentioned ideas forging these broad connections between Black people’s trauma—from slavery to present-day perceptions of Black mediocrity—are just as damaging. The historical notions about Black inferiority continue to shape 20th century psychology. In 1951, psychologists Abram Kardiner and Lionel Ovesey in The Mark of Oppression: A Psychosocial Study of the American Negro refer to the “wretched internal life” (97) of Black people due to their oppression.
When Kendi took test preparation courses for several standardized tests—such as the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and the Graduate Record Examination (GRE)—he did not know about their racist histories. He internalized statistics from the Nation’s Report Card, which gave an annual racial breakdown of standardized test performances and which always showed Black students underperforming. The Nation’s Report Card echoed early eugenics sentiments from biologists such as Francis Gaston in 1869 who wrote in Hereditary Genius that the “average intellectual standard of the negro race is some two grades below [that of the White race]” (102).
Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman drew from Gaston’s ideas in 1905 to create the first intelligence quotient (IQ) test. Carl C. Brigham borrowed Terman’s research to create the SAT in 1926, extending the eugenics idea of an achievement gap that would influence national policies such as George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act. Kendi concludes that the racial problem Black people face is due to an “opportunity gap” and not an “achievement gap” (103).
Chapter 9 Summary: “Color”
Kendi reflects on his time at his alma mater Florida A&M University when he dated a light-skinned woman considered highly desirable among his Black male peers. Their desire of her made him decide to pursue only dark-skinned Black women moving forward, which he later realizes still reinforces the same ideas designating different types of worth to Black people of varying skin colors.
In Kendi’s family history, he knows that a White man once impregnated a Black woman, who gave birth to Kendi’s great-great-grandmother Eliza. Eliza married Lewis, a dark-skinned Black man, and gave birth to Kendi’s grandfather Alvin. All the women in his family who are lighter-skinned married dark-skinned men.
The history of colorism—the privileging of lighter-skinned people over darker-skinned people—is extensive. US slaveholders kept light-skinned Black slaves in the house and dark-skinned Black slaves in the fields as they considered dark-skinned slaves more “animalistic” (114). They used skin color to justify the type of harsh labor they assigned.
Institutions that formalized this ideology further perpetuated colorism. Kendi attributes these ideas to such figures as the US’s “father of colorism” (115), Samuel Stanhope Smith, a theologian at Princeton University who championed the idea that lighter-skinned slaves who served as domestic servants were far superior to the darker-skinned slaves who worked the fields. Alabama physician Josiah Nott claimed the “mulatto” or mixed-race Black people were “degenerate, unnatural offspring” (114).
In 1865, these ideas about color hierarchies stemming from enslavement extended into emancipated life. Light-skinned Black communities grew to shun dark-skinned Black people, “preserving prewar racial disparities” (115). This growing animosity between lighter-skinned and darker-skinned Black people was not always commonly acknowledged, even early in W.E.B. Du Bois’s career, as he disavowed the idea of colorism, claiming it was “absolutely repudiated by every thinking Negro” (117). Du Bois eventually changed his views when he experienced friction with National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) executive secretary Walter White, a fair-skinned Black person with blue eyes. Du Bois believed White favored the causes of fair-skinned Black people and refused to defend the darker-skinned and poor Scottsboro Boys—young Black men falsely accused of raping two White women.
Kendi advocates for the celebration of all Black beauty—not just one that favors White aesthetics and encourages the favoring of lighter skin. He cites the growing movement towards acceptance of Black beauty with the 1970s when Malcolm X and Angela Davis set a precedent for liberating Black hair by refusing to use relaxers on their natural hair.
At Florida A&M University, Kendi witnessed the Black brilliance and talent of the school marching band and found himself revising his colorist ideas of race.
Chapters 7-9 Analysis
In Chapters 7 and 8, Kendi explores the double standards Black people experience when it comes to language they use and their potential for educational success. In each scenario, Kendi critiques the metrics guiding the perception of Black progress and failure rather than the perception that they possess inherent qualities of limited potential. Kendi argues the metrics are usually based on White cultural standards, which have always operated against the interests of Black people. Thus, the perception of degraded Black culture or failure to succeed is not the fault of Black people, but the limiting measures by which they must abide for White acceptance.
The association of Ebonics with “delinquency and thuggery” (84) has more to do with the failure of racist imagination to see how Black people might adopt new language practices as part of a growing cultural identity in the US. Linguists like the University of Massachusetts’s Lisa Green emphasize that Ebonics, or “African American English” as she and other scholars term it, only seems haphazard to those unfamiliar with it; in reality, it is as systematic and rule-governed as any European language taught in schools. (Green, Lisa. African American English: A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge University Press, 2002.) Similarly, the perception of Black underperformance in schools is an issue of disproportionate opportunities for Black students to succeed in standardized testing formats. What has been perceived as an achievement gap in national conversations about Black academic progress should be more aptly named an opportunity gap. By reinterpreting these aspects of Black cultural and academic life in these ways, society decenters the emphasis on White cultural standards for measuring validity and success.
In Chapter 9, Kendi tackles colorism—the historical origins that have defined White societal relationship to Black people with different complexions, as well as how Black people view each other. Kendi implicates himself when it comes to his early ideas about skin color, wanting to embody qualities of lighter skinned Black people while simultaneously resenting lighter skinned Black people. He realizes that both attitudes are part of colorism. His recollection of his early relationship to skin color in this chapter marks one of several examples throughout the book in which he examines his own internalized racist ideas to show how he has evolved his thinking since then.
Related Titles
By Ibram X. Kendi
