How to Be an Antiracist

After Kendi penned his controversial editorial in The Famuan, his supervisor at the Tallahassee Democrat, Mizell Stewart, called Kendi into the office. Stewart distinguished Black people in an elitist manner, referring to poor Black people who deviate from societal norms as “them n*****s” (136). Stewart gave Kendi the ultimatum to pull the column or lose his internship, which he needed in order to graduate. Kendi opted for the former but admits he did so “in absolute bitterness” (109). While he felt angry and discouraged by the experience, it also motivated him to learn more about Black identity, and he started a second major in African American studies.

Reflecting on Stewart’s comment, which emphasized a distinction between different classes of Black people, Kendi is reminded of Chris Rock’s 1996 stand-up special, Bring the Pain. During the show, Rock makes jokes about different kinds of Black people, referring to poor Black people as “them n*****s.” Kendi believes there is a correlation between this attitude held by Black people and the identification of racism’s impacts on their lives. In a survey conducted in 1993, 40% of Black people stated they thought racism was the source of the inequities they experienced. During Barack Obama’s presidency in 2013, only 37% held this sentiment. This number increased to 59% in 2017 after the election of Donald Trump.

The belief that Black people do not have the ability to be racist is part of what Kendi dubs the “powerless defense” (140), which claims that because Black people lack power, they do not have the potential to be racist. This belief overlooks the influential Black policymakers instituting racist policies. During the 2000 election, when several Ohio voters found that their votes were improperly purged, Ken Blackwell—Ohio’s Black Secretary of State and George W. Bush’s Ohio campaign co-chair—was responsible for blocking voters’ access to provisional ballots by imposing numerous barriers: only permitting voter registration forms on certain paper stock and misinforming formerly incarcerated Black people that they cannot vote. Because of his “state-of-the-art racist work suppressing Black votes for Bush’s reelection” (143), in 2017, Blackwell was asked to join Donald Trump’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity.

Kendi traces the history of Black influential figures who acted against the best interests of other Black people. In 1526, Leo Africanus—an enslaved Moroccan Moor given his name after he was freed by Pope Leo X—penned Della descrittione dell’Africa (Description of Africa), in which he describes Africans as “beastly” (144) for a White European audience. In 1657, Richard Ligon’s A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes tells the story of the slave Sambo who reveals to slave owners the plot of a slave revolt and refuses reward for his betrayal.

There was also house slave Peter Prioleau’s betrayal of Denmark Vesey and other enslaved Black people organizing a revolt in Charleston, South Carolina. While Vesey warned recruits against telling other slaves who “receive presents of old coats from their masters” (145) about the revolt, one recruiter did not listen and told Peter. Peter informed his master, which resulted in the end of the rebellion and Vesey’s hanging. Peter, upon emancipation by South Carolina legislature for his allegiance to White slave owners, received a lifetime annual pension and eventually kept his own slaves.

These instances of betrayal by Black people against other Black people persist in modern forms. Author William Hannibal Thomas published The American Negro in 1901 at the same as Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery. Thomas and Washington were both touted as authorities on Black identity at the time. However, they held opposing views: Thomas believed Black people were an “intrinsically inferior type of humanity” (146).

Placing Black figures in positions of authority does not necessarily eliminate the issue of racism. This was clear in the efforts of the 1960s to diversify the police force. The hiring of Black cops did not decrease police brutality. In fact, Kendi argues that Black people in positions of power have the capacity to harm other Black people as well. During Ronald Reagan’s presidency, he appointed several Black administrators under his cabinet— including Clarence Thomas as the director of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. During Thomas’s tenure, he doubled the dismissal of discrimination cases. Similarly, Samuel Pierce, the secretary of Department of Housing and Urban Development, redirected funds for low-income housing to Republican efforts.

When Kendi moved to North Philadelphia to attend graduate school at Temple University, he lived in an area considered the “dark ghetto” (151) as it was a poor Black neighborhood. At the time, he believed that being near Black poverty made him more authentic as a Black person. Living in North Philadelphia made him feel “so real, so Black” though he eventually realized he was “playing poor Blacks cheap as human beings” (164-65).

Kendi’s early ideas overlooking the entwinement of issues of race and class are reflected throughout history, which always blamed poverty on individual failures. In 1959, anthropologist Oscar Lewis wrote about the “culture of poverty” (153) in his ethnography of Mexican families, which blamed poor people for perpetuating their own poverty without acknowledging the role of inequitable policymaking against nonwhite communities. This idea was an extension of the belief that governmental welfare programs perpetuated poverty rather than assist the poor, propagated by politicians like senator Barry Goldwater who wrote in The Conscience of the Conservative in 1960 that welfare “transforms the individual from a dignified, industrious, self-reliant spiritual being into a dependent animal creature without his knowing it” (154).

Black people and people of color also perpetuate these ideas about race and poverty. Former president Barack Obama held similar ideas, referring to Black poverty as part of a “legacy of defeat” (155), suggesting that Black people’s impoverished circumstances are partially their own doing. Similarly, W.E.B. Du Bois once believed in the idea of the “Talented Tenth” (156), which held that Black elites would save poor Black people from their economic circumstances. He later revised this idea after encountering the thinking of Karl Marx, and developed his theory of the “Guiding One Hundredth” (160), which recognized the power of poor Black people.

Kendi posits that racism and capitalism have always been entwined since the beginning of the transatlantic slave trade of Black people. While power was once concentrated through Portugal and other European countries involved in the slave trade, economic power is now consolidated in the hands of the US, Europe, China, and satellite nations beholden to these countries. The inequities that existed during the 16th century slave trade now manifest in the forms of poverty, unemployment, and wealth disparities between Black and White people. Globally, there is a widening gap between the wealthy and the poor as well as an expansion of a White middle class. For Kendi, these modern manifestations of economic inequity are racially inflected, bearing especially heavily on poor Black people who face a “double burden” (158) as they are more likely to live in high-poverty areas. Therefore, their poverty is more visible and concentrated.

Conservatives and liberals can be equal defenders of capitalism. Kendi uses US Senator Elizabeth Warren as an example of someone who envisions a fairer economic system of capitalism. However, by insisting on fairness rather than the undoing of capitalism, Warren falls into the liberal assumption that racial inequity has nothing to do with capitalism. Undoing capitalism is part of antiracist work. By insisting on an inequitable system, conservative and liberal parties alike ultimately perpetuate the work of racism.