Summary
Chapter 9: Color
Kendi was an undergraduate at Florida A&M now, known as “FAMU.” He opens this chapter with an account of the first time he saw the FAMU Marching 100 perform at halftime at a football game. He was there with his roommate Clarence, an intelligent and ambitious young Black man. When Kendi first met Clarence, he was surprised to see his light hazel eyes. Kendi himself had started wearing “honey” contact lenses, and his friends called him “orange eyes.” He thought wearing blue or green contacts was shameful, but he liked his honey ones. Thinking back to these contacts now, Kendi knows he wasn’t trying to be White (after all, he still wore cornrows): what he was trying to do was to be the cutest version of himself, and that was by aspiring toward Lightness. He was happy to be Black but did not want to look Black.
The term “colorism” was coined by Alice Walker in 1983 and referred to the fact that Light and Dark people “are two distinct racialized groups shaped by their own histories” (109); racist policies affect them differently and claim that there are inherent differences between the two. Colorism is also the assimilation into the White body.
Anti-Dark colorism links color to behavior. Darker Black people face harsher prison sentences, are considered less attractive, and get worse grades; Dark immigrants have less wealth and income than Light immigrants.
At college, Kendi dated a Light woman. All his friends were envious and often made disparaging comments about Dark women. Kendi became frustrated, dumped the Light woman, and made a vow only to date Dark women. He did not realize his own racist hypocrisy at the time.
The color hierarchy remains and is insidious to all: Light people report their struggles to be “Black enough” and prove their Blackness, just as Dark people resent Lightness. To be antiracist, Kendi explains, “is to eliminate any beauty standard based on skin and eye color, hair texture, facial and bodily features shared by groups” (114). The beauty culture should accentuate, not erase, natural beauty.
Kendi turns to colorism in history, noting how an enslaved body would be closer to the enslaver’s house if it was Lighter. A Darker body was considered more animalistic. On the other hand, “some enslavers considered Dark people more perfect than the so-called human mule, or mulatto. The biracial ‘hybrid’ is ‘a degenerate, unnatural offspring” (115). In private, Light women were considered more beautiful and more seductive. Lighter enslaved people were suspected of being closer to their masters—for instance, by disrupting slave revolt plots. Emancipation brought more division between Light and Dark people, just as it was during slavery. At the end of the 19th century, “blue vein” societies barred Darker-hued people. Light people were thus a sort of “racial middle class” (116). Even W.E.B. Du Bois pretended there was no color line when he elsewhere spoke negatively of Dark people (he came to change his thinking later, though, and replaced Marcus Garvey at the NAACP as the chief antiracist voice).
In the 20th century, entrepreneurs were peddling ways to lighten skin and straighten hair, but in the 1970s, during the Black Power movement, such practices declined. They returned with a vengeance in the 1990s, though: Lighter children were adopted first, made more money, and were less likely to be in prison or public housing. Bleaching products soared in popularity again.
At the end of the chapter, Kendi details how after the game where he marveled at the Marching 100, he went to his room to talk to Clarence. He’d had an epiphany and he needed to share it.
Chapter 10: White
Kendi burst in to see Clarence and announced he had figured White people out. Looking back, Kendi says, he came to FAMU trying to figure Black people out. He’d had anti-Black racist ideas covering his eyes like the contacts he wore, but those all came crashing down with the election of 2000, in which Bush ended up winning the presidency over Gore. He saw that Black voters were less likely to have their ballots counted, that they were easily purged off voting lists, etc. He and his peers were frustrated with Black people who didn’t vote, but his real anger became centered on White people.
He read Elijah Muhammad’s Message to the Blackman in America, in which Muhammad, the leader of the Nation of Islam, spoke of the creation of the White “devil race.” Kendi was entranced by the story of Muhammad liberating Black people via the knowledge of their true history. He also read Malcolm X, who helped grow the Nation of Islam after he got out of prison. Malcolm X became a household name with his fiery speeches, but he eventually renounced NOI, claiming he was a fool. He espoused a startling fact: Black people can be racist towards White people.
Kendi knows this is perhaps a surprising statement, so he unpacks it for the reader. Any claim that White people as a race are inferior biologically, culturally, or intellectually is racist, but that does not mean that White people have not done horrific things throughout human history. There are no White genes: there are only individuals. There are racist Whites, antiracist Whites, racist Blacks, and antiracist Blacks.
Furthermore, there is a difference between the racist power/racist policymakers and White people. Ordinary White people do benefit from this system, but not as much as they think they do and certainly not as much as the superrich White men who run everything. Racist power convinces ordinary White people that they have a lot to lose if equalizing policies between the races were adopted; racist power suggests that such policies are anti-White.
Claims of “anti-White” racism and “reverse discrimination” are as old as civil rights. Any policy not rigged for White people ends up seeming racist to some; "All Lives Matter" and "Blue Lives Matter" refrains are examples of such a mentality.
The issue is that going after White people instead of the racist power ends up prolonging the policies that hurt Blacks, so anti-White ideas become anti-Black. In addition, White supremacists claim to be pro-White but ignore how climate change impacts them, how the Confederate cause led to death of hundreds of thousands of Whites, and how Nazis also led to the deaths of millions of Whites. White supremacists want things the way they were, but White people have always struggled, even during those “better” times. White supremacists blame Blacks for the things they are unhappy with, but they should blame “the rich White Trumps they support” (132).
In his sophomore year, Kendi looked fervently for the source of White evil. He felt thirsty for biological theories and enjoyed Frances Cress Welsing’s The Isis Papers, which explained how Whites’ numerical inadequacy and color inferiority made them hostile, aggressive, and deeply afraid of genetic annihilation. This never really made Kendi feel better, though, for melanin didn’t seem to provide any additional power.
Kendi told Clarence that he decided Whites are aliens, which explains slavery, colonization, and the Bush victory. Clarence asked why he was so interested in figuring out White people, commenting that there would be no way breeding could happen if Whites were aliens and Blacks were humans. Kendi had no comeback, felt awkward, and left.
He kept thinking about Blacks and Whites, and his next move was to share his ideas with the world. He began his public writing career with a piece in FAMU’s student newspaper, The Famuan. In his piece, he counseled Black people to stop hating Whites for being themselves. Whites had recessive genes, were facing extinction, and were trying to destroy Black people. The piece caused a small stir within the community. Kendi was called in to see the editor of the Tallahassee Democrat, where he was doing an internship that he needed to get his journalism degree.
Chapter 11: Black
Kendi was nervous in front of the editor, Mizell Stewart. Stewart was a tall and accomplished Black man, and he offered Kendi numerous critiques on his article. The most shocking moment was when Stewart said, daring Kendi to reply, “You know, I have a nice car…and I hate it when I get pulled over and I’m treated like I am one of them niggers” (137). Kendi could barely believe it and was infuriated, but said nothing.
“Them niggers” was a phrase popularized by Chris Rock in his special, Bring the Pain. Rock excoriated this segment of the Black population, painting them as too loud, negligent, ignorant, and more. The “nigger” was not equal to the Black man. Black people racialized them and attached negative behavior and loudness to them; without knowing it, they were guilty of being Black racists. Chris Rock was articulating a position many Black people felt at the start of the 2000s, “stationed within the dueling consciousness of assimilationist and antiracist ideas, distinguishing ourselves from niggers as White racists were distinguishing themselves from us niggers” (138).
Though Kendi hated what Stewart said, he had to realize it was a mirror put up in front of him. He’d always thought Black people could not be racist because Black people were powerless. However, this perspective shields people of color in power from antiracism because they are apparently powerless. It empowers people of color to oppress people of color; it underestimates Black people and overestimates White people, stripping Black policymakers and managers of all their power.
Kendi qualifies this by saying he knows that Black power is limited and White power controls the United States—but not completely. White people are not gods and they do not have all the power. One example Kendi offers is Ken Blackwell, the Black man who was Secretary of State of Ohio during the Bush/Gore election as well as Bush’s Ohio campaign co-chair. Blackwell suppressed Black votes in 2000, and in 2017, he joined Trump’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity, a commission with the thinly-veiled purpose of suppressing Black votes. Kendi suggests that such people should not be deemed sell-outs, Uncle Toms, or puppets: they should be called racists, for that is what they are.
A historical example is “Leo Africanus,” as he was deemed by Pope Leo X. Pope Leo X freed the enslaved man and converted him to Christianity, upon which Leo Africanus wrote Description of Africa in 1526. He wrote of the “beastly” and inferior Africans, ideas that would be echoed in subsequent books written by American Blacks. One such example was William Hannibal Thomas’s The American Negro (1901), in which he excoriated his fellow Black people as inferior, lawless, and mentally retarded. With his lighter skin, Thomas thought he and other Light people were set apart and were a “saving remnant” (146). In the 1960s, Black officers were particularly brutal towards the Black people they were supposed to protect, and in subsequent decades, they were occasionally responsible for the profiling and killing of “them niggers” (147). Black politicians, police chiefs, judges, and other Black people in power focused on the heroin, crack, and violence problems of the 1970s and 1980s as products of individual weaknesses, not public-health or poverty crises. The focus on Black-on-Black crime was conspicuous among the Black community as well as the White community.
Kendi capitulated and terminated his column for the paper, but from that moment on, he was a changed man. He started his difficult journey toward antiracism, taking up a second major of African American studies. Sports journalism no longer moved him, and he relished the classes he took with FAMU professor David Jackson, in which he started to see history not as a battle between Blacks and Whites/”them niggers” but rather between racists and antiracists.
Chapter 12: Class
Kendi began graduate school at Temple University, seeking his doctorate in African American studies. He moved into an apartment in North Philadelphia, which was commonly called “the ghetto.” The term did not encompass redlining, white flight, and racist developers: instead, it came to refer to disreputable Black neighborhoods. Kenneth Clark’s Dark Ghetto, published in 1965, deemed the “dark ghetto” a place of self-perpetuating, chronic, institutionalized pathology that needed to be contained. His ideas suggested a norm from which Black people deviated.
This is the intersection of elitist and racist policies: class racism. It is present among White Americans (“white trash”) as well, but it is even more insidious for Blacks. Segregationists say pathological people made the pathological ghetto, while assimilationists say the pathological ghetto made pathological people, but antiracists say that political and economic conditions are pathological, not the Black people who live in poor Black neighborhoods.
In 1959, Oscar Lewis introduced the term “culture of poverty” to discuss how the children of impoverished people (read: people of color) were raised with behaviors that made it difficult to escape poverty, thus perpetuating the cycle. This elitist idea suggested poor people were poor because of their own behavior.
Clark did include how racial issues—slavery, segregation, life in the “ghetto”—affected Black people, but his work still sought to explain why poor people were poor by claiming they were inferior. Welfare was the next idea to be tacked on to this. In the 1960s and beyond, Black welfare recipients were deemed to be the problem, though no one wanted to talk about White people’s benefiting from inheritances, tax cuts, government contracts, and bailouts.
Black elites like Clark suggested that the Black poor were inherently inferior, but the “stereotype of the hopeless, defeated, unmotivated poor Black is without evidence. Recent research shows, in fact, that poor Blacks are more optimistic about their prospects than poor Whites are” (155).
Racist poor whites, W.E.B. Du Bois noted, enriched themselves with the “wage of Whiteness,” meaning that racist poor Whites patted themselves on the back for at least not being Black. Racist Black elites, similarly, were pleased to not be “them niggers” (155).
Over time, “dark ghetto” became redundant—the ghetto was Black, and the word became an adjective as well. Kendi lived in the ghetto, but saw poor Blacks as the victims of racism rather than capitalism, largely because he did not know capitalism well. Racism is indelibly intersected with capitalism, however, which he recognizes now. He writes of racism and capitalism as “conjoined twins” (156) that grew up side-by-side throughout the slave trade, forced labor in America, hot and cold wars over resources in the 20th century, and more. Currently, there are strong inequities between Whites and Blacks in wages, unemployment rates, and median net worth, with Blacks always coming out on the wrong side. Whites have better upward mobility, White poverty is not as distressing as Black poverty, and Black families live in areas with the double burden of poverty of resources and poverty of opportunity.
All of these facts are due to racism and capitalism; antiracists have to eliminate class racism. Socialism and communism aren’t necessarily free of racism either, but Du Bois conceived of “antiracist anticapitalism” (159). He wrote of how there was a working-class aristocracy, with White workers being more deleterious to the prospects of Black laborers than the capitalists themselves. He articulated not the uplift-suasion-inflected “Talented Tenth” of his earlier days but rather a “Guiding One Hundredth,” whose antiracist anticapitalist ideas manifest themselves now in the 21st century thanks to the Great Recession, the Occupy movement, Black Lives Matter, etc.
Kendi lambasts conservative defenders of capitalism, saying that what they are actually defining capitalism as the freedom to exploit, the freedom to kill unions, the freedom to prey on consumers, workers, and environments, the desire for profit above all else, the ability not to pay taxes and to heave the burden onto those below, and the impulse to make the rich richer. Pro-capitalist liberals like Elizabeth Warren speak of essentially “disentangling capitalism from theft and racism and sexism and imperialism” (162), which is all well and good, but “history does not affirm this definition of capitalism” (162). The fact remains that capitalism is racist and always has been, and racism is essentially capitalist. They were birthed together and, one day, they will have to die together. They cannot be fought as separate entities.
As for young graduate student Kendi, he considered poor Blacks to be “the truest and most authentic representatives of Black people” (163) and felt like he needed to live in the neighborhood he chose. He wanted to experience “real” Black life but was in fact unwittingly carrying the “dueling bags of Blackness: ‘Black is Beautiful’ and ‘Black is Misery’” (164). He was actually being racist, acting as a Black gentrifier. He believed he had to go to the “bottom” to be civilized, thinking culture filtered upward. Ultimately, though, “to be antiracist is to recognize neither poor Blacks nor elite Blacks as the truest representative of Black people” (165).
Analysis
In “Color,” Kendi explicates the different lived experiences of Light-skinned and Dark-skinned Black people, building off of the “colorism” theory of Alice Walker. Essentially, Light-skinned Blacks are considered more attractive, attain more economic and political success, are incarcerated at lower rates, and have more favorable experiences with government bureaucracies. On the other hand, they are considered “less Black” than Dark-skinned Black people, and they have to strive to “prove” themselves. By accounting for his college-aged self’s desire to look Light-skinned by wearing honey-colored contacts, he addresses how colorism pervades communities of color. In an interview with Democracy Now, he writes, “And we have been led to believe, primarily taught to people of color by the white people, who said, ‘Since lighter people are closer to us, they’re more superior to those dark people,’ and we’ve internalized those ideas. And there’s also a set of policies that actually favor lighter people over darker people. So I talked about all of the disparities between light people and dark people. And an antiracist does not view lighter people, or even darker people, as better or worse than each other.”
In “White,” Kendi articulates his point that Black people can be racist as well. This might sound surprising to some readers, but he is simply saying that any claim that a race is biologically or culturally inferior or predisposed toward a behavior is wrong: there are individuals who behave a certain way or are more violent or less intelligent. Kendi is not letting White people off the hook here, of course. He excoriates White supremacists and reminds ordinary White people that racist Whites in power make ordinary White lives almost as difficult as they do those of people of color. Part of his argument is that Black people who are anti-White are not doing themselves any favors, explaining in an interview with Yes Magazine, “And in the way that I make that case is when you as a Black person believe that there is something genetically or fundamentally wrong with White people and that essentially your enemy is every White person that you see, you’re not going to see as your fundamental problem racist policymakers. Because for you, that poor White person and Donald Trump are pretty much the same. And so, you’re not going to basically challenge and focus your activism on racist policymakers. Anytime you’re not focusing on the true source of Black harm, which is racist policymakers and policies, you’re essentially allowing Black harm to persist. So that’s why I talk about how actually hating White people actually leads to hating Black people. So, I think that’s absolutely critical, I think, for people to sort of understand that when people think that the problem is people, in this case, White people, they’re not going to go after policy, they’ll go after people. And when Black people are not going after policy, they are not going after the true source of their harm.”
The following chapter, “Black,” brings Kendi’s epiphany about some Black people “stationed within the dueling consciousness of assimilationist and antiracist ideas, distinguishing ourselves from niggers as White racists were distinguishing themselves from us niggers” (138). Middle-class, upper-class, and educated Black people sought to distinguish themselves from the “lesser” Black people—people who were not educated, who were unwed single mothers, who lived in the inner city, and who gave Black people a bad rap due to their tawdry or violent or obnoxious behavior. Kendi calls this for what it is—racism—and exhorts his readers to remember that Black people are not fully powerless: some Black people in power have done a great deal of damage to Black people.
In the last chapter of this section, “Class,” Kendi uses a powerful and oft-repeated metaphor: race and capitalism are conjoined twins, birthed together with the beginning of the slave trade. Their “ancient siblings” are “sexism, imperialism, ethnocentrism, and homophobia” (156), and their deleterious impact on people of color persists today: “In the twenty-first century, persisting racial inequities in poverty, unemployment, and wealth show the lifework of the conjoined twins” (157). While Kendi was aware of racism’s effects on poor Blacks, he was not initially as aware of capitalism’s, and he sought to find out its impact. Capitalism hurts unions, preys on workers and environments, lets the rich off the hook in many ways, and puts the tax burden on the poor and the middle class. When you add race into the mix, poor Black people suffer even more, statistically, than poor White people because poor White people see poor Blacks as their inferior competition. Assumptions about Black poverty and behavior manifest themselves more easily than those of White people because “poor Blacks are more likely to live in neighborhoods where other families are poor, creating a poverty of resources and opportunities…Black poverty [is] dense and White poverty [is] scattered, [thus] Black poverty is visible and surrounds its victims; White poverty blends in” (158).
Kendi explained in an interview with Democracy Now how to think about these “conjoined twins”: “the origins of racism cannot be separated from the origins of capitalism. The origins of capitalism cannot be separated from the origins of racism. The life of racism cannot be separated from the life of capitalism, and vice versa. When you think about, for instance, the slave trade, which was critical in the accumulation of wealth in Europe, that was fundamentally a set of racist policies. When you think of colonialism, or even slavery, these are fundamentally a relationship between racism and capitalism, which was essential to its emergence. And so, I think in order to truly be antiracist, you also have to truly be anti-capitalist, as I write in the book. And in order to truly be anti-capitalist, you have to be antiracist, because they’re interrelated.”
