Summary: Definitions, Dueling Consciousness, Power: Chapters 1–3

Chapter 1, “Definitions,” opens with Ibram X. Kendi describing how his parents, Carol and Larry, met through the Black liberation movement, which emphasized Black empowerment. Kendi then stresses the importance of defining words related to race. He defines racism as the union of racist policies and racist ideas that “produce and normalize racial inequities.” Racial inequities occur “when two or more racial groups are not standing on approximately equal footing.” Kendi defines racist policies as those that create or sustain racial inequity. In contrast, antiracist policies create or sustain racial equity. Kendi explains that the term racist policy more accurately captures the dynamic of racial inequity than the term racial discrimination, which fails to take policy into account.  

Kendi asserts that race-neutrality is a racist movement because it does not address policy. Further, it suggests that any action toward racial equity is tantamount to discrimination against white people, producing a narrative of white victimhood. In contrast, an antiracist idea begins from the belief that all racial groups are equal, even if they have differences. Kendi uses health care as an example of racist policy. He cites Black people’s shorter life expectancy and lack of adequate health care as arising from racist policies.  

In Chapter 2, “Dueling Consciousness,” Kendi examines assimilationist, segregationist, and antiracist ideas as approaches to the issue of racism. He begins the chapter discussing how rising crime rates led both white people and Black people to support harsh incarceration policies as a solution to crime. The call for harsher punishment ignored the underlying inequities that resulted in criminal behavior.  

Kendi cites Black scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois, who coined the phrase double consciousness to describe how Black people feel they have “two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body.” Kendi stipulates that this dueling consciousness arises from conflict between Black people’s antiracist ideas and their assimilationist ideas. For Kendi, assimilation is racist because it postulates that a racial group is inferior to the dominant culture and can only develop by merging with the dominant culture and internalizing its values. In America, white culture is the standard of superiority that other racial groups should assimilate into.  

White people, too, have their own type of dueling consciousness: the tension between supporting segregation or assimilation. Both are racist ideas. Assimilationist white people believe that inferior people of color can be developed if they embrace white culture. Segregationist white people believe the inferiority of people of color is so great that they are considered less than human and thus cannot be uplifted by assimilation. Antiracists reject both assimilation and segregation because neither promotes racial equity. For Kendi, tension from this dueling consciousness yields “an inner strife between Black pride and a yearning to be white.” Only antiracism can liberate a person from the stress of dueling consciousness.  

In Chapter 3, “Power,” Kendi addresses race and power. He opens by discussing white flight out of neighborhoods with growing numbers of Black residents. Kendi describes meeting a Black third-grade teacher at a new school he might attend, where pictures show all other teachers to be white. Learning that the student body was mostly Black, he’d asked the teacher if she was the only Black teacher, and she’d said, yes. When Kendi asked her why, she could not answer him. After recounting this memory, Kendi goes on to describe the strength and importance of his Black identity, which situates him culturally and politically in American society and impels him to strive to be an antiracist. 

Kendi explains that race has no basis in biology but is a construct that creates new types of power to “categorize and judge, elevate and downgrade, include and exclude” people of different races. Kendi reviews the history of human enslavement to illuminate the role of power in the slave trade. He describes how powerful white people classified Black Africans as the lowest form of humanity. He explains how creating a hierarchy of races was born out of the self-interest of the white slave traders who grew rich from that trade. Kendi asserts that the problem of race is rooted—and always has been—in the desire to preserve the economic, political, and cultural power of those whom it benefits. 

Analysis: Definitions, Dueling Consciousness, Power: Chapters 1–3

In Chapter 1, Ibram X. Kendi recognizes the need for clear definitions of keywords used in his argument: words such as racism, racial equity, and racist policy. He also lays the groundwork for later discussion of how embedded racist ideas and policies are in American society. Thus, the point of the book is to show that only antiracist ideas, which challenge and change racist ideas and policies at every level of government and society, can result in racial equity. Kendi recognizes that American culture addresses racial differences by ignoring them, copying them, or destroying the inferior race. He notes that American society has no framework that allows people to see all races as equals. That’s why radical antiracism is necessary.  

In Chapter 2, Kendi analyzes the dueling consciousness of non-white racial groups to show that racist ideas are not only embedded in society but also embedded in individuals. He discusses the concept of dueling consciousness, which arises from the conflict between the consciousness of who you really are (as a Black person, for example) and the awareness of how you’re seen by others, particularly white people, to illustrate how profoundly racism affects people in America.  

In Chapter 3, Kendi introduces the fundamental task of antiracists, which is dismantling the power structures that preserve the power of some people over others. This chapter explores the history of this racist society going back to its beginnings. It ties together how white society’s emphasis on racial differences—and then creating a hierarchy related to them—enabled white people to justify taking advantage of those they deemed less than—for an economic goal. This idea that racism is tied to economics is woven throughout the book.