Summary: Failure, Success, Survival: Chapters 16–18

Chapter 16, “Failure,” continues describing Ibram X. Kendi’s time at university. He and the other college students met to discuss why antiracism had failed to change the nation’s racist policies. He suggests that antiracists focus too much on the symptoms of racism rather than its root causes. Kendi faults Black judges who advise Black people to uplift themselves by learning to fit into white society, a perspective called “uplift suasion.” Afua Hirsch of The Guardian notes that Kendi “is particularly strong on his critique of ‘uplift suasion.’” Uplift suasion is meant to make white people less racist by proving that Black people are worthy or exceptional. It is a burden on Black people who must hide their true selves in order to perfectly perform for white people. It is also a burden on Black people who are always judging whether they are “representing” the Black race in a positive way. Unfortunately, Black people’s lived experience shows uplift suasion does not work.  

Moral suasion, appealing to white people’s moral conscience about their racist ideas, also doesn’t work to reduce racism. Kendi states that moral suasian doesn’t work because racism is born out of white self-interest, which is immune to moral arguments. Only when Black people and other oppressed racial groups recognize their power and exert it to influence policy are racist policies eliminated or changed to serve the interests of non-white peoples. Once white people recognize that the fearmongering of racist policy makers is groundless, Kendi asserts, they’ll begin to support antiracist policies.  

Kendi and the other university students had vowed to become activists who put their bodies on the line to highlight the need for changing racist policies. Effective protest can’t be based on feeling righteous after attending a demonstration, Kendi argues. He says protest must focus on risking arrest if necessary to forcefully (but peacefully) demand elimination of racist policies. Effective protest is radical, but it must also free protesters and others of fear so that their antiracist power can emerge and be acted upon. Kendi admits that he failed to erase the fear at the student gathering. He concludes that antiracist action must come from antiracist power, not from ideology. “Antiracist power . . . views . . . racial inequity as abnormal,” he explains. Effective protests “create an environment whereby changing the racist policy becomes in power’s self-interest.” 

Chapter 17, “Success,” opens after Kendi has graduated and taken a job teaching Black studies at a predominantly white state college in upstate New York. The context made him consider what antiracist success would look like. He concluded that it would be where “antiracist ideas are our common sense.”  

Individual racism is overt; it’s the racist actions of specific people. Institutional racism is covert and subtle; it’s the hidden policies that underpin social institutions. Inequities in health care and education are founded on institutional racism. Institutional racism is insidious because the policies that prop it up are unseen and seemingly unassailable. Kendi critiques the concept of institutional racism, however, because it implies that all white people benefit equally. However, this is untrue: Rich white people benefit far more from institutional racism than poor white people. When antiracists focus on inequities and delve into their source, he says, they are better able to understand and fight institutional racism. Kendi offers the phrase institutionally racist polices as a replacement for the vague term institutional racism because its focus is on the root cause of that racism—policies.  

Kendi ends Chapter 17 with a list of the steps a person needs to take to be an antiracist.  

Chapter 18, “Survival,” closes the book. It describes how cancer affected Kendi’s family. Kendi’s wife won her fight against breast cancer. The couple moved to Washington, DC, where Kendi began working at the Antiracist Research and Policy Center, which he founded at American University. As Kendi worked tirelessly on creating the research center, he ignored his weight loss and other symptoms of gastrointestinal disease. Testing revealed that he had a severe form of colon cancer. Kendi underwent six months of chemotherapy treatments, which left him weak.  

Kendi finds in these experiences an apt metaphor for society. He compares cancer to the racism that has spread throughout every aspect of life in the United States and threatens to spread throughout—and finally kill—American society. He wonders if huge infusions of antiracist policies might cure America of its metastatic racism in the same way that his chemotherapy helped cure him. He ends by asking Americans to believe in the possibility of transforming America into an antiracist nation. He believes that racist policies can be destroyed. 

Analysis: Failure, Success, Survival: Chapters 16–18

​In Chapter 16, Ibram X. Kendi attributes the failure of antiracism to a lack of focus on racist policies and excessive focus on ideology. Focusing on ideology is like focusing on the symptoms of a disease; focusing on racist policies is focusing on destroying the disease itself.  

Chapter 18 continues this line of thinking, as Kendi uses his own experiences with cancer to develop a metaphor comparing the cancer that is ravaging his body to the cancer of racism that has metastasized through and may perhaps kill America. He likens his chemotherapy treatment to saturating America with the immunotherapy of antiracism. Once that is done, antiracist policies can be used like a surgeon’s scalpel to remove the last remnants of the cancer of racism.  

Chapter 18 also explores the cure for the cancer of racism, as Kendi explains that antiracists will have achieved some success when antiracist ideas are the societal norm. But success is dependent on antiracists fully understanding the subtle, hidden racist policies that guide institutional action and then formulating actions to undermine these racist policies and replace them with policies that promote racial equity. Kendi envisions the destruction of racist policies as well as the racial inequities these policies cause. This vision is broad and ambitious in scope. Perhaps that is why Jeffrey C. Stewart of the New York Times calls this book “the most courageous book to date on the problem of race in the Western mind.”