Summary: Biology, Ethnicity, Body: Chapters 4–6

In Chapter 4, “Biology,” Ibram X. Kendi defines a biological racist as one who believes that people of different races are “meaningfully different” biologically and who thinks these inherent differences result in a “hierarchy of value” among races. A biological antiracist believes races are “meaningfully the same in their biology.” Biologists have determined that there is no biological difference among races of people. Yet biological racists, who are generally segregationists, promote the ideas that racial biological differences exist and that these differences represent a justification for racism.  

The decoding of the entire human genome in 2000 revealed to the world the absence of genetic—and thus biological—differences among races of people. Humans are simply humans. People get their genes from their parents, but they are categorized into races by society. Scientists have found more genetic differences among African populations than between Africans and Western Europeans. Segregationists ascribe the 0.01 percent difference in genetics among humans to race. Assimilationists believe in the common humanity of all, but they err in refusing to recognize racial categories. Kendi asserts that race must be acknowledged so it can be eradicated by antiracists. Biological antiracists assert that there’s no distinction between white and Black blood or biology. Race may be a mirage, but it’s a reality of life for many people.    

Ethnicity is often a source of racism, and policies create inequity between racialized ethnic groups. These inequities are justified by racist ideas about these ethnic groups. Chapter 5, “Ethnicity,” states that ethnic antiracism is based on antiracist ideas and consists of antiracist policies that create equity among racialized ethnic groups. 

Kendi recalls incidents in high school when he and other Black classmates made racist jokes at Kwame, a Black classmate from Ghana, in Africa. Kwame was well-liked, but he was still the butt of cruel and racist put-downs from his classmates. Kendi and his friends mocked Kwame’s Ghanaian roots and joked that he was a “barbaric and animalistic” African. Kwame was the object of cruel jokes based on the ethnic racism of his African American friends. But ethnic racism affects African Americans too. When Kendi visited the home of a Haitian friend, Kendi felt the standoffishness of the boy’s Haitian parents. They viewed Kendi as “other” because he was not of their ethnic group. This phenomenon holds true for interactions among immigrant groups of many ethnic backgrounds. Thus there arises a hierarchy of ethnicities informed by and based on racism. Ethnic antiracism views all ethnicities as equal and focuses on the policies that create inequities among ethnic groups. Afua Hirsch of The Guardian praises Kendi for being honest about the differences among “African Americans and other black groups in the U.S. . . . [whose] historic mutual suspicions of each other are unsentimentally unpicked.” 

After having a long and meaningful talk together, both Kendi and Kwame came to a more profound understanding of where ethnic racist ideas originate and how to recognize and overcome them. Kendi now asserts that African Americans can be as ethnically racist toward immigrant groups as any other people. When they do that, they are “tightening the handcuffs of racist policy around their own wrists.” When policy makers promote ethnic racism as a divide-and-conquer strategy, the only winners are the powerful policy makers themselves.  

In Chapter 6, “Body,” Kendi discusses the body racist, defined as someone who perceives some bodies inherently more “animal-like and violent than others.” Most white Americans, he observes, associate Black faces with violence. This leads to the perception among white people that Black bodies are larger, more threatening, and more harmful than white bodies. Kendi even admits to fearing some of his Black neighbors.  

Smurf, a Black high school classmate, once pulled a gun on Kendi. Later, Kendi watched as Smurf bullied and then beat up and robbed a skinny kid on a bus. To this day, Kendi is ashamed that he was too scared to stand up to Smurf and stop the beating. Kendi had internalized white fear of the Black body. He distrusted and feared Black kids like himself. Policy makers responded to white fear of Black people by passing draconian anti-crime laws intended to put Black “super-predators” in prison with extended sentences. Kendi was so infused with this white view of the Black body and Black behavior that he’d worried that he would inevitably become a super-predator himself.    

Kendi noticed, and researchers proved, that violent crime correlated more closely with economics than with race. The Black body was not the cause of violence—unemployment and poverty were. Antiracists state that Black bodies are not the cause of violent crime; the real cause is the poverty that policy makers create for them.  

Analysis: Biology, Ethnicity, Body: Chapters 4–6

These chapters begin to work systematically through the ways racism manifests in society. In Chapter 4, Ibram X. Kendi addresses two ways that people use biology to discuss race and how both are fundamentally racist. On the one hand are those who use biological difference to promote racist ideas about the inferiority of Black and other non-white people, for example, white segregationists. On the other hand are assimilationists, who interpret genetics as proof that “there is only one race, the human race.” Although this position might seem “not racist,” it is exactly the kind of attitude that undermines antiracist efforts because it encourages people to ignore race. Thus antiracists occupy a middle way of believing race is not biological yet is real, nonetheless.  

Chapter 5 explores how racism creates hierarchies among ethnic groups. Ethnic racism also entails intersectionality because the despised ethnic group suffers from both racism based on their race and racism based on their ethnicity. To be an antiracist, a person must see that racism is racism and that powerful policy makers use it to divide the populace—particularly people of color—to prevent them from realizing their commonality and thus working together to exert political—and economic—power. 

Chapter 6 illustrates how racism is self-perpetuating. Kendi explains that it is the American fear of the violent Black body—a corrosive trope not based in facts—that causes separation between people in society. White people flee neighborhoods as Black people move in. Black people live in fear of their Black neighbors. In this way, relationships that could counteract racist ideas are sundered. Again, just as in Chapter 5, this suggests that the work of an antiracist is to oppose ideas and policies that divide.