Summary: Culture, Behavior, Color: Chapters 7–9

In Chapter 7, “Culture,” Ibram X. Kendi recalls that he hated high school, though he didn’t know why. Maybe it was white teachers who viewed his Black body as “a weed to be plucked out of school and thrown into prison.” Kendi spent most of his time hanging out with other kids on a busy shopping street. He spoke Black street language and wore the baggy jeans popular among his Black peers. Some white commentators denigrate Black culture because it differs so much from “standardized” white culture, he notes. This is cultural racism, which makes one race the standard to which others are compared. Antiracism, on the other hand, rejects the setting of cultural standards or hierarchy. Jeffrey C. Stewart of the New York Times critiques Kendi for his lack of attention to the great things about Black culture. Stewart writes, “the African-American mastery and transformation of Anglo-American culture—its language, behaviors, values, and arts—is one of the greatest accomplishments in world history.” Yet Kendi defines himself through young Black culture, which he found a joyful experience in many ways. 

Many social critics at the time claimed “street” was not culture and Black people lacked their own culture. Others saw Black street culture as an outgrowth of African culture, even though Black adults, including Kendi’s parents, thought of Black street culture negatively.  

When his family moved to the more rural South, Kendi felt lost. Black street culture had not migrated southward. Kendi began to look down on southern Black culture as inferior to northern Black street culture. Looking back, he sees this as racist because it was an example of cultural racism. Kendi explains that his judgment of southern Black culture was the equivalent of white people judging Black street culture. Culture must not be judged in relation to an artificially standardized culture.  

In Chapter 8, “Behavior,” Kendi continues to describe his high school experience. He’d still been a poor student at his southern high school. But he points out that his irresponsible behavior should not reflect on the behavior of all Black students. A white teenager who does poorly in school does not tarnish the entire white race. Individual behavior seen as representative of an entire race is a racist concept, generally applied only to Black people. Kendi agrees that critiquing him as a bad student would have been true and acceptable but that characterizing him as a bad Black student is racist. 

Behavioral racism, then, makes one individual’s behavior representative of an entire racial group. A racist is anyone who describes a behavior as a Black behavior. An antiracist is someone who knows there is no behavior particular to a race. Assimilationists explain Black behavior by asserting that oppressed people have negative behaviors because they are oppressed. However, this “oppression-inferiority thesis” is just another form of racism. Others claim that Black behavior has been shaped by slavery (or segregation or discrimination). But this version of the oppression-inferiority thesis is also racist because it uses the behavior of Black individuals to characterize an entire race of people. Not all Black people exhibit nonstandard behavior, so individuals cannot represent their whole racial group. Yet judging a race by individual behavior leads Black people to pressure other Black people to behave as white people think they should behave. If they don’t, they are seen as “letting down” all Black people. Thus, young Kendi felt pressured not to let down his race with Black street behavior.  

Kendi ends this chapter harkening back to his speech at the oratory competition. In that speech, he harangued Black people about their behavior and blamed this behavior for causing the problems faced by African Americans. Again, Kendi acknowledges his speech was racist. An antiracist knows that individual people may behave poorly but that this is not a function of race and does not represent the whole race.  

Chapter 9, “Color,” defines colorism as “racist policies . . . that lead to inequities between Light and Dark people.” Color antiracism supports policies that ensure equity between Light and Dark people and recognizes that colorism falls especially hard on Dark people. As an illustration, Kendi shares that at college, he started wearing eye-lightening contact lenses because he thought light eyes were more attractive. He notes that he wanted to “be Black” but not “look Black.” At the time, he didn’t know what colorism was, but he continued to value Light characteristics in himself and others. he recalls that Dark women were insulted with slurs about their looks. But when Kendi dated a Light woman, he began to hate himself for preferring her looks. He broke up with her and started dating Dark women and began denigrating men who date Light women. Ericka Taylor of National Public Radio praises Kendi for his “transparency [that] serves as an invitation to all of us to accept and grow from our racist behavior.”  

Kendi also explains that Light people can have a hard time integrating with and proving their Blackness to Dark people. So there’s racism running in both directions. The Black Power movement of the 1960s liberated Black people to take pride in their natural looks. But colorism persists in public policy, as Light people get shorter prison sentences, better jobs, more money, and even more parental attention. When Black singers and performers started bleaching their skin, the obsession with Lightness reemerged. A color antiracist works to eliminate standards of beauty linked to the typical skin or eye color, hair texture, or facial features of a racial group. 

Analysis: Culture, Behavior, Color: Chapters 7–9

​These chapters continue Ibram X. Kendi’s exploration of all the ways racism manifests in society. In Chapter 7, he explains how cultural racists create a cultural standard—typically white culture—and impose it on non-white racial groups. He uses his own experiences to show that cultural racism is something that even oppressed groups can perpetuate, again emphasizing that racism is not something only white people sustain but something that most everyone in society helps to feed. Chapters 8 and 9 continue to probe this idea.  

Chapter 8 explores how racializing behavior creates a system in which individuals are seen as representative of their entire race—for good or bad. Both white and Black people contribute to this dynamic. White people may use the bad behavior of one Black person to bolster stereotypes about all Black people. Black people may pressure Black individuals to “represent” their race in positive ways. Colorism, covered in Chapter 9, is another example of racist attitudes held by Black people. Colorism reflects Black racist attitudes derived from white standards of beauty, so it also shows that while racism was begun by and benefits white people, it is not only white people who now perpetuate it.  

Again, a core point of Kendi’s inclusion of forms of racism among a variety of races and ethnicities is that any person can have a racist perspective, so all people should try to become antiracists.