How to Be an Antiracist Summary and Analysis

Summary: My Racist Introduction

Ibram X. Kendi begins with some of his own experiences as a young Black man. He had been a rather indifferent student at his high school in Manassas, Virginia. Yet he’d been thrilled to learn he’d been accepted by Hampton University in Virginia. Young Kendi had had fairly low self-esteem, thinking he was too stupid to go to college. He’d been amazed that after winning his high school oratory competition, he’d made it to the finals in his county’s Martin Luther King Jr. oratorical contest.  

As an adult looking back, Kendi considers whether racist stereotypes of Black people as academically subpar made him judge himself as ungifted academically. Kendi admits that he’d internalized society’s negative views of Black people, to the point where he’d wanted to push them on others. Kendi feels ashamed of the racist speech he gave that long-ago day. The subject of each speech had been “What would be Dr. King’s message for the millennium?” and Kendi had prepared a speech that essentially blamed Black people for the fact that they were still not free of racism. In his speech, Kendi had blamed Black people for being feared by white people, for not valuing education or thinking, for having too many babies, and for “confining their dreams to sports and music” instead of intellectual pursuits. Kendi notes that American racist culture had given him a weapon to use against Black people, and he had indeed used it. The audience’s applause had spurred him on. He railed against Black people for lacking “intestinal fortitude” and against Black youths who were ignorant of how to succeed as adults. In her review of this book, Afua Hirsch of The Guardian writes, “[Kendi’s] honesty in linking his personal struggles to the work he has now undertaken is one of the most powerful elements in this compelling book.” 

As an adult, Kendi now understands this speech as a nightmare in which “his internalized racism [was] the real Black on Black crime.” He now cringes at how he’d blamed Black people for the problems a racist society created for them. Kendi shows why there’s no such thing as being “not racist” because “there is no neutrality in the racism struggle.” Either you’re for policies that promote racial equity, or you’re not. There’s no in-between. He stresses that the word racist is not a pejorative, or the equivalent of a racial slur. Instead it’s a description of how people identify themselves in relation to policies that create racial inequities. Making the word racist a slur leads to paralysis in the face of racist policies. Similarly, because “color-blindness” fails to acknowledge race, it fails to act against it.  

Kendi admits that his younger self used to be racist. But his good news is that being “racist [is] not [a] fixed identit[y].” Any person of any race can change by choosing not to be racist if they examine their beliefs and behaviors in terms of race and act to rid themselves and society of racism.

Analysis: My Racist Introduction

Ibram X. Kendi introduces the book with his own experiences, which explain his interest in the topic. He explains that as a young person he internalized society’s racist stereotypes about Black people. This affected young Kendi on a deeply personal level—he believed he was stupid because a racist society had normalized the idea that Black people were intellectually inferior to white people. Kendi admits this shows he was a racist, who had adopted the identity a racist society had imposed on him. He blamed Black people for being weak and self-destructive and for creating their own problems. The author’s experiences since that time led him to recognize the racism embedded in his own perspective.  

One of the main points Kendi introduces in this section relates to the term antiracist. He contrasts this with the phrase not racist, which seems neutral but which he sees as an excuse for inaction. He also distinguishes racist policies from personal biases, noting that seeing racism as an individual failing, too, provides an excuse for inaction. When a policy is identified as racist, policy makers immediately deny that it’s racist, because they’re not personally racist. In contrast to these common ways of seeing racism and racists, Kendi says that a racist is someone who doesn’t act to oppose and overturn policies that create racial inequity. Thus, anything that instills passivity and nonaction in people is inherently racist. Kendi’s concepts of racist/antiracist apply to all people and all races. By critiquing his own perspective as racist, showing that Black people can be racist, and defining the term racist apart from personal failings, Kendi anticipates readers who might feel defensive by the material in the book and sets the conversation on a more objective footing.