How to Be an Antiracist: Chapter 17: Success Summary & Analysis

When another scholar compared racism to a disease at a conference, Kendi raised his hand to contest this metaphor. He was in the small, predominantly white town of Oneonta, New York, where he had his dissertation fellowship and befriended Caridad, an Afro-Latinx feminist professor.

Kendi describes what a successful antiracist future would look like: power and policies would be antiracist, not racist; there would be equity among racial groups; and racist ideas would be marginalized. But the future is in the hands of present-day people: we have to fight for it. Caridad understood that, for a professor, this meant understanding and catering to each student’s needs.

At the conference, Kendi asked the lecturer, Boyce Watkins, why he viewed racism as a disease. Kendi saw racism as “more like an organ,” an essential part of American society. But Watkins ignored this question, and Kendi admits that it was misguided: he replaced Watkins’s self-serving metaphor with one that served him. Even as an antiracist, in other words, he was totally closedminded and hypocritical.

Kendi remembers reading the work of Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton, who defined institutional racism in 1967. They distinguished racist acts committed by and against individuals from racist acts committed by and against entire racial groups. Now, Kendi thinks that this is unhelpful—talking about “the system” is too vague. Additionally, talking about white and Black communities as a whole misleadingly suggests that all white people benefit equally from racism, and that all Black people suffer from it equally. When Kendi described racism as an organ, he was referring to this conception of racism as secret, unchangeable, and systemic. This conception implies that racism is impossible to change, but in reality, it’s possible to identify the people and policies that cause racial inequity. Of course, Ture and Hamilton never intended to mislead people—in the 1960s, their goal was just to get people to oppose policies, rather than individual prejudice.

Kendi remembers learning about Trayvon Martin’s murder. Trayvon was an ordinary teenager who dreamed of being an airplane pilot, and he was visiting his mother’s boyfriend in a gated community when a neighbor named George Zimmerman started following him. At the time, Kendi was busy researching how Black studies students helped transform other disciplines. He jumps back to Zimmerman stalking and calling 911 on Trayvon Martin, then shooting him dead. Soon thereafter, Alicia Garza started the Black Lives Matter movement, which motivated Kendi to write his previous book, Stamped from the Beginning.

To write Stamped from the Beginning, Kendi spent three years cataloguing thousands of pages of racist ideas. This helped him understand how historical racism affected his own thinking and figure out how to undo it. Over time, he abandoned the idea of not being racist, recognized that racism is fundamentally about policies, and realized that he supported some of these policies and racist ideas—in part because of his upbringing. Kendi then recognized what antiracism requires: developing antiracist power, recognizing the intersections between racism and other forms of oppression, and finally replacing racist ideas and policies with antiracist ones. This whole process was like a mental cleanse—but the everyday physical violence of racism continues.