How to Be an Antiracist: Chapter 2: Dueling Consciousness Summary & Analysis

Kendi defines the terms assimilationism and segregationism as they relate to antiracism. Assimilationists think that certain groups are inferior and thus try to change those groups and make them resemble dominant groups. Segregationists think that certain groups are inferior, but cannot be improved, and thus should be separated from the dominant group. Antiracists, on the other hand, believe in equality among all racial groups and try to promote racial equity.

Kendi was born in 1982, just after President Ronald Reagan announced his war on drug crime. Over the next two decades, the American prison population quadrupled because of longer sentences. Black and Latinx Americans are disproportionately likely to serve these sentences, even though they sell and use drugs at lower rates than white Americans. Richard Nixon pioneered this strategy in 1971, when he started inventing drug charges against Black activists who opposed him. But many Black activists turned around and supported the same racist policies during the 1980s: they called for harsher policing and decried “Black on Black crime.” Even Kendi’s mom and dad blamed racial inequity on Black people’s laziness and “ghetto culture.” In reality, Reagan’s policies accelerated inequality and unemployment, which led to an increase in crime. But most people still blame people, not policy, for this crime wave.

Kendi admits that his mom and dad chose “civilizer theology” over liberation theology. Despite wanting to be missionaries or poets, they took middle-class corporate jobs and surrounded themselves with white people instead. They developed a “dueling consciousness”: they saw themselves both through their own eyes and through the gaze of mainstream white society, and they struggled to choose between antiracism and assimilationism. But Kendi points out that assimilationism is racist: it suggests that one racial group should imitate another, superior one. Kendi has fond memories of his family’s church, but it reinforced their dueling consciousness. It preached both the antiracist idea that Black people should fight white supremacy and the assimilationist belief that they needed to change their culture and behavior in order to better themselves.

Kendi notes that white people also often suffer dueling consciousness: they get caught between segregationism and assimilationism, which are both racist ideas. Assimilationists want to help people of color improve—which they define as resembling white people. But segregationists see people of color as subhuman “animals” who need to be controlled or separated from white society. For example, Enlightenment philosopher David Hume was a segregationist: he thought non-white people could never be “civilized.” In contrast, Thomas Jefferson was an assimilationist: he argued that “all men are created equal” but thought people of color were “temporarily inferior” to white people and could become equal over time. Assimilationist policies aim to improve and integrate racial groups, while segregationist policies try to subordinate, isolate, or destroy them. On the other hand, antiracist policies assume that everyone is “already civilized” and try to foster racial equity.

The duel between white segregationism and assimilationism, like the duel between Black assimilationism and antiracism, has played out throughout history. There has been “antiracist progress” as well as “racist progress.” White people oscillate between assimilationism and segregationism, and Black people sometimes try to assimilate, only to find themselves rejected by segregationists. Kendi believes that the solution is antiracism, which implies that being American does not mean being white—or trying to resemble white people.