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Chapter 6: Body
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in How to Be an Antiracist, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Racism vs. Antiracism
Activism and Social Transformation
Intersectionality
The History of Racist Ideas and Policies
Summary
Analysis
A cultural racist believes in a cultural hierarchy of different racial groups, which they hold to some standard of superior or supreme culture. A cultural antiracist rejects the idea that one culture can be better than another.
Just like antiracism is about fighting for equity and not about pretending that there’s no such thing as race, cultural antiracism is about learning to overcome one’s own cultural biases and respecting all other cultures equally. However, it doesn’t entail asking people to assimilate into a single culture or pretending that cultural differences don’t exist.
Themes
In high school, Kendi only cared about one thing: basketball. His teachers viewed him as threatening, and he barely tried in school. He spent his weekends hanging out with friends in his neighborhood’s main shopping street. They spoke in Ebonics—the African American dialect that is often considered an inferior and incorrect kind of English. Kendi disagrees with this assessment. He points out that in every region where Africans were enslaved, those African populations developed their own dialects—and racist people in positions of power always labeled them as inferior. For centuries, white people have demanded that Black people abandon their “broken” languages and learn the “standard” white dialect. But Kendi believes that there is no reason that “standard” dialects are superior to “broken” ones, besides cultural racism.
In many ways, Kendi’s high school experiences fit stereotypes about Black teenagers. This is because American society associates many elements of Black urban culture—like the social importance of basketball and the Ebonics dialect—with negative moral judgments about Black people. So while readers might think there’s something wrong with Kendi for fitting this stereotype, his point is actually to show how racist this stereotype really is. There’s nothing wrong with identifying common characteristics of Black culture, but it’s racist and illogical to associate these characteristics with inferiority, criminality, or a lack of intelligence. His point is that there is nothing inherently good or bad about any group’s culture.
Themes
Biological racism became taboo after the Holocaust, but cultural racism remains alive and well. White Americans tend to look at African American culture as a “distorted or pathological” version of their own superior culture. In other words, they measure culture against a standard, which creates a hierarchy of cultures. Antiracists reject such standards, but segregationists and assimilationists uphold them. Segregationists think that other cultures can never match up to their own, while assimilationists try to force other groups to resemble the dominant culture.
Biological racism might be the most blatant and openly reviled form of racism, but cultural racism is the most common today, so it’s arguably the most important to combat. When most Americans think of American culture, they probably think of white protestant culture. But this culture is only dominant and defined as truly “American” because it has had disproportionate power throughout history. Thus, even non-white Americans tend to implicitly measure the cultural beliefs and practices of nonwhite Americans through the racist idea that white culture is the gold standard.
Themes
In Kendi’s childhood, Black culture wasn’t imitating mainstream culture—it was precisely the other way around. For Kendi and his friends, this culture was mostly about fashion. And yet assimilationist writers still argue that Black Americans will solve racial inequities by giving up their “uncivilized” culture. Of course, for Kendi, “civilization” always meant school, while African American culture was his pride and joy. He was especially proud of how his ancestors repurposed European culture (like Christianity and the English language) to fit their needs. In fact, Kendi sees many African characteristics still alive in today’s African American culture, which he appreciates on its own terms. So when he and his friends listened to hip-hop on the weekends, they heard poetry—even while the adults around him heard a threat to their personal and cultural development.
Ironically, many racists both demand that African American people give up their fashion, dialect, and music while also celebrating these things in popular culture. While many white people consider it cool and fashionable to imitate Black culture, they view Black people who actually participate in that culture as inferior, dangerous, and unintelligent. These imitators aren’t appreciating Black culture on its own terms—they’re viewing it through the lens of white culture. In contrast, Kendi’s vision of African American culture shows how it’s possible for people of all races to appreciate African American culture on its own terms. This is the key difference between appropriating and celebrating other cultures.
Themes
Get the entire How to Be an Antiracist LitChart as a printable PDF.
When Kendi moved to Virginia and transferred to Stonewall Jackson High School in 10th grade, he was frightened of Southern racism. He had no friends and thought that basketball offered his only hope of making any, so he broke down and cried to his father when he didn’t make the JV team. Kendi admits that he looked down on rural Southern African American people, whose culture he viewed as somehow inferior to the urban, Northern Black culture he grew up with. He thought that New York superior to Virginia in every way—but now, years later, he sees that this arrogance was probably exactly why he couldn’t make any friends.
Again, Kendi shows that in the past, he was guilty of the kind of racism he’s describing now. This is a reminder that people who express racist beliefs and support racist policies are capable of change—in fact, it’s far better to educate and persuade them than to shun them. Kendi’s cultural racism came from his inability to understand the values and norms that people lived by in Virginia. Indeed, his difficulty adapting to life in the South shows how difficult it can be to learn to see other cultures as equal. This helps explain why so many Americans remain stubbornly prejudiced against the cultures of minority groups—but it also underlines the importance of fighting for change.
Themes
Cultural racism is, by definition, identifying a certain racial group as having a certain culture, then defining that culture as inferior. Even though Kendi did not look down on Black culture in general, he did look down on Black Southern culture, which is just as wrong as white New Yorkers looking down on Black New Yorkers, or 18th-century Europeans judging the rest of the world by their own cultural standards. Cultural antiracism simply means cultural relativism: we can see the differences among different cultures without thinking that these differences make any culture better or worse than any other. After a few months in Virginia, Kendi started to figure this out and learn to appreciate the local culture.
Although Kendi emphasizes that antiracists must respect different cultures rather than looking down on them, he also points out that there are no fixed boundaries between cultures. Black culture is a diverse category that includes the different cultures of African Americans, Black immigrants, and different places all around the country. Every time we judge another culture, we are really just expressing an idea from our own culture. In other words, all value judgments about cultures are themselves cultural judgments. Thus, such judgments are circular and illogical: it’s only possible to call another culture inferior if one already assumes that one’s own culture is the gold standard.
Themes
