How to Be an Antiracist

by

Ibram X. Kendi

How to Be an Antiracist: Chapter 8: Behavior Summary & Analysis

Summary
Analysis
Kendi defines a behavioral racist as someone who conflates the behavior of individuals with that of entire racial groups. A behavioral antiracist understands that “racial group behavior” is a totally fictional concept.
Behavioral racism is about individual actions and traits, while cultural racism is about shared traditions, values, and norms. However, much behavioral racism comes from in a confusion between culture and behavior: racists wrongly assume that individuals’ racial and cultural identities cause them to behave in certain ways.
Themes
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Kendi did not try hard in high school, and the adults in his life pointed it out. This is similar to how politicians at the time told Black people they were wasting the opportunities granted to them by the Civil Rights Movement by, for instance, selling drugs, relying on welfare, and having too many children. These calls for individual responsibility tend to specifically target Black people—everybody criticized Kendi for not studying, but nobody cared when his white friends slacked off.
Although Kendi didn’t sell drugs, rely on welfare, or father children in high school, his lackluster academic performance was still a problem in the eyes of adults, because it fit in with this broader racist stereotype. In other words, as a young Black man, Kendi was asked to act in certain ways in order to help others overcome their own racism. This burden is actually part of racism, because it’s an expectation that falls to Black people but not white people, who usually get seen as individuals—not representatives of a race.
Themes
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Kendi explains that racism itself was one factor that dissuaded him from trying in school. He certainly could have overcome it—but it’s not reasonable to hold Black people to this extraordinary standard, when white people get second chances to make up for their mistakes. Kendi was a bad student, but it would be behavioral racism to call him “a bad Black student,” which implies that his poor performance represents Black people as a whole. “Racial-group behavior” is an imaginary thing because no individual’s behavior reflects their entire racial group.
Kendi points out that there’s a significant difference between succeeding despite racism, which is often hailed as antiracist progress, and eliminating racism to begin with, which is real antiracist progress. The idea that the achievements of Black politicians, business leaders, or writers mean that racism no longer exists is also a form of behavioral racism. This is because it sets up different behavioral standards for different racial groups and uses a few individuals’ behavior to distract from the overall inequities and trends experienced that a group experiences.
Themes
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White progressives largely managed to overcome their biological, ethnic, bodily, and cultural racism by the 1990s, but many still believe in behavioral racism. Like the conservative voters they ostensibly oppose, some white progressives believe that “Black people are ruder, lazier, stupider, and crueler than White people.” But there’s no evidence for this, just like there’s no “Black gene.” There are cultural differences among racial groups, but culture is not the same as behavior. Culture is about shared traditions, whereas behavior is about individual traits that all human beings can potentially have (like intelligence or laziness).
Behavioral racism is based on generalizations that connect individual behaviors to a whole group’s overall outcomes. Some Black people are rude, lazy, stupid, or cruel—and so are some white people. Characteristics like this are not tied to race. In reality, connecting behavior to race is just a way to shift attention away from policies and try to blame people for inequities.
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Quotes
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Behavioral racism has a long history. In the 19th century, proslavery writers argued that freedom made Black people behave badly, while abolitionist thinkers (like today’s assimilationists) believed that oppression made Black people immoral and lazy. Racist policy has always been traumatic for some African American individuals, but this does not mean that “Blacks are a traumatized people” as a whole.
Kendi again clearly distinguishes between talking about certain individuals’ behavior and using this behavior to generalize about an entire group of people, based on an entirely unrelated characteristic like race.
Themes
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Growing up, Black adults saw Kendi’s failures as failures for the whole race. His mom and dad pushed him to try harder in school, but when he struggled in International Baccalaureate (IB) classes, he started seeing himself as “an imposter.” He blamed this failure on being Black.
When Kendi accepted the behaviorally racist ideas that his parents and community fed him, he learned to see both his successes and his failures as simply the products of his race. He lost track of his own individual accomplishments and responsibilities in the process.
Themes
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Behavioral racists often note that Black students consistently score the lowest on standardized tests, which they believe suggests that Black students are less intelligent. But as Kendi realized while taking a GRE prep class in college, these test scores have very little to do with intelligence. Prep class only taught him to game the exam—just like lifting a lot of weight in the gym requires knowing the right form, scoring high on standardized requires learning certain techniques for taking them. Since they are just numbers, test scores often look like objective measures of intelligence. But in reality, the tests are the problem, not the students who take them.
Common debates about racial differences in standardized testing tend to assume that the tests measure people’s innate intelligence rather than a specific set of skills and knowledge that different groups have varied access to because of resource disparities. Finding a biological link between race and intelligence is impossible because neither race nor intelligence are objective scientific concepts.
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Quotes
The history of standardized taking makes this all the more clear. In the early 20th century, eugenicist scientists developed IQ tests in the hopes of demonstrating that different racial groups had different levels of intelligence. A few years later, they created the SAT for the same reason. Although assimilationists have long blamed environmental factors for Black people’s poor performance on these tests, the eugenicist argument never disappeared. Most notably, Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s widely discredited book The Bell Curve argued that genes help explain the achievement gap. Over time, policymakers have emphasized these tests more and more, based on the racist idea that they measure innate intellectual ability. But in reality, Black children aren’t less intellectually capable than white children. Rather, the testing gap shows that they have different kinds of intelligence adapted to their differing circumstances and, more importantly, that they attend schools with far fewer resources as compared to white students.
Intelligence tests are a circular process: to justify their racism, scientists created a biased tool that leads to biased results. When Kendi says that Black children have different kinds of intelligence, he isn’t saying that they are somehow innately different from white children. Rather, he’s saying that people who score lower on standardized tests aren’t less intelligent—it’s just that their intelligence doesn’t show up on standardized tests, which only measure specific kinds of cognitive abilities.
Themes
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In high school, Kendi flirted with a girl named Angela, who convinced him to sign up for the MLK oratorical contest. His speech was full of classic behavioral racist ideas. But now, he understands that antiracism requires that we “deracialize behavior” and treat it as a purely individual phenomenon. Angela loved his speech and backed him up when he accidentally slept through the contest—she convinced the judges to give him another shot, and he won. Kendi felt proud of his academic achievements for the first time and started looking forward to attending Florida A&M University (FAMU), the country’s largest HBCU (historically Black college or university).
Returning to the speech he discussed in the book’s introduction, Kendi can now clearly identify the reason his message was racist: he repeated the common idea that Black people are somehow predisposed to bad behavior, and that this behavior leads to poverty and violence. It’s illogical to say that a racial group behaves in certain ways because of race, and it’s much harder for people to never make mistakes than it is for society to change in order to forgive some of those mistakes. The fact that Kendi slept through his timeslot and still won the contest is even clearer proof that people’s good or bad behavior does not always correlate with their outcomes in life. It also attests to the value of second chances, something that Kendi advocates is necessary for antiracist activist to grant others.
Themes
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