Kendi made the common mistake of preserving the central idea of racism (that one group is superior to another), simply flipping it to put the subordinate group at the top and the dominant group at the bottom. Now, years later, he sees that people should respond to hierarchies by rejecting the principle of hierarchy altogether, not just moving different groups up and down the latter. His friends’ refusal to date dark-skinned women is an excellent small-scale example of an informal racist policy, which produces inequities even though it is not a formal law.