Intersectionality Theme Analysis

How to Be an Antiracist is principally about racism and antiracism, but Ibram X. Kendi also discusses other forms of inequity and injustice, like sexism, classism, homophobia, and transphobia. He builds on Black feminist scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept of intersectionality, which refers to how people who live at the “intersections” of these inequities experience them. Namely, these forms of inequity do not merely layer on top of one another—rather, they intersect to produce specific experiences that are not merely equivalent to the sum of their parts. For instance, a Black woman doesn’t experience racism in the same way as a Black man or sexism in the same way as a white woman. Rather, racism and sexism work together in the everyday abuse and social inequities that Black women experience. Therefore, conventional antiracist and feminist movements often exclude Black women (and other people who suffer multiple forms of inequity). Because inequity is intersectional, Kendi argues that a movement against one form of inequity must collaborate with movements against other forms of inequity. In fact, activists should actively work to eradicate all forms of inequity. In other words, to be genuinely inclusive and achieve meaningful equity, antiracists must also fight the other forms of prejudice that intersect with racism.

Racism is not a uniform force that affects everyone in the same way. Rather, it intersects with other kinds of social power and inequity to create a complex range of outcomes and experiences. For example, the intersection between race and class is particularly important. Poor and wealthy people who belong to the same racial group have different access to resources, so lumping them together means failing to truly understand their different circumstances and interests. To represent the interests of all people of color, antiracist movements must account for the intersections between classism and racism. If they don’t, they are likely to demand policies that primarily benefit upper-class people of color (like diversity in elite schools and corporate management).

Racism also intersects with sexism, homophobia, and transphobia in ways that create specific challenges for women of color and non-heterosexual or trans people of color. For instance, Black trans women are largely excluded from the formal economy by discrimination and face uniquely high rates of violence and poverty. This isn’t reducible to the challenges of being Black, trans, or a woman. Rather, it depends on the intersection of all three. In turn, this means that Black trans women cannot fight for their interests simply by joining an antiracist movement that ignores sexism and transphobia, a queer movement dominated by white gay men, or a feminist movement that ignores racism. If antiracist movements fail to account for the experiences of people who aren’t straight men, they unintentionally prioritize the dominant perspective of cisgender, heterosexual men like Kendi, who are a minority of people of color. In short, movements that are not explicitly intersectional end up unintentionally becoming exclusionary.

Racism not only interacts with other forms of inequity to create a diverse range of experiences but also itself encompasses many different kinds of prejudice and inequity, which antiracists must take into account. Racism depends on far more than just how racist ideas “racialize” people (assign them to racial categories). For instance, dark-skinned people tend to experience far more severe anti-Black racism as compared to light-skinned people, and African American and Black immigrant communities in the U.S. often hold ethnically racist ideas about each other. It is both misleading and counterproductive to assume that all of these groups have the exact same needs and interests just because they are all Black.

By identifying the intersections among different forms of social hierarchy, Kendi demonstrates how people who are disadvantaged by racial inequities can also perpetrate them. In his chapters on anti-white racism and the idea that Black people can’t be racist (which he calls the “powerless defense”), Kendi concludes that Black people cannot avoid scrutiny for their racism simply because they also face racism. First, he argues that some people simply do choose to invert racism and decide that white people are inferior to other races. This closely resembles other racist ideas, and it’s counterproductive and inexcusable: it leads people of color to target all white people instead of targeting racism. In reality, antiracist movements grow stronger by trying to identify anti-white ideas and replace them with antiracist ones. Similarly, Kendi rejects the powerless defense because it takes an overly simplistic view of power—it’s not logical to assume that all white people are oppressors and all Black people are oppressed. In reality, different forms of power intersect, and many Black people—like CEOs, police officers, and politicians—do have power, which they often use in racist ways. In contrast, many working-class white people have very little power but share antiracists’ interests in economic justice. But without understanding how different forms of power intersect, the fight against racism easily gets turned into an unproductive campaign against white people. Similarly, Kendi emphasizes that people of color can still be sexist, homophobic, elitist, ethnically racist, and so on. Just like white women should be accountable for their racism, people of color should be held accountable for their sexism—it cannot be excused simply because they are antiracists. On the contrary: Kendi argues that someone is not genuinely being antiracist if they exacerbate other social inequities and ignore the connections among them.

Kendi concludes that an intersectional worldview improves social movements by showing that nobody is totally powerless, nobody is above accountability, and everyone is responsible for promoting solidarity and inclusion. All power constructs and forms of inequity are connected to one another: they intersect and are based on the same fundamental logic of turning differences into hierarchies. So all struggles for liberation and justice are fundamentally linked, and for Kendi, a movement against one form of inequity must be part of a broader movement against all forms of inequity.