How to Be an Antiracist

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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).