Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America

Moynihan’s gloomy report hit the pages of Newsweek just after the Voting Rights Act passed. As it shared the depressing news about black families, the “urban rebellion” in the Watts neighborhood in Los Angeles set out “the aggressive panther” of black activism “that needed to be controlled” (393).

Kendi uses this landscape to return to Angela Davis, who, upon graduating from Brandeis University, traveled to Frankfurt, Germany for graduate school. Antiracist thought bloomed in Europe at the time, with a focus on language like “blackmail” and “blacklisting” “that had long associated Blackness and negativity” (394). The terms “ghetto” and “minority” were on the rise in America. “Ghetto” emerged from Kenneth Clark, the scientist famous for doll tests, in his 1965 text Dark Ghetto. The term, borrowed from segregated Jewish communities under Nazi Germany, became synonymous for Blackness and poverty, even though some referred to all black neighborhoods as ghettoes. “Minority” was intended to refer to numerical proportions, Kendi writes, but “it quickly became a racial identifier of African Americans (and other non-Whites)” (394).

Black people in ghettoes were contrasted with Asians, the “model minority” (395). While antiracists battled both the term “ghetto” and the term “model minority,” “assimilationists were negatively loading the terms… with racist associations in 1966” (395). But antiracists, led by SNCC leader Stokely Carmichael, worked to pull negative associations from the term “Black.” They moved to place negative associations on the term “Negro,” preferred by King and others, calling it a term for “accommodation and assimilation”, and worked to “[remove] ugliness and evil from the old identifier” of “Black” (395).

Carmichael, King, and Floyd McKissick led the 1966 March Against Fear through the American South. During the march, Carmichael started to call for a chant of “Black Power!” in the crowd (396). Majority black areas “latched onto Black Power” in response to palpable hostility (396). White people interpreted “that Black Power meant Blacks violently establishing Black supremacy and slaughtering White folks” (396). This racial fear fueled Republican gains in the 1966 elections.

The Black Panther Party and other Black Power groups came of age in 1967. This growth, Kendi writes, “reflected the fact that Black youngsters had realized that civil rights persuasion and lobbying tactics had failed” in many ways (397). Protests erupted across the country, including one led by the new National Welfare Rights Association. But rhetoric calling protesters lazy was well received: Congress “passed the first mandatory work requirement for welfare recipients” that year (398).

Davis returned home to join the Black Power movement, finishing her doctorate at University of California San Diego under the leadership of her mentor, Marcuse. She quickly learned of diversity within the movement: “Black Power appealed to activists of many ideological stripes” (399). Even King drifted toward the movement, and accordingly “made his way out of the good graces of assimilationist America that year” (399).

Recognizing the unequal benefits of desegregation work, which disproportionately benefited elites, King focused on the Poor People’s Campaign, which sought an “economic bill of rights” (399). Kendi notes that this movement reflected much of the Black Panther platform. King then criticized the Moynihan report and called for “civil disobedience, not persuasion” (400). At the same time, Carmichael coauthored a book that coined the term “institutional racism,” which created problems beyond just acts of “individual racism” (400).

Johnson’s 1968 State of the Union address pointed at the “raging” masses around him: both raging at racial violence, and raging out of fear of racial rebellion. The film The Planet of the Apes, released that year, pictured this “racist panic” metaphorically. Kendi notes that by 1968, all politicians called for “law and order” (401). This motto translated to police brutality, which led to a cycle of rebellion, rhetoric, and violence.

Eldridge Cleaver, a Black Panther, spoke out against this police violence. His book, Soul on Ice, sold one million copies and was “frigidly controversial” (401). It was a call “to redeem the tragic colonized male” and fight against “the racist idea of the emasculated Black man […] [and] [q]ueer racism and gender racism” leaped out of the book (402). Still, the text also praised the beauty of black women and showed disdain for those black men who did not. Black femininity was pathologized, and, by extension, so was the black family. Working against this was sociologist Andrew Billingsley, who in 1968 “refused to analyze Black families from the criteria of White families,” an antiracist breakthrough (403). His work attempted to free black communities and culture from this pathologizing.

President Johnson responded differently to the violence, assembling a National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders to report on the 1967 turmoil. The majority-white panel, called the Kerner Commission, surprised the country when it “unabashedly blamed racism for urban rebellions” (404). It “proclaimed the progression of racism” in America (404). Nixon disapproved; King approved; Johnson felt that “his own [group] had overblown White racism” (404). He largely ignored the vast recommendations for aid and housing, though he did allocate funding for police spying on Black Power groups. For his next commission, he selected different members, who recommended further police funding.

In April of that year, Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination sparked rallies in over 125 cities. Davis led the Los Angeles group, which she guided away from the Los Angeles Police. Racist American presidential candidates rebuked what they saw as disorder among blacks. Kendi writes that “King’s death transformed countless doubly conscious activists into singly conscious antiracists,” and Black Power bloomed (406). James Brown released “Say It Loud—I’m Black and I’m Proud” (406). Antiracist black groups worked on the “search for new standards, for Black perspectives, for Black people looking at themselves through their own eyes” (406).

In the years leading up to 1970, student groups made inroads at black universities. Nearly 1,000 higher-learning institutions introduced Black Studies, and intellectuals developed new antiracist textbooks for K-12 students. While racists looked down on these movements, “Black Studies and Black Power ideas in general began to inspire antiracist transformations among non-Blacks” (407). Multiethnic solidarities between the Black Power and Brown Power movements “challenged […] color hierarchies just as the emerging Black Power movement challenged the color hierarchies within all the multicolored Black ethnicities” (408).

Groups like the SNCC did struggle with gender infighting. Angela Davis, joined with other leaders like Kathleen Cleaver and Frances Beal, struggled with “racist patriarchs,” who repeated “myths of Black womanhood” to claim their superiority (408). By 1968, the SNCC in Los Angeles closed down because of this infighting. Davis turned to Communism, a group she hoped would begin to pay attention to racial discrimination. She joined the Che-Lumumba “collective of Communists of color” and began to work on the campaign of the first black woman presidential candidate, Charlene Mitchell (409).

Richard Nixon won the 1968 presidential election, Kendi writes, by a strategy of endearing rabid segregationists and attracting whites who feared black integration and equality. Historians, Kendi outlines, called this the “Southern strategy,” by which Nixon would “demean Black people, and praise White people, without every saying Black people or White people” (410).

Following Charlene Mitchell’s campaign, Davis began a teaching job at the University of California at Los Angeles. But Governor Ronald Reagan, empowered by an FBI report linking Davis to communism, had her fired. Davis responded with an appeal in court; she “entered into the public light,” which brought her hate mail and harassment (411). Though the courts ruled that Reagan’s anti-communist regulation was illegal, and Davis resumed her teaching post, the government’s interest in Davis did not fade.

Protesting both the imprisonment of three men accused of killing a prison guard in Soledad State Prison and her second dismissal from UCLA, Davis spoke out in front of rallying crowds. She had been fired for publicly criticizing an educational psychologist, Arthur Jensen, who “represented the revival of segregationist scholars in the late 1960s” (412). Davis connected this “academic enslavement to the judicial enslavement of political prisoners” (412).

Davis’s protests on behalf of the inmates led to her imprisonment. Jonathan Jackson, brother of George, one of the imprisoned men, held up a Marin County courtroom with a gun owned by Davis; she, as a result, “was charged with murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy” (413). She fled from the FBI and was tracked down in New York in 1970. Later that same year, she was extradited to California.

The FBI poster of Davis featured her Afro, which Kendi calls an emblem of movements away from assimilationists, even among their own race, who “classified natural styles as unprofessional or aesthetically inferior to permed styles” (413). Images of black people in culture became normal, with Hollywood’s “Blaxploitation” genre, which featured black people in action films (413). But “too often,” Kendi writes, the films regarded the black world as “the world of poverty, hustling, prostitution, gambling, and criminality” (414).

The debate over Roe v. Wade entered the public consciousness in the same year that Davis entered prison. While she was there, she started to think of “embryonic Black feminist consciousness” (414). When Frances Beal and the Third World Women’s Alliance arrived at a National Organization for Women (NOW) strike, they were told that Angela Davis was not part of “women’s liberation” (415), but Beal fought back. Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou joined the voices of black women entering, questioning, and enriching conversations about women’s rights.

Davis had many supporters, though, who wrote her letters and formed defense committees. They believed that “Nixon’s America had gone too far—too far in harassing, imprisoning, and killing hordes of antiracist, anticapitalist, antisexist, and anti-imperialist activists and condemning them for their ideas” (415). Though Griggs v. Duke Power Co. seemed to lead the court to condemn institutional racism, Black Power activists focused on their own movement.

A March 1972 convention in Gary, Indiana brought together “the largest Black middle class in history,” a new group of black elites (416). A strong economy and new policies meant that “the rate of Black poverty would dip to its lower level in US history” by 1973 (417). Importantly, Kendi notes, the rise of the financial status of blacks, coupled with a rise in political control over majority-black areas, did not necessarily mean a rise in antiracist politics.

When a jury acquitted Davis of all criminal behavior later that year, she “walked out backward,” facing those left behind for whom she hoped to fight (417). Davis was dissatisfied with the number of people in prisons, and the National Advisory Commission on Criminal Justice Standards and Goals agreed, concluding that the prison system was “a creator of crime rather than a preventer” (417). The Watergate Scandal also heightened attention to unequal jailing.

Davis returned to academia in 1975 to teach in the Claremont Colleges’ Black Studies program. She found similar segregationist and assimilationist thought to when she had left. As one sociologist, Charles Stember, focused on “White man’s sexual jealousy of the hypersexual Black man” as the core of racism, he pushed out women and LGBT people (418).

Queer antiracism, however, led by Audre Lorde, was on the rise in New York City. Ntozake Shange produced For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/When the Rainbow is Enuf for Broadway in 1976, a text that would become a “black feminist bible” (419). Queer and feminist antiracism built itself through the arts. The black feminist movement was a “portrayer of imperfect Black humanity,” but it was also criticized for showing black men abusing black women (420). Kendi notes that the tendency to see art as representing black behavior, instead of individual behavior, led to (and still leads to) “senseless media portrayals arguments” that see “the racist or antiracist portrayer” as a problem, rather than seeing “the generalizing consumers” as “the racist problem” (420).

Michele Wallace’s 1979 Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman “shaped the Black gender debate” (420). Many were drawn into Wallace’s idea that sexism was “a greater concern than racism” (420). Another debate emerged around Bo Derek’s cornrows in the movie 10. The rise of Black hairstyle as fashion, in an act of appropriation, recalled for many African Americans “the dusty racist idea that European cultures could overpower African cultures” (421). Kendi points that some black people spoke hypocritically in the debate, ridiculing white women for appropriating African hair after perming their own.

Elsewhere in popular culture, the film Rocky followed in The Planet of the Apes’s footsteps. It symbolically showed the fall of black empowerment at the hands of “White supremacist masculinity” (422). White power refused “to be knocked out from the avalanche of civil rights and Black Power protests and policies” (422). At the same time, Alex Haley’s Roots: The Saga of an American Family took over the New York Times Bestseller list, and the 1977 television version of the book became “the most watched show in US television history” (422). It overwhelmed racist ideas about the past previously entrenched in popular culture; Kendi writes that “the plantation genre of happy mammies and Sambos was gone with the wind” (422). 

Following the Rocky metaphor, Kendi describes Ronald Reagan as a “real-life” Rocky Balboa for the Republican Party. He had “fought down all those empowerment movements” and earned “law-and-order credentials” (424). Reagan problematized welfare, calling to put “welfare bums back to work” and endearing “Nixon’s undercover racists to his candidacy” (424). Gerald Ford fought off Reagan’s campaign and won candidacy for the Republicans in the 1976 election, but lost the general election to Democrat Jimmy Carter.

Carter’s administration was also “austere”: it cut many social programs and expanded the military (425). Unemployment rates, inflation, inequality, and rates of black poverty rose; locally, activists and residents found the fault in “corporate-friendly Black politicians” (425). Regents vs. Bakke questioned the quota system at the University of California medical school in front of the Supreme Court. The decision undid affirmative action measures and raised a movement against the idea: energy spent attacking antiracist movements in higher education meant that four years after the decision, “White students were two and a half times more likely than Black students to enroll in highly selective colleges and universities” (429). That disparity doubled by 2004.

Kendi next points to the standardized-test and GPA scores used to define admission as overlooked in this period, which focused on the question of whether or not schools should have “quotas” for nonwhite applicants. Though these tests did not predict success in a compelling way, they were used “to justify discriminating against” women, poor people, and nonwhites in admissions decisions (426). Discussions focused on quotas largely because of the belief that “race-conscious policies” were no longer necessary: “the United States had moved beyond racism in 1978” (427).

1978 also brought William Julius Wilson’s text The Declining Significance of Race, which solidified that view. Using the black middle class as its example, Wilson wrote that “class [was] more important than race in determining black access to privilege and power” (427). Discrimination, then, was not (for Wilson) happening for middle-income blacks, though evidence said otherwise. Thirty years later, Wilson “admitted the book’s shortcomings,” and suggested that he needed to advance “both race- and class-based solutions to address life chances for people of color” (428).

It became difficult to encourage black voters again in the late 1970s, partly due to a dearth of politicians worth voting for. Angela Davis, just 35 years old, joined Gus Hall on the Communist Party’s ticket for the 1980 election, though Davis was not completely satisfied by either the CPUSA or the state of antiracist activism at the time. In the Bay Area, Davis and colleagues fought a Klan that had “almost tripled its national membership between 1971 and 1980” (430). Police violence against black people was rampant. Davis’s campaign tore down “those who put profits before people,” but the campaign barely showed up in the media compared to the Carter-versus-Reagan showdown in the Democratic and Republican parties (430). Reagan, bolstered by the white Southern vote, won the election.

Under Reagan’s economic policies, which included an expanded military budget, “the median income of Black families declined by 5.2 percent, and the number of poor Americans in general increased by 2.2 million,” Kendi reports (431). Academic fields like sociobiology and physical anthropology took the helm, providing “racist ideas” that could “rationalize the newly growing disparities” (431). For the first time, these academics sought to avoid the label “racist,” while still blaming the problems black people faced on blacks alone. Davis and other antiracists fought back against this academic push. Along with activist writer bell hooks (hooks does not capitalize her name), Davis “helped forge a new method of study, an integrative race, gender, and class analysis, in American scholarship” (433).

While this movement occurred, Reagan rolled out his War on Drugs, a movement that criminologists at the time, who “were publishing fairytales for studies that found that racial discrimination no longer existed in the criminal justice movement,” did not realize “would disproportionately arrest and incarcerate African Americans” (433). Though “only 2 percent of Americans viewed drugs as the nation’s most pressing problem” at the time, Reagan prioritized the issue.

White people felt the benefits of a better economy and stuck with Reagan when 1984 came around. But the arrival of cocaine from CIA-backed Contras in Nicaragua created danger in some communities. Unemployment rates for young blacks were four times higher than thirty years before. Some of those unemployed people “started remaking the expensive cocaine into cheaper crack to sell so they could earn a living” (434). This practice was, in Reagan’s eyes, entirely the fault of blacks (434). In 1985, the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) began a media frenzy to create fear of the drug and its peddlers.

Just after vetoing the antiracist Anti-Apartheid Act, which would have sanctioned South Africa to de-incentivize apartheid, Reagan signed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act. It prescribed five years of jail time for dealers found in possession of five grams of crack (a drug associated with poor blacks) and five years for 500 grams of powder cocaine (a drug associated with rich whites). The act was bipartisan and “led to the mass incarceration of Americans” (435). The prison population, Kendi explains, “quadrupled between 1980 and 2000” (435). Though the same percentages of white and black people used drugs, 63.7 percent of people jailed for distributing drugs in 2000 were black. In 1996, two-thirds of crack users were white or Latinx, but 84.5 percent of defendants for possession of crack were black. Kendi notes that higher policing in black neighborhoods likely contributes to many of these statistics. Importantly, he notes that this higher policing is justified in spaces of high unemployment: “certain violent crime rates were higher in Black neighborhoods simply because unemployed people were concentrated in Black neighborhoods” (437).

Blaming crime on the results of Reagan’s economic policy, though, was not an option. Studies connecting black neighborhoods to violent crime routinely excluded drunk drivers, who were overwhelmingly white and male. When the Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) sought criminal treatment of drunk drivers, who killed more innocent people than any other kind of violent criminal, the resulting sentences for DUIs and DWIs “paled in comparison with the automatic five-year felony prison sentence for being caught for the first time with five grams of crack” (438).

Kendi finishes his chapter on Reagan by outlining the debate over the trope of the black “Vanishing Family,” as CBS called it in a special report. Though Davis did some complicated math to clarify demographic shifts toward younger, single female parents, widespread propagandist opinion blamed welfare. Gary Bauer, Reagan’s chief domestic policy adviser, named welfare benefits as an incentive to bear children, and the consensus among white America became that something was wrong with black women, and the black family. Poorer blacks supposedly lacked values that would push them out of the welfare system.

The instinct toward black uplift and media suasion returned with The Cosby Show. Kendi notes that the show was thought “to redeem the Black family in the eyes of White America” (440). Cosby’s vision of “what was possible if [Black Americans] worked hard enough and stopped their antiracist activism” was supposed to “persuade away the racist ideas of its millions of White viewers” (440). Though that mission worked to a degree, it also reaffirmed the idea that racism was a thing of the past, that the Huxtable family “were extraordinary negroes” (440).

But the degradation of the “racial drug war” continued with descriptions of “crack babies” who were “a bio-underclass” (441). Despite this late-80s fear, when one major Philadelphia study concluded in 2013, it showed that “poverty was worse for kids than crack” (441).

The publicity surrounding the concept of crime and Blackness in the 1980s was persuasive, and George H. W. Bush played it up in his 1987 Presidential campaign. McCleskey v. Kemp helped the matter when it “made constitutional the rampant racial profiling that pumped up the inhumane growth of the Black executed and enslaved prison population” (442). Black youth rose up in resistance of the police, particularly through hip-hop music. NWA’s “Fuck Tha Police” and Public Enemy’s “Fight the Power” pushed back on police surveillance; Spike Lee’s film Do the Right Thing adopted the latter song to bring together socially-conscious black music and film.

In 1988, Black Studies and hip-hop came together in academia. Professor Molefi Kete Asante proposed “cultural antiracism to counter the assimilationist ideas that continued their ascent after the demise of Black Power” (442). He called for “Afrocentricity” that would look beyond eurocentric worldviews (443). The next year, legal scholars, brought together by Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, met to define the antiracist intellectual approach that is critical race theory. In the 1990s, this group would work, with Black Studies thinkers, to reveal “the progression of racism” (444).

Davis “thundered” from her academic post that racial progress was a myth. Those who responded, including Ronald Reagan in 1991, seemed to blame “global African incompetence” and handouts from capitalists for black poverty and stunted progress worldwide (445). Young black women were blamed for “loose sexual behavior,” and new, pain-inducing contraceptive devices called Norplant were released as a solution for the increased percentage of children born to young black mothers (445). Again, Davis came to black women’s defense, and “Louisiana legislator David Duke, the former KKK Grand Wizard, made a campaign about it” (445). By racializing welfare, someone like Duke could convince whites on welfare to vote for those who would reduce their benefits.

As black feminists fought to ban Norplant, women rappers, directors, and actresses struggled for exposure. Black men made leaps in cultural production, though, and especially in film. Black male sexuality became problematized when Magic Johnson suddenly quit professional basketball and admitted to being HIV-positive. Kendi writes that Johnson “became the overnight heterosexual face of the presumed White gay disease,” shifting focus on the disease as attacking innocent white bodies and toward attacking “ignorant, hypersexual” blacks (449). The police beating of Rodney King sparked even more controversy.

In 1991, President Bush nominated Clarence Thomas, “a paragon of self-reliance,” to replace Thurgood Marshall on the Supreme Court (447). Though Anita Hill testified to Thomas’s workplace sexual harassment and gender discrimination, he was confirmed in October. The court focused on “intentional discrimination” civil rights, overlooking the new, “more sophisticated affirmative action rationale for exclusion” (449).

Also in 1991, Angela Davis (along with 800 others) retired from the Communist Party, citing “the party’s racism, elitism, and sexism” (450). She did not, however, join the “New Democrats,” led by Bill Clinton, who went along in disavowing the violence against Rodney King (450).

Riots built as King’s abusers were acquitted. Antiracist books emerged, and Spike Lee’s 1992 film Malcom X featured the same video of the beating. While local politicians like Maxine Waters stood up for the protestors, Clinton blamed both sides, then decried the “savage behavior” of protestors (451). Rapper Sister Souljah made a provocative statement about reversing White-on-Black violence that started an uproar; and “by the 1993 Christmas season, rappers were hearing criticism from all sides of the racist rainbow” (452). Civil rights activist C. Delores Tucker decried “Gangsta rap” because it made “Black people look bad before Whites” (452). Tupac Shakur told his fans to “Keep Ya Head Up” (453).

Black women continued to gather to “defend against the defamation of Black womanhood” in the Clinton era (453). A 1994 conference honored Davis, who provided the keynote address. Kendi calls Davis “arguably America’s staunchest antiracist voice over the past two decades,” and lauds her for remaining “unwavering in her search for antiracist explanations” (453). In her speech, Davis called for “a new abolitionism” and a way beyond prisons (454).

In Clinton’s first State of the Union, he endorsed a “tough on crime,” “three strikes and you’re out” approach to policing (454). Both Democrats and Republicans applauded the $30 billion crime bill that came out of this claim, called the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. While black rappers responded with a discourse, in music and in videos, about how black men were understood as criminals, an academic debate began over “whether Black people were natural or nurtured fools” (455).

The academic debate over whether intelligence could be measured “[endangered] the racist perceptions” of academia on many levels (456). Kendi points to Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life as the “landmark book” that revitalized standardized tests as standard intelligence fell under attack (456). Their two explanations for achievement gap differences were biological (segregationist) or environmental (assimilationist). Because “genetically inferior” poorer people had more children, Herrnstein and Murray claimed, they would overcome the “cognitive elite” if given “artificially manufactured outcomes” (457).

These racist ideas were a foundation for New Republican policy. In the 1994 midterm elections, the party devised a “Contract with America” to be “tough-on-crime” and “tough-on-welfare” (457). “Personal responsibility” was the antidote to black people’s ills; they should “stop blaming racial discrimination” and “depending on government to fix them” (458). Kendi notes that this trope of laziness revitalized the old slaveholder depiction of African Americans as lazy.

The debate over The Bell Curve continued after the election. Segregationists, assimilationists, and antiracists were “powerful,” Kendi writes, which made this debate controversial (459). Reagan aide Dinesh D’Souza decreed “the end of racism” in 1995, building on the idea “that racial inequality was due not to discrimination, but to genetics” (460). D’Souza, identifying as a “minority” and claiming “antiracist” sentiments, called “liberal antiracism” the “main obstacle” for blacks (460), but the media, in “one of the most racially charged years in US history,” showed that this idea was a farce (461). D’Souza omitted the case of O.J. Simpson, that year, or the rise of Don Black’s white supremacist website, Stormfront.org, from his argument (461).

Black culture, and its “moral poverty,” was to blame for a recent 300 percent rise in Black teenage murder, according to John J. Dilulio. He was not alone in seeing young black men, in “baggy clothes” and listening to hip-hop, as “a scary character” (462). But black people united for the 1995 Million Man March on Washington, one that black feminists like Davis decried for its sexist prioritization of black masculinity.

Coinciding with the Million Man March, African Americans circled around Mumia Abu-Jamal’s execution that August. Protestors could not stop the order. Black organization, that summer, was “doubly conscious of racist and antiracist ideas,” Kendi writes, and the March leaned on the “personal responsibility” idea that black men could uplift their own communities (463). But the antiracist idea “that there was something wrong with rampant discrimination” was also a cornerstone of the demonstration (464). Clinton perpetuated the idea of personal responsibility with a series of bipartisan acts connected to it. “Welfare reform” took center stage, though “programs for the poor represented only 23 percent of the non-defense budget” at the time (465).

Black hate for other black people also grew. Chris Rock’s “Bring the Pain” offered “a litany of antiracist jabs at Blacks and Whites” and “introduced the three main comedic topics for a new generation: relationships, the racism of White people, and what was wrong with Black people” (465). This “doubly conscious Black comedy” became a site for both “antiracist and racist ideas” (465).

In 1996, California voted to ban affirmative action in schools. Standardized testing and funding allocation did not change, and African-American enrollment at University of California schools started to decline. Advertisements for the cause erroneously used Martin Luther King Jr.’s image to claim that affirmative action was “discriminatory” (465).

The day after the 1996 election, which won Bill Clinton another term as president, the film Set It Off entered theatres. It “humanized inner-city Black perpetrators of illegal acts” in a way that, Kendi writes, politicians refused to (466). Film critics loved the movie, though politicians did not seem swayed by it.

As Clinton expressed his hope to start “a great and unprecedented conversation on race” in 1997, bands of black people united to make sure their voices emerged (467). Black feminists united in Philadelphia in a Million Woman March. However, Newt Gingrich’s idea that “racism will not disappear by focusing on race” was also persuasive, introducing the idea of “color-blindness” into the mainstream (467). “The Race Card” was creating a race problem where it didn’t exist, and liberal “white guilt” exacerbated the problem (468). These ideas began to shape opinion on the Supreme Court. 

The idea of multiculturalism took hold with the idea of colorblindness, Kendi explains. Assimilationist thought that people of all backgrounds could normalize to “Euro-American culture” faded as Ethnic Studies arose. But celebrating multiple cultures, Kendi notes, does not overcome the domination of certain languages and religions in the country. Ethnic Studies and Afrocentric ideas remained fringe, “controversial” disciplines (469). Kendi notes that, at least in the public sphere, 1997 still saw the widespread “[enforcement] of cultural standards” (470).

Despite this sidelining, Davis continued in her antiracist black feminist cultural production with a new book, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism. She also continued her anti-prison activism. Spurts of antiracism, like the Oakland School Board’s 1996 resolution to accept Ebonics as an acceptable English language, accompanied such activism.

The Oakland Ebonics decision “set off a typhoon of assimilationist ire and antiracist defenses” at the end of the century (471). Kendi calls this ire an expression of the fact that, “despite the lip service they gave it, many Americans despised multiculturalism” (472). Providing “bilingual education for […] Ebonics speakers” became “another example of Black America’s self-sabotaging” (472). Self-victimizing, separatism, or “Black anti-intellectualism” all became markers of this self-sabotage (473).

John McWhorter, who opposed the Oakland decision, “[mobilized] a loud Black minority” to articulate that “struggling Black folk [needed] to take personal responsibility and work harder” (473). Kendi recognizes that these feelings “may have been deeply personal” (473); “[l]ike racist Whites, racist Blacks believed” that they found success because of their extraordinary gifts and work ethic (474).

Decoding the human genome only helped this thinking: Clinton himself, in 2000, reported that the results of the human genome project showed “that in genetic terms, all human beings, regardless of race, are more than 99.9 percent the same” (474). Segregationism “should have […] ceased” in response to this claim that “race has no genetic or scientific basis,” Kendi writes (475). But segregationist scientists instead focused on the 0.1 percent, and tried “to figure out something that did not exist: how the races differed genetically” (475). Biological racism continued, even as some scientists tried to stem the tide.

The 2000 presidential election—which led to debate over the destruction of black votes and the opportunity to vote in Florida—went to George W. Bush. After claiming the success of racial progress before the United Nations, Kendi writes, the US Supreme Court allowed for racism in elections. Though Bush worked to focus on evangelical leaders and “personal responsibility advocates,” antiracism, globally, picked up, until the terror attacks of September 11, 2001 (477).

In 2003, a “shocking” Supreme Court ruling upheld the University of Michigan’s affirmative action policy (478). Kendi cites Sandra Day O’Connor’s opinion that the court expected “the use of racial preferences” to be unnecessary within twenty-five years (478). President Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act introduced more standardized testing to assess learning goals, which made this racial parity hard to work toward. Kendi calls the act “the latest and greatest mechanism for placing the blame for funding inequalities on Black children, teachers, parents, and public schools” (479).

Bill Cosby was one of the leaders of the movement for self-help. But Barack Obama, in his keynote at the 2004 Democratic national convention, “subverted” the message of this “blame-the-poor tour” (480). Obama pointed out that the poor and powerless did work to take responsibility. He thus “presented himself as the embodiment of racial reconciliation and American exceptionalism,” and became “poised to embody the future of the Democratic Party” (481).

Kendi calls Obama’s 2004 memoir, Dreams from my Father: a Story of Race and Inheritance, an “antiracist litany” (482). Though the text called out the phenomenon of the “extraordinary Negro,” Kendi writes, that is exactly the title racists “of all colors” accorded to Obama in 2004 (483). Where segregationists before “had despised these extraordinary-Negro exhibits,” Kendi writes, Obama seemed to offer them a chance to “end the discourse on discrimination” (483).

August 2005’s Hurricane Katrina “blew the color-blind roof off America,” writes Kendi, revealing “the dreadful progression of racism” in a world that had declared racism non-existent (484). “Disaster capitalism,” which takes advantage of disasters to liquidate the black and the poor, took root (484). The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) delayed relief, and “thousands of residents of the predominantly Black Ninth Ward” of New Orleans were trapped (484). Media coverage was also, often, racist: in Kendi’s words, “Racist Americans” who believed biased stories also believed “the outrageous lies of those who were saying that Black people in a disaster zone would shoot at the very people coming to help them” (485).

Academics and rappers alike spoke out about the disregard for poor black lives but leaders, including Bush, were upset to be called racist in response to Hurricane Katrina. Those who called them racist, who pointed out discrimination, “were lying—they were playing their race cards” (486). The Duke Lacrosse gang-rape of Crystal Mangum, a black single mother, brought out the ire of “the national antiracist, anti-rape, and antisexist community” (486). When it emerged that Mangum lied about her rape, racist and sexist individuals used her lie to generalize about “all Black people, all women, and especially all Black women” (487). As antiracists and antisexists belittled Mangum for setting their work back, their frustration was also “setting rape culture and racism back” (487).

Kendi returns, after Mangum’s case, to Angela Davis, who continued to protest the Iraq War in the early 2000s. Black activists focused in on the use of racial slurs, including the n-word, in public spaces. But, Kendi notes, other racist terms “were allowed to live on in the dictionary of racism” (488).

In a racially-charged public atmosphere, Barack Obama prepared for the 2008 presidential election. Kendi notes that many racist minds, including Joe Biden, described and viewed Obama “as an extraordinary Negro” (489). Time suggested that African Americans seemed to support Hillary Clinton more than Obama because they were skeptical that he was “ordinarily Black like them” (489). When he won the Democratic primary, the media “became obsessed with” his wife, Michelle, framing her as a combination of many black female stereotypes (490).

The media searched for “dirt” on the Obama family (490). Their pastor, Jeremiah Wright, was pointed out for having supposedly anti-American beliefs. When Obama stood to address the conflict, Kendi points out, “many Americans did not see Obama as merely a politician saying what he needed to save his campaign” but “as an esteemed, knowledgeable and sincere expert lecturer on race” (491). Like King and Du Bois before him, Kendi notes, Obama lumped Wright in as an “angry” antiracist, taking a more assimilationist approach that would appeal to a broader audience (492). Though Obama “uttered quite a few antiracist words in the speech” he also legitimized “racists resentments, saying those resentments were not racist” (493).

Politicians of all stripes praised the speech. Obama’s election gained momentum, even as racist Americans pointed out Obama’s Arabic middle name to incite hateful resentment. Obama spoke out against missing black fathers, leaving an echo where others needed to point out the relative presence of black fathers compared to fathers of other races. Even in popular culture, a good black man seemed hard to find.

Despite some of these issues with Obama’s campaign, 64-year old Angela Davis voted for Obama. This was her first vote “for a major political party” (495). She joined people “dancing on streets around the world” when Obama won the presidency (495). And even though racist attacks on black people began and continued in the following weeks, “the producers of racist ideas were working overtime to take down some of their color-blind rhetoric,” and cited the Obama presidency as the end of a need “for protective or affirmative civil rights laws and policies” (496).

Kendi breaks down the statistics of those who voted for Obama to explain that white voters voted for Obama in about the same numbers as they had for Democratic candidates since Lyndon Johnson. The Epilogue reflects upon “what if” statements: all of the racist thoughts that might have shrunk the numbers of white, nonwhite and young voters who decided to vote for Obama. Even for those who voted for Obama, the question discussed by racists and antiracists over whether America was or was not post-racial became an active one.

Kendi cites black economic disempowerment, after the 2008 financial crisis, and anti-black violence as reasons why America is not post-racial. Obama held back from reaching too far into antiracism, as a president, but pundits like Glenn Beck still began to call him “a racist” (499). While it was acceptable for Obama to criticize “millions of Black people,” criticizing “a single White discriminator” was “race-speak” and “hate-speak” (499).

Antiracist voices continued to emerge, Kendi writes, in Occupy Wall Street protests and intersectional transgender activism. They “seemed to be protesting everywhere, especially in front of prisons,” following Davis’s historical lead (501). When Michelle Alexander released The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, she “exposed the life of postracial America” (501). The 2012 murder of Trayvon Martin, and the court case that followed it, set off a string of anger: “antiracists were upset, and assimilationists were of two minds” (501).

The #BlackLivesMatter movement was born out of a string of acts of police violence against blacks through 2014. It became “the antiracist declaration of the era” and a unifying cry. Similarly, the #SayHerName movement came out as part of “a black freedom movement,” which sought to incorporate “different experiences that are rich and complex” into a single empowerment movement (503).

Kendi turns to antiracists to call for “the day [...] when Black lives will matter to Americans” (503). He summarizes his own text by recalling that “racial reformers have customarily requested or demanded that Americans, particularly White Americans, sacrifice their own privileges for the betterment of Black people” (503). But he points out that this approach says that “racism materially benefits the majority of White people,” and that whites “would lose and not gain” in an antiracist America (503). This generalization, he notes, discounts class disparity, which defines whites’ experience in America.

As a result, Kendi writes, “antiracists should stop connecting selfishness to racism, and unselfishness to antiracism” (504). They should “have intelligent self-interest,” he writes, and explains how many groups can accomplish this task by remembering that they are not free of racism until all black people are (504). There is only a very small number of people “who need to be altruistic in order to be antiracist”; the rest “merely need to do the intelligent thing for ourselves” (504).

He then explains how uplift suasion has not only failed, but “has brought on the progression of racism—new racist policies and ideas after Black broke through the old ones” (505). Freedom for black people “to be their imperfect selves around White people” and show the “imperfections that make Black people human” and “equal to all other imperfectly human groups” is important (505).

Finally, Kendi turns to the idea of “educational persuasion,” a past strategy of racial reform. He shows, across the text, that this strategy is “predicated on the false construction of the race problem: the idea that ignorance and hate lead to racist ideas, which lead to racist policies” when the reverse order is more accurate (506). When racist policies come in or disappear, he notes, that action is usually out of self-interest. Education, historically, makes little difference; despite seeing “the essential facts,” Americans “remain for the most part indifferent and unmoved” (507).

Kendi points to lawmakers for the power they have “to stamp out racial discrimination” and “champion the antiracist cause of immediate equality” (508). But campaign demands place politicians in a difficult place, as they “know that the postracialists would reject any sweeping antiracism bill as discriminatory […] even if such a bill would actually benefit nearly all Americans” (508). He calls “the primary job of the powerful to know the facts of America,” and therefore claims that “trying to educate these powerful producers or defenders or ignorers of American racism” is not a good use of time (508).

Recognizing that Americans “have discarded old racist ideas,” Kendi cites their replacement with new racist ideas as the reason why “the effort to educate and persuade away racist ideas has been a never-ending affair in America” (509). He believes that if American can “eradicate racial discrimination, then racist ideas will be eradicated, too” (509).

Though Kendi praises protest as a means of creating “positions of power,” he states that protesting racial discrimination is also “a never-ending affair in America” (510). He calls for antiracists to take power “over institutions, neighborhoods, counties, states, [and] nations” in order to create an “antiracist tomorrow” (510). He believes that “that day is sure to come”; “maybe,” he writes, “just maybe, that time is now” (511).