He recounts the words of historians and doctors who claimed over the last hundred and fifty years that Blacks were more improvisational by nature, that Black men had larger penises, and that Blacks were not as smart. Kendi remembers hearing that Black people were more physically gifted. These beliefs are widely held, but many people don’t realize they hold them. Adults in his life had been teaching him that superficial physical differences “signified different forms of humanity” (49), which was the definition of biological racism.īiological racists believe that the races are different in their biological makeup, that there is a hierarchy, and that inferior races should be segregated. In third grade, Kendi was aware that he was Black and not White to him, the White kids looked like they were a different species.
When she tried to grab his shoulder, he screamed not to touch him, and he remained when she went to get the principal. His teacher did not ask him what was wrong, assuming it was, as she did with Black kids, misbehavior rather than distress. The class went to the chapel when the morning service was over, he refused to get up. Therefore, Kendi prefers the term “ racist abuse,” and he states that only racists shy away from the R-word (in this context, "racist").Īfter the incident in the classroom, Kendi was roiling with anger. Kendi does not like the term, explaining how it came to prominence in the era of the first Black president and seemingly made it easier to talk around the word “racist.” A microaggression is an instance of abuse, and it is not minor. It describes “the constant verbal and nonverbal abuse racist White people unleash in Black people wherever we go, day after day” (46). Kendi explains that people have deemed such an occurrence a “ microaggression,” a term coined by Harvard psychiatrist Chester Piece in 1970. Kendi did not notice this until one day when a small, timid Black girl raised her hand to answer a question and was promptly ignored in favor of a White student. The teacher almost always overlooked the kids of color and called on the White kids instead. His class was mostly comprised of Black kids, with some Latinx and Asian kids and three White kids.
Kendi cannot remember the name of his White teacher, which may have been a coping mechanism, but he writes that people often “see and remember the race and not the individual” which is “racist categorizing” (44).
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