How to Be an Antiracist

Kendi grew up in Southside Queens, where he dreamed of becoming a star basketball player. Kendi’s adolescence was marked by this dream and a passion for Queens-raised hip hop artists and rappers; when he eventually moved to Manassas, Virginia, he thought what he learned from Queens was the superior form of Black culture. He was surprised to find that Northern Virginia Black culture was very different, and he arrogantly asserted himself; he believed this attitude cost him a spot on the junior varsity basketball team. As an adult, Kendi understands that his belief in the superiority of Northern Black culture over Southern Black culture is no different than a belief in the superiority of Northern White culture over Northern Black culture. They are both forms of cultural racism.

Kendi uses language as an example through which Black people in the US come to share a common culture. The use of Ebonics has always been looked down upon as a form of “broken,” “improper,” or “nonstandard” English (83). Wall Street Journal reporter Jason Riley once argued that Ebonics denigrates Black American culture as it condones “delinquency and thuggery” (84).

However, enslaved African people in the early US forged Ebonics as a separate language from White slaveowners, much in the same way that Jamaican Patois and Haitian Creole were forged.