Chapter 5: Ethnicity

One of the most significant pieces of this chapter is the rationalization of Africans selling other Africans, which is attributed to another time period that is not connected to the Atlantic Slave trade where European intellectuals created the social construct of race. Ibram justifies his view that Africans didn’t see any similarities between them and their African slaves they sold.

This means the Africans didn’t create a slavery system based on race, the Europeans did. Ibram says that antiracism doesn’t get distracted with inner ethnic conflicts because that take away the focus from ethnic racism. He says: “We practice ethnic racism when we express a racist idea about an ethnic group or support a racist policy toward an ethnic group. Ethnic racism, like racism itself, points to group behavior, instead of policies, as the cause of disparities between groups.” Ibram says that when people compare West Indian Africans to African Americans, calling the African Americans lazy, “they are recycling the racist ideas of White Americans about African Americans.” (p.63)

Ibram teaches in this chapter that it is the White “cook” who has served the Black body, whether West Indian, Ghanian, or African American, racist ideas about the same ethnic body, even if they are from geographically different areas. Ibram suggests that Whites say Black immigrants have ‘transnational ethnicities’ that are superior to that of the African Americans. (p.67) Ibram sets the stage for understanding that racist ideas about inner ethnic groups from different locations come from the White body, not from within the Black body. To discourage such racist ideas, Ibram suggest that “Ethnic racism is the resurrected script of the slave trader.” (p. 58)