Race is the American disease. There is no cure for the facts of the past, but you can buy absolution for feeling bad about them. That was the bargain sold to white liberals by Ibram X. Kendi, the superstar theorist of “anti-racism.” Last week, his Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University crashed amid allegations of mismanagement. The university has launched an “inquiry” into the whereabouts of millions of dollars in donor cash. Some bargain.
“I don’t know where the money is,” says Saida Grundy, a BU professor of African American and Black Diaspora studies. Professor Grundy doubled as the center’s “Assistant Director of Narrative” then resigned, complaining about “exploitative” working hours. Her successor, Phillipe Copeland, called the firings “an act of employment violence and trauma” and demanded an explanation “how mass layoffs are ‘antiracist.’” These are not serious people, but they hold serious positions in what used to be a serious proposition, the American academy. A year’s study with these stellar minds is also a bargain: just $83,278.
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Before Kendi went down like a lead balloon, he went up like a rocket. In 2016, he became the youngest winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction, for Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. Within a year, Kendi had a Guggenheim fellowship, a spot on the Atlantic’s masthead, and a donor-funded perch as the head of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University. The New York Times called his 2019 book How to Be an Antiracist “the most courageous book to date on the problem of race in the Western mind.”
In How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi argues that “there is no such thing as a not-racist idea,” only “racist ideas and antiracist ideas.” This is not courageous at all. It is demonstrably false and incipiently tyrannical. The mathematical idea “2+2=4” is, for example, a non-racist idea. So are the ideas that all workers should pay taxes or that all retirees deserve Social Security payments. Kendi, however, thinks that objectivity is “dead” and that “white culture” demands mathematical accuracy in order to control black people. Wait till he hears about the Indians and the Chinese.
“Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining racial inequity or equity,” Kendi claims in How to Be an Antiracist. This refigures the old Marxist language of class war for racial conflict, with “institutional racism” and “white supremacy” replacing capitalist exploitation and false consciousness, and “equity” as a euphemism for forcible redistribution. It is also a license for a protection racket: “Nice institution you’ve got here. It would be a shame if someone called it racist.”
Launched in the summer of 2020 amid the mass hysteria of the George Floyd protests, the Center for Antiracist Research picked up tens of millions of dollars in grants. Jack Dorsey of Twitter gave $10 million. The biotech firm Vertex gave $1.5 million. George Soros’s Open Society Foundations gave $140,000. The Rockefeller Foundation earmarked a $1.5 million donation for the COVID-19 Racial Data Tracker. In the bright dawn of “racial justice,” Kendi hired 45 race-obsessed anti-racists to drive the racism out of the American soul by thinking up new ways to make everything in American life about race.
Ensconced in the corner office, Kendi reconsidered his doubts about math and objectivity. He would mobilize the white man’s social science and big data to build a digital racism tracker with hot spots flashing in real time. With an Anti-racist Amendment added to the Constitution and a new Department of Anti-racism, the government could hunt down and punish anyone accused of racism, everywhere, all the time. Americans would defeat racism by becoming the most racialized society on the planet.
He had a dream. Fortunately, no one at the center did any work. Its staff put their names to only two articles in three years, and even those were co-authored with outside researchers. According to the Boston Globe, Kendi “declined to delegate authority” while busying himself with an anti-racist graphic novel, an anti-racist podcast, and an anti-racist TV series. He then went on anti-racist leave. Anti-racists call this kind of behavior “power-hoarding” and say it’s characteristic of “white culture.”
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BU’s provost Jean Morrison now detects a “pattern of amassing grants without any commitment to producing the research obligated” by accepting the money. If America’s institutions really are as racist as Kendi claims, then his failure to “do the work” has sustained them in their wickedness.
The high priests of anti-racism got rich by selling racial absolutism. Meanwhile, black Americans are more likely to be the victims of serious crime than they were in 2020. Their children, despite the percolation of Kendi-style nonsense into the curriculum, are less likely to meet minimal educational standards. Phillipe Copeland now accuses Kendi of selling “theater, therapy, and marketing masquerading as institutional commitment.” But that was always the bargain. White liberals were so busy buying in to save their souls that they didn’t care who they sold out.
