The 2020 Black Lives Matter riots and the racial obsession liberals fomented during them gave life to a new generation of race hustlers. Ibram Kendi was one of those race hustlers, but his racial grift has apparently fallen apart just a few short years later.
Kendi (who changed his name from Ibram Rogers) won a think tank at Boston University out of the riots and the white guilt that he and others pushed on liberals during that time. Now, three years later, the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research has laid off almost its entire staff. The supposed research center produced little research, burned through some $43 million, most of which is unaccounted for, and is now all but shuttered as it transitions to a “fellowship model,” with Kendi still serving as its director.
BREAKING: A Boston University professor who worked at Ibram Kendi’s “antiracism” center tells the Boston Globe: “I don’t know where the money is.”
It’s time for a full investigation into the center’s finances. What happened to the $30 million it received?
— Christopher F. Rufo ⚔️ (@realchrisrufo) September 21, 2023
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Most notable, though, is that the center built a reputation for being a toxic workplace environment very quickly in its short lifespan. The complaints started in 2021, just one year after the center’s formation. Discrimination was, poetically, one of the issues in the “antiracist” think tank, which is not a surprise given that Kendi himself actively calls for discrimination as a solution to discrimination.
But it was the center’s role as a money funnel that truly brought it down. Saida Grundy, an associate professor of sociology who worked at the center, filed an anonymous complaint in 2021 alleging that the center was collecting grant money with no intention of carrying out research projects. She then alleged that she was retaliated against by the university for her concerns when the organization quit communicating with her when it allowed her contract to end.
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The main point probably was never to fix racism or perform “antiracist” research. The point was always to line grifters’ pockets off of the white guilt of liberals and the major corporations they run (or harass into acting on that same guilt), in this case to the tune of $43 million in grants and donations that were burned through in just three years. Just as Kendi secured lucrative deals from Netflix or was paid $20,000 by Fairfax County Public Schools for an hour-long virtual lecture, Kendi wasn’t concerned about white or black. The only color he seemed to care about was, and maybe has always been, green.
If the allegations are true, Kendi’s racial grift helped enrich him off the back of a cultish liberal embrace of the racial obsession that Kendi and others were peddling. At the end of the day, the Center for Antiracist Research being effectively shut down after producing almost no real research is not a failure. It succeeded in exactly what it was designed to do, just like the Black Lives Matter organization and every other race hustler project that spawned off the back of, or was rejuvenated by, those 2020 riots.
