The End of Kendi
Ibram Kendi seems like a decent man...but he was a terrible scholar who did damage to our understanding of race in the US
This week the New York Times produced an essay on Ibram X. Kendi. Kendi is the Boston University professor who introduced us to the concept of “anti-racism” and, in doing so, may have set back race relations more comprehensively than anyone else in 2020 (and in a year with Derek Chauvin and Robin DiAngelo, that’s saying something). The NYT essay is vaguely sympathetic to Kendi, who it portrays as a poor schlub out of his league. I largely agree with the assessment…Kendi seems like a decent if neurotic individual prone to bad ideas…in effect, the wrong man at the wrong time. The NYT is also clearly a professional obituary…the time of Kendi’s “anti-racism” is past us like a fever dream. Still, I think it is difficult to underestimate how much damage he did to our understanding of race in the United States, however well-intentioned he might have been.
I read his book How to Be an Anti-Racist (HTBAAR) in 2020 (I read his children’s book too and probably could have saved myself a lot of time by just reading that). HTBAAR was perfect for the irrational 2020 covid/George Floyd moment when so much of the US progressive left both lost any sense of critical thinking and became culturally dominant to the point of being briefly unstoppable. My impression of HTBAAR was that it was more thoughtful in tone than so many other explicitly anti-white books in its genre (unlike so many “anti-racists”, Kendi acknowledges black people can be racist, for instance). Still, it was a keystone in binary thinking (things being only either racist or anti-racist), and colossally bad ideas such as his suggestion for a Department of Anti-Racism. This hypothetical Department of Anti-Racism would be an unaccountable government board of censorious political commissars more reminiscent of Mao’s China than any modern democracy. This suggestion and others like it, such as advocating current discrimination to undo past discrimination, struck me as intellectually crude, at best. Yet many people, particularly well-educated white people, ate it up.
In the NYT essay, Kendi appeared to back away from the more extreme ideas he himself had promoted, chalking it up to a misunderstanding of his beliefs. But my own read of HTBAAR is that even the most rabid conservative reactions were, for the most part, not wrong about the book. Freddy DeBoer, in reacting to the NYT essay, observed that Kenti’s more recent comments seemed to be a motte-and-bailey approach…his extreme claims in HTBAAR used to garner attention, then a current retreat to more moderate views to avoid criticism. DeBoer expressed that this is common in academia, and that’s probably true, but I’m less sure that this is a defense of Kendi as much as it is a conviction of academia. Surely, we should expect better from our nation’s thought leaders than cheap logical fallacies?
Much of Kendi’s problems originate with the collapse of the Center for Anti-Racism Research at Boston University. Kendi directed the center, which received tens of millions of dollars in donations in 2020, based largely on both Kendi’s fame and the virulent virtue-signaling on race during that very strange year. The Center somehow burned through tens of millions in donations while producing very little. Kendi has been cleared of any wrong-doing and it seems he was simply in over his head. Whoops! That said, the people who tossed money at this were…I guess suckers is a bit harsh, but I don’t think much thought or oversight went into that unique 2020 moment.
Kendi didn’t originate ideas related to structural racism, but he became a standard bearer for them. Unfortunately for progressive race panickers1, the data didn’t really fit the narrative of a structurally racist US, whether we were talking about economics or criminal justice. The US isn’t perfect, but it really does seem to be racially egalitarian to a point that’s difficult to find a parallel in human history (this is true for most other modern democracies as well, of course). To the extent group differences exist, it’s probably time to accept that those differences are real2, not the product of racism, and we’d do better to figure out how to address them culturally rather than banging on about systemic racism endlessly while helping no one.
I think the NYT is basically right. The Kendi moment is receding. Even many top universities are abandoning things like DEI statements, and Affirmative Action received a mortal wound by the Supreme Court. But the legacy of Kendi remains with us. None less than President Biden gave a truly awful and anti-American commencement speech regarding race at Morehouse College, his talking points not dissimilar to those of Kendi. A certain kind of mostly white progressive invested so deeply in Kendian thought as a key facet of their moral identity, that any amount of data showing they were wrong will never wrest them from “But racism…!” “America bad!” ideology3.
In a sense, I feel sorry for Kendi. Granted, he’s a rich man, so he’ll be fine. But he never should have been made a standard bearer for a moral panic. I wish him well and a long and happy life. But if his ideas are on the way out, I’m certainly not sorry to see them go.
But anyone rational would take this as good news…
To be clear…I do not think they are, in the main, biological. Rather, they are likely cultural, even if some of these ultimately don’t flatter specific cultures. I don’t leave whites out of this…the remarkably high white suicide rate certainly is due to a cultural neuroticism that, itself, played out in the 2020 race panic.
I do find that mute and unfollow buttons help a lot with this.