The Lies and Fall of Ibram X. Kendi

By Jeffrey Blehar

Wednesday, June 05, 2024

 

Do you remember, back in the day, when giants once walked the earth? Our childhood era was populated by improbably world-bestriding figures such as “Air” Jordan and “Iron Man” Cal Ripken; Madonna, Prince, and Bruce; Ronnie, Maggie, and Gorby; Leonardo, Donatello, Michelangelo, and Raphael — the list goes on. Studies have shown that when you ask people what the cultural “golden age” was during their lives, they almost invariably answer with a date when they were between the age of 16 and 25. The best music, the cutest movie stars, the handsiest presidents — they say it’s all merely a reflection of the bias from your own formative halcyon days, nothing more. They forgot Ibram X. Kendi.

 

For I remember our most recent golden age — perhaps more accurately an iron-pyrite age, if you will — when giants of culture still truly walked among us. And it was quite recently: after the George Floyd riots, during the final violent spasms of the Great Awokening. Recall that horrible, exhausted moment: Huddling in Covid lockdown, with a tumultuous presidential election on the way, we got Ferguson redux in Minneapolis. And at that point a procession of legendary grifters already plying their trade made their bones on the backs of our national discourse, forever deforming it.

 

There Robin DiAngelo found herself, positioned after years of savvy preparation, to stand proudly atop the body of George Floyd and accuse white America of personally choking this man to death via workplace microaggressions. There professional harpy Saira Rao was, hiring herself out to be served dinner while telling guilty, well-mannered women how racist they were. There Nikole Hannah-Jones was to capitalize on her serendipitously timed 1619 Project and then promptly retire from writing, having made her name and money. (Floyd died in late May 2020; Hannah-Jones has written two pieces for the Times since June of that year, one of which is a review of children’s books. Who wouldn’t envy her — unless they had a sense of self-worth?)

 

As a fundamentally lazy person, I will confess to you: I am in awe of these people. As the child of federal-government employees, I was raised to appreciate the concept of making good money from contributing almost nothing of value or effort to society. (This is why I was once an attorney and am now a writer.) So, watching the efflorescence of newly sprouted griftlings during the post-Floyd era was like seeing a sudden bloom of hidden fungal life after a particularly humid, toxic overnight summer squall. You? You might have been horrified. Me — I got out my Wellington boots, sample bag, and a magnifying glass. There are so many bizarre finds to discover! (Remember that Black Lives Matter president who took all the donor money and bought a random mansion? I bet you forgot! Not me.)

 

But nobody impressed me more than the Cut Creator, Ibram X. Kendi. If people like DiAngelo and Rao were paler Joan the Baptists, then the experience of Kendi (born Henry Rogers in Philadelphia, name changed at age 32) was like witnessing the advent of the anti-racist messiah himself. Why, it was even right there in the title of his book. How to Be an Antiracist — which came out in mid 2019 to significant (and retrospectively ominous) plaudits among the “woke set” but complete indifference among the world at large — was one obscure black academic’s solution to all the textbook American racial oppression he had read about as a child but never quite suffered during his middle-class upbringing yet felt he should have. And once George Floyd died at the hands of Officer Derek Chauvin, its fantasy narratives might as well have been placed in advance and doused in gasoline, merely awaiting a lit match.

 

What is racism, per Kendi? Anything that oppresses minorities but most especially African Americans. What is “antiracism”? Anything that promotes their social, economic, or physical well-being. How to be “antiracist”? It’s simple: Question literally every single decision you make in life on a granular level. Does voting for this candidate or referendum advance “antiracism”? How about reading this book? Wearing these clothes? Boycotting this show? Not boycotting this show? (How about this hummus? It’s made by Zionists!) The logic wasn’t even particularly compelling, merely ironclad in its suffocatingly recursive and intentionally ill-defined way. “There is no neutrality in the racial struggle,” warned Kendi, and the book (and his subsequent lectures on it — which might have cost you $20,000 a pop, provided you were an institutional sponsor) made it clear: Every single choice we make marks us like Cain as “racist” or — hopefully, the way Calvinists reckon with future salvation — as “antiracist.”

 

Future generations will barely believe it, but this stuff had its moment. Kendi became a multi-millionaire off the Floyd agonistes among liberal and corporate America, as I noted a year ago. The man had hustle and an easy way with conversational patter, as well as the willingness to fearlessly reductio his thesis all the way to absurdum. It captured a certain zeitgeist. No wonder he was showered with $55 million for his Boston University “antiracism center,” and no wonder he fumbled it all. It all collapsed when we shuddered ourselves out of the 2020–21 punch-drunk daze. Being surprised at the fact of Kendi’s mismanagement is like being surprised that you can’t really promote Eddie Murphy from street hustler to floor trader in the span of a month.

 

Strangely enough, I end with today’s “news hook” instead of beginning with it: The New York Times Magazine is out this week with an autopsy on the rise and fall (to date) of Kendi. The piece is of course written with all due sympathy — in this narrative, the audience is assumed to understand that Kendi is a well-meaning crusader beset by the cruelties of academic expectations — and for once I don’t particularly recommend it to you. It treats the entire phenomenon of Kendi-ism as the unique travail of one put-upon college administrator unused to disbursing large amounts of cash. (Ray Stantz once warned Peter Venkman that the harsh realities of the private sector would make him long for the cushiness of academia, but apparently academia has raised its game as well.) Great pains are made to distinguish his theories from Robin DiAngelo’s: For her, racism is a state of inexpiable white original sin that one must constantly apologize for. For Kendi, it is merely something you oppose by micro-interrogating every single action you take on a relentless second-by-second basis. The Times wants you to understand that his is the more sensible way to reckon with your failures.

 

I choose neither. But I lament the twilight of the fanaticism that gave us such brief phenomena as Ibram X. Kendi, if only from a detached, aesthetic, “may you live in interesting times” perspective. This man gave America the simplest, most easily applicable binary solution to all of our racial problems. It didn’t matter that it was stupid, at least not from the perspective of his personal enrichment. For a while, it sold. Now that it doesn’t? It’s time for the think pieces. What we lived through in 2020, during the Floyd meltdown and its aftermath, was a onetime necrotic bloom during which the first carrion-feeders on the scene were able to fatten themselves up to spectacular proportions on the collapsed body of American progressive racial and political angst. The first-mover advantage went to the Kendis and DiAngelos of the world, already lean and hungry from years of preparation — and if you, like me, have grown to appreciate the majestic adeptness of cynical operators, then why not salute how quickly they denuded our national carcass, leaving us with the bones? Why not, unless you care about the future of American civil society?