The Incredible Lightness of Ibram X. Kendi’s ‘Anti-Racism’

By Rich Lowry

Sunday, July 25, 2021

 

Ezra Klein of the New York Times doesn’t usually do brutal takedowns on his podcasts, but his conversation with “anti-racism” guru Ibram X. Kendi is an exception.

 

Rarely has a sympathetic interview, or at least an overtly friendly interview, done more to expose the shallowness and bankruptcy of the interviewee’s worldview.

 

Kendi, who has become an industry unto himself, famously contends that any policy that creates a racial inequity, no matter what the intentions, is racism. This is a sophomoric and indefensible view that Klein punctures with a series of “how is this supposed to work?” questions.

 

The crux of the conversation is an exchange about crime and policing, a topic that would seem relatively simple — let’s get good, robust policing to make black neighborhoods safer — but that presents insuperable problems for Kendi given the absurdity of his premises.

 

Klein asks Kendi whether support for defunding the police would be an anti-racist policy.

 

Kendi tries to get around the question. He says that some people have believed that the cause of crime in black neighbors is black people — “it’s their culture, it’s their behavior.” According to his hostile caricature, this is why people believe that “you need police, well-funded police, who can basically control those animals because they’re the cause of crime.”

 

Then, he posits an opposite view: that crime is caused by things such as high levels of poverty and unemployment, the number of guns in circulation, the lack of mental-health services, and resource-starved schools.

 

It’s yet another sign of how silly Kendi’s theory is that he apparently can’t take into account that many earnest, well-intentioned people might loosely draw on both of these buckets of causes. In other words, they may believe (correctly) that there is a culture of crime in dangerous urban neighborhoods and believe that kids in those neighborhoods are being failed by the schools.

 

Regardless, this whole discussion should be beside the point for Kendi. Remember, what sets him apart from run-of-the-mill race-obsessed authors is his belief that intentions don’t matter; only outcomes do. If this is true, why does he care whether some people believe that people living in high-crime areas are “animals”?

 

Let’s take Rudy Giuliani. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that his crime polices as mayor in the 1990s were driven by racism (something that is untrue, but again, for the sake of argument). Since their outcome was a reduction in the black homicide rate, Kendi would, at least by his own metric, have to consider Giuliani an anti-racist in good standing, whatever his motivations.

 

It’s possible to extend the argument further. Let’s say there is one New York City mayor who harbors racist beliefs that cause him to heavily police high-crime neighborhoods and consequently the number of black victims of violent crime drops. Then, there’s another New York City mayor who believes the only problem is Kendi’s list of root causes and this prompts to him to reduce policing in high-crime neighborhoods and the number of black victims of violent crime increases.

 

Again, by this outcome-based measure, Kendi would have to bless the racist mayor for his righteous anti-racism and condemn the well-intentioned, soft-headed one for his racism.

 

Does this make any sense? Bill de Blasio, for instance, is ineffectual and wrongheaded and has undoubtedly made New York more dangerous for young black men, but is he really racist?

 

Kendi never did answer Klein’s query about policing because he must know it’s unanswerable for him.

 

By his own standards, Kendi is a racist coming and going on this question. If he supports any version of current policing, he’s supporting a policy that arrests and jails a disproportionate number of black men. That’s a racial inequity, and whatever Kendi’s intentions, by his own reckoning that makes him a racist.

 

If Kendi supports defunding the police, murders of black men will inevitably increase. That’s a racial inequity, and whatever Kendi’s intentions, by his own reckoning, he’s a racist.

 

Kendi’s anti-racism box is so stupidly reductive that even he can’t escape it.

 

He tried to get out of it with Klein via various other unconvincing evasions.

 

Kendi said that police unions are making the case that more police mean less crime, and that there are no data to support this contention. Klein correctly pointed out that there are ample data for this proposition, noting one study that showed the decline in crime disproportionally benefits African Americans.

 

Kendi went off on a bizarre riff, denying that there are “criminogenic conditions” in some black communities (Klein had to remind him that his position is that root causes have indeed created such conditions).

 

According to Kendi, what counts as a crime is highly racialized. But no one disputes that the crimes that are consuming our cities right now — murder and assault with a deadly weapon — are and should be crimes whatever the race of the people who commit them.

 

Kendi elaborated by arguing that drunk driving wasn’t considered a serious crime in the 1980s because the vast majority of drunk drivers were white men. This isn’t a good example since the 1980s marked the beginning of a massive, decades-long effort to shame drunk drivers and tighten laws around driving while impaired by alcohol.

 

He then tried to make a distinction between high-unemployment neighborhoods with crime and high-unemployment black neighborhoods with crime, saying we should talk only of the former. This doesn’t make much sense given Kendi’s worldview — he champions an extreme race consciousness except when it comes to high-crime neighborhoods, when, all of a sudden, “the race of the people really [doesn’t] matter.”

 

The basic incoherence here is remarkable given how Kendi has been adopted as the nation’s foremost authority on race and given that Kendi wants a constitutional amendment enshrining a sweepingly powerful Department of Anti-Racism to impose his sloppy, tendentious, and racially divisive way of thinking.

 

It’s a cliché that no battle plan survives contact with the enemy; Kendi’s premises are so deeply flawed that they can’t even survive contact with a mildly challenging progressive podcast host.