By Jeffrey Blehar
Thursday, September 21, 2023
This
post is in response to Is Ibram X.
Kendi a Racist?
All football fans of a certain age know of the classic
moment in 2006 when hapless Arizona Cardinals coach Dennis Green, after a
narrow defeat to the highly ranked Chicago Bears, came out on Monday
Night Football to deliver a press conference so memorable that it
actually (no joke) has its own devoted “folklore” page on the team’s
website. The Cardinals were on a losing streak, and Green’s frustration was
acute because his underdogs had exposed the Bears; they’d come
so close, they’d revealed that the emperor had no clothes, but they couldn’t
finish the deal. (Ironically, Bears fans with memories of “Sexy Rexy” Grossman
are currently groaning and nodding their heads as well.) “The Bears are what we
thought they were! . . . They’re what we thought they were! <pounds
table> AND WE LET THEM OFF THE HOOK!”
Which brings me to my response to Charlie’s lovely rhetorical question about whether Ibram X.
Kendi is, by his own logic, one of the most notorious and appalling racists in
modern academic history. I just assume he is. But more importantly, Ibram X.
Kendi — and this entire intellectually insulting racial-grievance subculture —
is precisely who we thought he was. I, for one, will enjoy not letting
him off the hook. I cannot emphasize enough to the readers of National
Review how much the present Kendi scandal — which involves allegations
by his own former employees of misuse of millions of dollars of funding for his
Boston University antiracism center, as well as claims of a leadership style
that flitted between authoritarian, suspiciously opaque, and altogether
absentee — fills me with delight. In an era where I must daily contemplate the
thought that Donald Trump and Joe Biden will be running against one another for
president again next year, sheer comedy like this is
practically manna in the wilderness: It truly sustains a man to see his priors
so hilariously affirmed by way of such a richly ironic public scandal.
Those priors, of course, are the following: Over the
course of a decade, a cottage industry has arisen out of the shocking amounts
of money available to be wrung from corporate America on matters of racial
grievance, diversity, and “equity.” This was possible because it was buttressed
by an academy long suffused with a maximally aggressive generation of scholars
inculcated in racially essentialist orthodoxy and therefore happy to both
perpetuate and profit from it. (The intellectual origins are basically Marxist,
escaped from a mid-Sixties academic lab like Frankenstein’s monster to roam the
American countryside making boards of directors feel guilty.)
Even before the George Floyd riots, a whole crop of
enterprising grifters were making out like bandits on this play. But afterward
they ascended to national prominence — their feats are legion, their tales
legendary. They belong to the ages now. Robin DiAngelo cornered the market on
guilt-ridden professional white women, reaping massive financial rewards by
explaining (also, in a way, confirming) their “white fragility” to them. Saira
Rao — a former Cleary Gottlieb attorney and the extremely well-heeled daughter
of two doctors — hilariously has managed to make ridiculous sums of money by
convincing those same women to pay for the privilege of serving her dinner while
she angrily lectures the attendees on you’re-all-racist garbage. (Seriously,
this is an amazing grift. I tip my cap to a master.) Nikole
Hannah-Jones’s adventures in The Project of 1619 have been so successful that
she has written a single article for the New York Times since
2021 (a review of a children’s book). I’m sure she earns her berth through
other diligent journalistic work, none of which will ever be written.
But Ibram X. Kendi was the one who truly impressed me.
After the Floyd riots, his farcical book How to Be an Antiracist exploded
along with his booking fees, almost in inverse proportion to the value of the
solutions he offered. Kendi was different from the others in his fascinating
willingness to actually loudly and aggressively follow the reductio ad absurdum
of his racial logic all the way to absurdum. Charlie explains better than I can
exactly how perverse and incoherent Kendi’s hyper-determinist thesis is, but
never forget: This guy made ridiculous amounts of money off of it.
Which is why it’s so funny that Kendi was submarined in the present Boston
University scandal by his own employees. Their allegations may or may not be
correct, but it’s utterly remarkable that the financial-mismanagement claims
(by far the most serious charges) are offered by the complainants almost as
window-dressing to their more real concern: They wanted more control
themselves, and wanted to be (is this actually conceivable?) even more
radical. It seems like the game may be over for Kendi (at least
temporarily), but hey: nice work when you could get it, and especially if you
didn’t even have to do it.
I’m not optimistic about where this leads in terms of
academia. People sometimes muse about whether the pendulum is finally swinging
back from this sort of obvious waste of money, to say nothing of academically
institutionalized racist cant. I rather suspect the opposite. There is a real
cultural backlash coalescing (not just in working-class populist spaces but in
more middle-class ones as well), but the more it dawns on those in the academic
driver’s seat that the ride could someday come to an end, the more they will
floor the accelerator to maximize their gains before the tank is out of gas.
Until universities have a serious financial reckoning (one shudders to imagine
the sort of society-wide crisis that would force it), this academic racial
grift cycle will not end. It tumbles forward ceaselessly like a giant hamster
wheel — only in this case a wheel packed with a multitude of hamsters, each
clawing desperately over the others to get a chance at turning it.
And all of them, always, running in place.
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