Is Ibram X. Kendi a Racist?

By Charles C. W. Cooke

Thursday, September 21, 2023

 

Is Ibram X. Kendi a racist? Here’s Kendi’s rather novel definition of a racist policy:

 

A racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups. By policy, I mean written and unwritten laws, rules, procedures, processes, regulations, and guidelines that govern people.

 

Here’s the Boston Globe describing the center that Kendi runs at Boston University:

 

Since its announced launch in June 2020, just days after the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, the center has raised tens of millions of dollars from tech entrepreneurs, Boston-area corporations, and thousands of small donors.

 

At the time, Kendi, the author of the bestselling 2019 book “How to Be an Antiracist,” said the center would “solve these intractable racial problems of our time.”

 

And here’s the Boston Globe describing how Kendi’s approach has made it impossible for the center to succeed, and thus impossible for it to “solve” the “intractable racial problems of our time” — a result that, one assumes, must help to “produce or sustain racial inequity between racial groups”:

 

In interviews with the Globe this week, current and former employees described a dysfunctional work environment that made it difficult to achieve the center’s lofty goals.

 

The organization “was just being mismanaged on a really fundamental level,” said Phillipe Copeland, a professor in BU’s School of Social Work who also worked for the center as assistant director of narrative.

 

Although most decision-making authority rested with Kendi, Copeland said he found it difficult to schedule meetings with him. Other staffers described paralysis in the organization because Kendi declined to delegate authority and was not often available.

 

Copeland resigned from the center in June.

 

Copeland is black, and he believes that his work — which Kendi’s bad behavior destroyed — was as important as “life and death.” Again, here’s Kendi’s definition of a “racist policy”:

 

A racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups.

 

By taking millions of dollars designated for the fight against racism and doing nothing useful with it, does this not describe Kendi? He was in charge of this project — a project that he promised would “solve” the “intractable racial problems of our time” — and the result of his conduct was a failure to “maintain the nation’s largest online database of racial inequity data in the United States”; accusations of professional “mismanagement” that led to an “exploitative” environment that caused “employment violence” and “trauma”; and mass layoffs that left one staff member accusing Kendi of having engaged in “theatre, therapy, and marketing masquerading as institutional commitment,” and having “let down, betrayed, abused and neglected” his employees. It sounds to me like the man has some self-reflecting to do.