By Luther Ray Abel
Thursday, March 12, 2026
Ibram X. Kendi, the man whose book, How to Be an
Antiracist (along with its derivative satellites), was a fixture on the New
York Times‘ bestsellers list for nearly a year from 2019 well into the
racial upheaval of 2020 — as well as a virtue-signaling totem on your medicated
aunt’s coffee table until recently, when her cats made some use of the
yet-unopened hardback — is attempting a relaunch.
A trucklesome profile in New York Magazine begins:
“People cast aspersions on me as
a director in order to cast aspersions on my scholarship,” says Dr. Ibram X.
Kendi, “because they do not see a direct way to undermine my scholarship.”
Huddled in a storage room inside Founders Library at Howard University, the
43-year-old historian, speaking softly and deliberately, is reflecting on the
roller-coaster arc of his fame. Nearly seven years ago, his 2019 book, How to Be an Antiracist, was seized upon by
liberals as a sacred text, rocketing up the best-seller lists and earning
Kendi, already a National Book Award winner for Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist
Ideas in America, a reputation as a racial-reconciliation guru.
Written as he was being treated for stage-four colorectal cancer, the book is
infused with a spirit of personal transformation. (“The heartbeat of antiracism
is confession,” Kendi writes in an oft-cited passage.) Both its language and
its stakes felt biblical after the killing of George Floyd.
Yet today, How to Be an
Antiracist is widely remembered as a self-flagellating manual for bleeding
hearts. This baffles Kendi, for whom the book’s thesis — that “racist”
is not a pejorative identity, like “evil,” but a descriptive term that should
be applied to policies according to whether they shrink or widen racial
disparities — is focused on material effects.
“The heartbeat of antiracism is confession” really does
encapsulate the racialist gospel of irredeemable total depravity that Kendi
hawked all the way into presiding over a Boston University–affiliated think
tank that made him a very wealthy man while producing two mediocre pieces of
academic research. Since being dismissed from his ivory tower in Boston, where
he spent his working hours transmuting white guilt into green, Kendi has been
in exile at Howard University along with Nikole Hannah-Jones. It’s an Elba of
sorts for those
who can’t be bothered to conquer a monthly column, let alone Europe.
I could go on, but other writers at National Review
deserve their due when it comes to reminding the world and, apparently, Mr.
Kendi about his scholarship, leadership, and venomous effect on American life
and goodwill toward one’s fellow man.
The Lies and Fall of Ibram X. Kendi — Jeffrey Blehar
(June 5, 2024)
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.”
Read the rest here.
Ibram X. Kendi, Prophet of Anti-racism — Christopher
Caldwell (July 23, 2020)
Kendi spends a lot of energy
turning up ancient grievances — an article in a 1903 issue of Medicine about
the “sexual madness and excess” of black people, the speculations in a New York
City prison doctor’s report in 1894 about whether lesbians are physically
different from other women. He tends to imagine his interlocutors as eccentric
and simple-minded, holding opinions that hardly anyone would dream up, let
alone defend: “Black neighborhoods do not all have similar levels of violent
crime,” he insists. “If the cause of the violent crime is the Black body, if
Black people are violent demons, then the violent-crime levels would be
relatively the same no matter where Black people live.” Who needed to be
convinced of that? What is this “Black body” that Kendi and other
ethnic-studies authors constantly allude to? Kendi leaves the impression he has
had few conversations with people he really disagrees with. The distinction
between mainstream Republicans and night-riding bigots does not appear to be an
important one to him, given his references to what “white supremacists” think
of climate change and Obamacare.
In African-American studies
departments you can address racial problems in an atmosphere of esprit de corps
and ideological unanimity. Because they traditionally had a different academic
culture than other university departments, it long seemed natural to ignore
them. But their very isolation has turned them into mighty bases for
consciousness-raising, dogma construction, and political organizing. They are
Internet Age equivalents of 19th-century Fenian Brotherhood lodges. It is from
these hives of like-minded activists that the country’s human-resources
departments have been staffed. That helps explain how, within hours of the
first urban protests in June, hundreds of far-flung corporations had
spontaneously and independently produced identical press releases and Facebook
posts, identical right down to the catchphrases.
Read the rest here.
Boston University Plans to Close Anti-racist Center as
Ibram X. Kendi Departs for Howard — David Zimmermann (January 31, 2025)
Around the same time as the
layoffs, the founder faced accusations of exploiting workers and mismanaging the
center’s financial resources. BU Today said the layoffs happened because
public support for the center’s work “shifted” and financial contributions were
“waning.”
In its nearly five years of
existence, the antiracism venture raised more than $50 million in funding from
donors, including Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who donated $10 million to
the cause. Despite the generous funds, only two new research papers had been produced by the time of the employee layoffs. The
exact count of total research papers is unclear.
“Despite all the headwinds we
faced as a new organization founded during the pandemic and the intense
backlash over critical race theory, I am very proud of all we envisioned, all
we created, all we learned, all we achieved—the community we built, the people
we helped and inspired,” Kendi said in a statement Thursday.
Read the rest here.
The Incredible Lightness of Ibram X. Kendi’s
‘Anti-Racism’ — Rich Lowry (July 25, 2021)
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.
Read the rest here.
Is Ibram X. Kendi a Racist? — Charles C. W. Cooke
(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.
You can find the piece here.
Tragically, despite the time in the wilderness that may
have prompted reflection and some humility, the Kendi of 2026 doubles back to
the motte of people misunderstanding him — he never meant for his use of
the “racist” label to imply his ideological foes were evil. He can only sing
one song, and no one is asking for an encore.
For a man who has been shown more grace than Jordan
Cowan’s camera, Kendi’s “tendency to claim that aspersions of his motives were
rooted in racism,” (as Cheney-Rice begins the final paragraph in the New
York Magazine profile), is sufficient evidence to conclude that Kendi
remains enslaved to the same ugly mix of arrogance and racism that have been
the ruin of men far more brilliant than he.
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