Professor Ibram X. Kendi has run into a spot of trouble. His fantastically funded Center for Antiracist Research – more than $43 million (£35 million) in the first two years alone – at Boston University is in financial meltdown. What happen to the $10 million (£8 million) from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey? Where are the donations from discount retailer TJ Maxx, food emporium Stop & Shop, and exercise empire Peleton? Why did the centre lay off almost all its staff last week?
No one at Boston University can give a straight answer. The story has made it into the national press, but the most illuminating details come from the student newspaper, the Daily Free Press. Its headline reads: ‘Amid mass layoffs, BU Center for Antiracist Research accused of mismanagement of funds, disorganisation.’ I take a keen interest because I spent 24 years as a faculty member and administrator at the university, and have harboured misgivings about the Kendian enterprise from the outset.
Not the faintest whisper of Western civilisation could escape Kendi’s accusatory finger
To see why the centre has not held, it is useful to go back to the beginning. That is Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which Kendi published in the spring of 2016.
Remarkably, it was not reviewed in the New York Times Book Review, an unusual instance of quality control in America’s most influential arbiter of bien pensant opinion. Kendi’s book is jammed with historical anecdotes derived from myriad sources, but it is not really a work of history. It is a testament of sorts to Kendi’s self-professed discovery that all ‘racial disparities must be the result of racial discrimination’.
Pause on that a moment. A racial disparity caused by, say, the prevalence of sickle cell anemia among people of sub-Saharan African descent is the result of racial discrimination? Racial disparities in the rate of murders committed by black, white, and Asian Americans are the result of racial discrimination? Yes, those things and anything else that is measurable or can be conjectured as a ‘disparity’.
The Kendian lens filters out all possible explanations of social, cultural, and even medical explanations other than racial discrimination. It is racism pure and simple, all the way down. Kendi explained in the prologue that he was ‘able to self-critique, discover, and shed the racist ideas that I had consumed over my lifetime while I uncovered and exposed that others had produced over the lifetime of America’.
The result is a work of towering conceit, beginning with the outrageous claim in the subtitle. ‘Definitive history’ is a claim that no historian since Thucydides has ventured, and even he was circumspect about the parts of the Peloponnesian wars he hadn’t seen first hand.
Nonetheless Stamped was stamped with the 2016 National Book Award for nonfiction, and came tenth among that year’s best-selling books. He followed it with another best-selling book in 2019, How to Be an Antiracist, and this time the NYT Book Review was wide awoke. It ran a laudatory review that explained that Kendi was, in effect, the prophet of a new religion. All ye who thought it was morally sufficient to have rejected racism now had a new mountain to climb. The only way to overcome racism, saith Kendi, was to pursue ‘antiracism’. Doing so meant engaging in a lifelong search to identify every trace of racism and eradicate it.
I remember reading that review by the scholar Jeffrey C. Stewart with a chill. Kendi’s book sounded like a call for fanaticism, a summons by a new Savonarola to burn civilisation to its roots, and then dig those up and burn them too. By then I had read Stamped and knew something of Kendi’s mind. For him, ‘racism’ was omnipresent. Not the faintest whisper of Western civilisation could escape his accusatory finger. If a hermit living in a cave in the 19th century forest primeval of northern New England was possessed of nothing but a tin spoon, some chain of association through the industrial revolution could be conjured that traced his spoon to the stolen labour of black folk and the hermit’s complicity with racial hierarchy.
To be sure, that story is my invention, but one need not read far in Kendi’s opus to get the idea that there is no principle that limits the attribution of guilt, no mean or moderation that extenuates the claim of culpability. Kendi is, in effect, a Puritan of Cotton Mather character. Not coincidentally, Stamped opens with his reflections of Puritan justifications for social hierarchy.
The success of Kendi’s two books catapulted him to national attention from his perch as an assistant professor at the University of Florida in 2015, first to a position at American University running its new Antiracist Research and Policy Center, and then all the way in 2020 to his appointment at Boston University as an endowed Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and founder of Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research.
He was given the keys to a large and newly renovated building on Boston’s Commonwealth Avenue, and a budget sufficient to hire an army of staff. Again, the university is tight-lipped, but the student newspaper reported between ‘at least 20 to 30 staff members’ have been fired in the current fiasco. Former staff members report both mismanagement of funds and ‘general disorganisation’.
Beyond this it is impossible to say what happened, though we can be fairly confident that Kendi will tell us that the root problem is white racism and the penchant of those racists who denied the centre the funds it needed to foment the revolution.
The story will strike a chord with many who remember the lavish funding visited on Black Lives Matter (BLM), where the founders allegedly made off with tens of millions of donated dollars and spent them on houses, boyfriends, and high living. Nothing so far suggests that Kendi was similarly engaged in such larceny, but plainly he was not minding the store.
Kendi made explicit and elevated the perverse notion that the best (and only) answer to racism is more racism
The proper way to read this story is to recognise the racial hysteria that began to grip America in President Obama’s second term. BLM was founded in 2013 after the acquittal of George Zimmerman who was accused of murdering Trayvon Martin. Zimmerman shot Martin after the two got into a physical altercation. In the years that followed, BLM organised protests around the country following other killings of black individuals, especially the shooting on Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014. President Obama did little to allay and a fair amount to intensify the politics of racial resentment.
By 2014, Ibram X. Kendi was well embarked on his ‘scholarly history’ of racist ideas. But he writes in the end of the book, ‘I must acknowledge that I had to compose this book during one of the most trying times of my life.’ Among the difficulties he faced, was ‘learning, nearly every week, about yet another tragic killing of an unarmed American by law enforcement’.
Kendi ought not to be seen as the prime mover of contemporary black racism or the bizarre psychosis we have learned to call ‘white fragility’, but he supplied some of the vocabulary, especially the misleading term ‘antiracism’. He also made explicit and elevated the perverse notion that the best (and only) answer to racism is more racism, or in his own words: ‘The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.’
By 2020, it was perfectly clear to anyone who was paying attention that Kendi was a voice, and perhaps the nation’s leading exponent, of a new and virulent form of racial animosity. His only rival for that title was and remains Nikole Hannah-Jones, whose 1619 Project takes on board the whole idea that America was ‘stamped from the beginning’ by racism.
2020, of course, witnessed the death of George Floyd in police custody in Minneapolis, which ignited BLM-inspired riots in towns and cities across the United States. It also ignited even greater hysteria among college administrators, foundations heads, and businesses who suddenly saw new urgency in unwinding centuries of supposed American racism. The stage was set for a grand-standing feminist provost at Boston University and a fainthearted university president to make the grand gesture of establishing Kendi as an all-expense-paid star of the faculty.
What could go wrong? Sloganeering, absolutist declarations, story-telling, and mythologising will take you only so far. The Center for Antiracist Research had a self-contradictory word and a charismatic ideologue, and a great deal of money. After three years, it still has the first two, but no ‘research’ and apparently no money. Good show BU.
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