The incredible meltdown of the Center for Antiracist Research

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’.