Ibram X. Kendi is the false prophet of a dangerous and lucrative faith
By: Christopher F. Rufo (New York Post)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Ibram X. Kendi's name appears everywhere: in school curricula, corporate training programs, even the Navy's official reading list. The Boston University prof is a blazing supernova in the constellation of radical-chic race activism. But be warned: His philosophy would jeopardize the bedrock American ideal of individual dignity and equality under law.
Kendi's rise was swift and significant. He published a bestselling book, "Stamped from the Beginning," in 2016. After the death of George Floyd in 2020, Kendi's next book, "How to Be An Antiracist," began selling an astonishing number of copies, including institutional sales to public schools, government agencies and professional groups, all seeking to understand the ongoing racial unrest; he was a campus and media fixture at the height of the crisis.
But after the protests died down, Kendi's work faced new scrutiny, revealing a simple truth: Kendi is a false prophet — and his religion of "antiracism" is nothing more than a marketing-friendly recapitulation of the academic left's most pernicious ideas.
Born Ibram Henry Rogers, Kendi presents himself as a radical subversive. But in reality, he is an ideologist of elite opinion, buoyed by government and corporate patronage. Kendi's work has been endorsed by Fortune 100 companies, the federal bureaucracy and the US military — the very power structures he claims to oppose.
Kendi's core thesis — that racism is the single, self-evident cause of racial differences in everything from school grades to incarceration rates to income and thus must be rectified using "antiracist discrimination" — reiterates critical race theory's basic concepts. Kendi's "gift," in other words, is for translating ivory-tower theories into media- and corporate-friendly narrative.
"When I see racial disparities, I see racism," Kendi says, to the exclusion of other explanations. His logic often descends into dizzying circularity and tautologies. When asked to define the word "racism," he told attendees at the Aspen Ideas Festival that it is "a collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity that are substantiated by racist ideas."
In another nod to 1960s-style radicalism, Kendi also claims to oppose capitalism. "The life of racism cannot be separated from the life of capitalism," he says. "In order to truly be antiracist, you also have to truly be anti-capitalist."
But Kendi, like his counterpart Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors, is a prolific capitalist in his personal life. He charges $20,000 an hour for virtual presentations and has merchandised his entire line of ideas, releasing self-help products and even an "antiracist" baby book. He gratefully accepts millions from tech and pharmaceutical companies on behalf of his Antiracism Center. Fighting Big Capital, it turns out, is a lucrative enterprise.
But Kendi's actual policy proposals, from "defunding the police" to restricting free speech, are much more alarming than his fraudulent posturing. Kendi is an open advocate for race-based discrimination, arguing that "the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination." Even worse, he has proposed a federal "Department of Antiracism," unaccountable to voters or legislators, with the power to suppress "racist ideas" and veto, nullify or abolish any law at any level of government not deemed "antiracist" — a policy that verges on the totalitarian.
Fortunately, as Americans have begun to seriously consider his ideas, Kendi finds himself on the defensive. In recent months, he has released a series of touchy and short-tempered articles and statements, claiming that "there is no debate about critical race theory" in one moment, then distancing himself from CRT in the next — despite the fact that only two weeks earlier, he had claimed that critical race theory was "foundational" to his work.
When he's put on the spot, Kendi reverts to word games and deflection, rather than defend his position on the substance.
Mercifully, his so-called antiracist discrimination remains deeply unpopular with voters. Despite the recent push to replace equality with "equity," Americans still support the system of individual freedom, equality under the law and colorblind public policy. Even in deep-blue California and Washington state, voters have recently rejected affirmative action at the ballot box, despite heavy support for those measures from multinational corporations and the Democratic establishment.
Kendi fashions himself a revolutionary, but like the radical-chic activists before him, he will likely be absorbed into the fabric of elite institutions, where supposedly radical ideas are cosseted into conventional wisdom — and sold at $20,000 an hour.
Tags
Who is online
48 visitors
"When asked to define the word "racism," he told attendees at the Aspen Ideas Festival that it is "a collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity that are substantiated by racist ideas."
Another white hating racist who can't defend his own racism.
Was he asked to defend his racism or as you first posited to define the term? Your last statement is a meaningless abstraction, by any other name, a dead squirrel that only a parked car would chase.
Princeton historian Matthew Karp offers a stinging criticism of the “stamped from the beginning” view of American history.
Here is a taste of his Harper’s piece “History as End: 1619, 1776, and the politics of the past.”
Whatever birthday it chooses to commemorate, origins-obsessed history faces a debilitating intellectual problem: it cannot explain historical change. A triumphant celebration of 1776 as the basis of American freedom stumbles right out of the gate—it cannot describe how this splendid new republic quickly became the largest slave society in the Western Hemisphere. A history that draws a straight line forward from 1619, meanwhile, cannot explain how that same American slave society was shattered at the peak of its wealth and power—a process of emancipation whose rapidity, violence, and radicalism have been rivaled only by the Haitian Revolution. This approach to the past, as the scholar Steven Hahn has written, risks becoming a “history without history,” deaf to shifts in power both loud and quiet. Thus it offers no way to understand either the fall of Richmond in 1865 or its symbolic echo in 2020, when an antiracist coalition emerged whose cultural and institutional strength reflects undeniable changes in American society. The 1619 Project may help explain the “forces that led to the election of Donald Trump,” as the Times executive editor Dean Baquet described its mission, but it cannot fathom the forces that led to Trump’s defeat—let alone its own Pulitzer Prize.
The political limits of origins-centered history are just as striking. The theorist Wendy Brown once observed that at the end of the twentieth century liberals and Marxists alike had begun to lose faith in the future. Collectively, she wrote, left-leaning intellectuals had come to reject “a historiography bound to a notion of progress,” but had “coined no political substitute for progressive understandings of where we have come from and where we are going.” This predicament, Brown argued, could only be understood as a kind of trauma, an “ungrievable loss.” On the liberal left, it expressed itself in a new “moralizing discourse” that surrendered the promise of universal emancipation, while replacing a fight for the future with an intense focus on the past. The defining feature of this line of thought, she wrote, was an effort to hold “history responsible, even morally culpable, at the same time as it evinces a disbelief in history as a teleological force.”
Today’s historicism is a fulfillment of that discourse, having migrated from the margins of academia to the heart of the liberal establishment. Progress is dead; the future cannot be believed; all we have left is the past, which must therefore be held responsible for the atrocities of the present. “In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism,” one essay in the 1619 Project avers, “you have to start on the plantation.” Not with Goldman Sachs or Shell Oil, the behemoths of the contemporary order, but with the slaveholders of the seventeenth century. Such a critique of capitalism quickly becomes a prisoner of its own heredity. A more creative historical politics would move in the opposite direction, recognizing that the power of American capitalism does not reside in a genetic code written four hundred years ago. What would it mean, when we look at U.S. history, to follow William James in seeking the fruits, not the roots?
I need to spend more time with this essay, but it seems as if the “origins-obsessed” history he writes about is relevant to the Christian nationalist view of history I write about at this blog and elsewhere and provides me with additional language to explain the David Barton’s and Eric Metaxas’s of the world. If I read Karp correctly, the 1619 Project approach to the past is similar to David Barton’s “America was founded as a Christian nation” approach. Neither view does justice to change over time. The Christian nationalist historians believe that the United States was “stamped from the beginning” as a Christian nation and nothing has changed since 1776. The 1619 Project writers believe that the United States was “stamped from the beginning” as a racist nation and nothing has changed since 1619.
Today’s historicist critics operate within a different kind of cosmology. In her essay introducing the 1619 Project, the journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones notes that black Americans have fought for and achieved “astounding progress,” not only for themselves, but for all Americans. Yet the project does not really explore this compelling story: in fact, it largely skips over the antislavery movement, the Civil War, and the civil-rights era. Strikingly, Frederick Douglass appears more often in the 1776 Report than in the 1619 Project, where he originally received just two brief mentions, both in an essay by Wesley Morris on black music. Martin Luther King Jr., for his part, makes only one appearance in the 1619 Project, the same number as Martin Shkreli. In more than one hundred pages of print, we read about very few major advocates of abolition or labor and civil rights: Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Henry Highland Garnet, A. Philip Randolph, Ella Baker, Rosa Parks, and Bayard Rustin are just a few of those who go unmentioned.
Above all, the historical imagination of the 1619 Project centers on a single moment: the purported date that marks the arrival of African slaves in British North America. “This is sometimes referred to as the country’s original sin,” writes Jake Silverstein, the editor of The New York Times Magazine, “but it is more than that: It is the country’s very origin.” Out of this moment, he continues, “grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional”—the kernel of four hundred years of economic, political, and cultural life. History, in this conception, is not a jagged chronicle of events, struggles, and transformations; it is the blossoming of planted seeds, the flourishing of a foundational premise.
From the same piece:
This critique, however persuasive as a reading of many liberal politicians, does not do justice to the intellectuals and journalists who have driven the national debate on these issues. It does not quite capture the significance of their interventions, or the ambition of their challenge to traditional liberal ideas. Nor does it capture the peculiarity of today’s politics of history. American conservatives, traditionally attracted to history as an exercise in patrimonial devotion, have in the time of Trump abandoned many of their older pieties, instead oscillating between incoherence and outright nihilism. Liberals, meanwhile, seem to expect more from the past than ever before. Leaving behind the End of History, we have arrived at something like History as End."
Matthew Karp appears to be "slamming" both sides.
I read the entire Matthew Karp essay. His disagreement with CRT and the 1619 Project is not on facts , it is on how the facts are used. Karp thinks that the 1619 Project and CRT are too pessimistic about today.
I dont necessarily disagree with him either, but as a Princeton professor he might be a little detached from the real world. A lot of people out here are in denial of historical facts related to race.
For example, Vic thinks Robert E Lee was a great man, and seemed unaware that Lee owned slaves and was perfectly willing to leave it up to Divine Providence to decide when the Negro race had learned its lessons and was ready to join free civilization.
I dont agree sometimes with the pessimism , so to speak, of CRT and 1619 Project, and Ibram Kendi is a little too black-centric for my personal taste, but these are important gaps in the historical knowledge base of the "average" American that they are filling with their work.
There is nothing to be afraid of in CRT or the 1619 Project.
It is my experience that people within the same field are not fond of eachother.
I think you best leave Vic out of it. Vic said that Robert E Lee was one of the greatest Generals in history. Nothing else can take that away.
A lot of historians think Lee is overrated as a general. But whatever.
Robert E Lee wrote a letter to his wife that I dont have in front of me but I do know that in that letter he says that slavery should last until God decides otherwise and that the Africans needed further 'teaching' before they should be set free.
Thats all I need to know Vic.
I just want to be quoted accurately.
Robert E Lee wrote a letter to his wife that I dont have in front of me but I do know that in that letter he says that slavery should last until God decides otherwise and that the Africans needed further 'teaching' before they should be set free.
I couldn't care less John. Lee was one of the greatest Generals that ever lived and the Civil War wouldn't have gone on so long had it not been for Lee fighting for his native Virginia!
Thats all I need to know Vic.
That is sad.
We all know you dont care about slavery. That has been clear as long as you have been here.
It's a part of history. I care about history. I'm not quite obsessed with race as you are.
Oh Vic , you choose your words so carefully, lol.
The reason you care about slavery in America is because it is part of history. Bwaaa!
You are already known for saying that blacks dont properly appreciate the sacrifices whites made for them in the Civil War.
What other gems do you have for us?
I'm not quite as good as some here, but thanks for being so concerned with me personally.
The reason you care about slavery in America is because it is part of history. Bwaaa!
Read what I said again. You keep saying "care about slavery." That implies that you want to do something about it and you have already told us what that is. You want the present day white population to apologize to the present day black population and you want reparations and CRT taught to our children. Any decent human being would be against all of that. It is wrong and immoral. Sorry, John, but you were the one that made it personal.
You are already known for saying that blacks dont properly appreciate the sacrifices whites made for them in the Civil War.
That's another of your misquotes. What I said was the US has already paid dearly for slavery and to end slavery - which it did in the 1860's. Rights followed, privileges followed, but the radicals on the left think they can take advantage of something I simply don't have - "white guit." As long as there are whites who feel somehow guilty about things they had nothing to do with this radical force will continue to plague us.
What other gems do you have for us?
Just common sense
it really is a religion, except racism replaces “god’s will” as the reflexive answer to all presented problems.
The seeder imagines he has shot off a cannon but it is really one of those popguns where a banner shoots out of the barrel with the word BANG! on it.
The first thing I noticed is that the seed is written by Christopher Rufo , the disreputable right wing grifter who invented non existent definitions for critical race theory in order to promote himself and get suckers to send him money. Before 'critical race theory' Rufo was a nobody in right wing circles, since he created a role for CRT brainwashing schoolchildren out of whole cloth Rufo is in demand in conservative media and is raking in the dough.
-
What we see throughout all of this is conservatives and the far right unwilling to face the reality of the American past. The seeder just posted hundreds of words with the seed and the first comment and not one of those words claims that either Kendi or the 1619 Project are factually in error. Rufo and the author of the first comment complain that Kendi's book and the 1619 Project exist , not that the information in them is untrue.
The totality of the seeders presentation here is, America may have been racist throughout hundreds of years, but to bring that up now is divisive. The Americans who were racist for hundreds of years did the best they could as part of their times, lets let bygones be bygones.
This plea would be more persuasive if it did not come along with constant attacks on the anti-racist material.
-
This is a passage from the first comment
This is astonishing coming from an "expert". Yes the Civil War and Emancipation ended slavery, and for a few years the newly free blacks achieved a form of "equality" in the South. Then the Reconstruction ended, blacks lost the right to vote in many places, anti-black violence bloomed, and Jim Crow laws were codified that made racial discrimination legal for the next 100 years. Those facts take a lot of the glory away from the impact of the Emancipation. But the seeders expert doesnt seem to grasp that.
The reason that we are headed to a reckoning is not because people like Ibram Kendi are wrong , it is because they are right and many whites dont want to hear it.
The left promotes a snake oil salesman and gets pissed when those of us that aren't brainwashed refused to buy.
A racist is a racist no matter what the color of their skin is.
Christianity?
The way some of the military top leadership(?) are trying to embrace this ideology almost makes me ashamed the military.
If you think everyone needs to have the same religious beliefs as you my military is better off without you.
Whatever religious beliefs I may or may not have are not the topic here. And that was not what I was referring to anyway.
Interesting how this supposedly makes you ashamed but the stories about white supremacy groups among the military didn't get such a response.
“We clearly recognize the threat from domestic extremists, particularly those who espouse white supremacist or white nationalist ideologies,” a Defense Department official said. “We are actively involved in always trying to improve our understanding of where the threat is coming from as a means of understanding and taking action.”
The official pointed to studies on domestic terrorism, which have found that “between 2001 and today right-wing extremists are responsible for more deaths in this country than any other extremist group,” the official said.
“We know that some groups actively attempt to recruit our personnel into their cause, or actually encourage their members to join the military for [the] purpose of acquiring skills and experience,”.
"In late October 2020, Lance Corporal Joseph Mercurio, a Marine with the 2nd Battalion of the 4th Marine Regiment, hit “send” on an Instagram comment: “The Jewish religion is that of Satan,” he wrote—responding to a photograph of me. His username on Instagram, “joe88mercurio,” incorporated a known neo-Nazi code: 88 stands for “Heil Hitler,” as H is the eighth letter of the alphabet."
" in the latter half of the twentieth century, the Aryan Nations developed a “sustained focus on recruiting veterans and active-duty military personnel” as far back as the late 1970s and early 1980s. Moreover, as Belew writes, military veterans have always had an outsize role in white-power violence, from Confederate veterans forming the first Klan, to the World War II veterans who comprised the vanguard of a Klan resurgence that struck back against the civil rights movement in the 1950s and ’60s."
Disciplinary records, transfers, and reasons for early discharge are not readily available to the public until 62 years after personnel leave the military . Under this official veil, extremist personnel—such as a cell of Marines who were open members of the Ku Klux Klan at Camp Pendleton in the 1970s and beat Black Marines with impunity—can be dispersed to different bases across the country, radicalizing those they encounter under the official imprimatur of “defusing the situation.”
According to author Spencer Ackerman “The military has never wanted to investigate this question. They have a structural disincentive—the military runs the risk of alienating a lot of its own people, depending on how hard it presses on this sore.”
"In my unit (infantry) I've met quite a few rightists — some openly [National Socialist] NS, lots of neo-Nazis ..." one infantryman wrote in leaked “Iron March” forum data from Ars Technica cited in an October Pentagon report. "A good way people in the military find other rightists is to simply wear a shirt with some obscure fascist logo … The symbols of SS units are especially common, even on things as public as cars, flags, and helmets."
So when military leaders start taking the problem seriously and start accepting some of the facts about systemic racism in society that authors like Kendi present, apparently we should be ashamed of the military. But it seems to some the white supremacists that intentionally try and infest our military and use it to recruit others and train in military skills with the obvious intent of someday using the training we all paid for with our tax dollars to attack and kill people of different races and faiths aren't even worth mentioning let alone feel ashamed about.
Pretending racism isn't a problem, doesn't exist or doesn't really effect actual outcomes and quality of life for millions of minority Americans is what weak, scared little bigoted scum bags do to justify their prejudiced views and extremist responses to liberal and progressive attempts to lessen or eliminate systemic racism.
A good post. However, in my defense I stated "almost", not that I was in fact ashamed. And what I should have clarified was that it was only certain areas that I was referring to.