Over the weekend, Colorado State University philosophy professor Andre M. Archie argued that the anti-racism agenda of Ibram X. Kendi — briefly: that the many disparities of our systemically racist society are ipso facto proof of discrimination, and the only way to fight bad discrimination is with good discrimination — is a betrayal of the American color-blind vision that alone can save us from endless racial recrimination, and is therefore a dead end. “We cannot afford to go along any further with the anti-racism message,” Archie wrote.
We may not be able to afford continued endorsement by the commanding heights of our culture of Kendi’s pernicious worldview, as institutions captured by it would persist in an endless bout of self-abnegation. But Kendi himself cannot afford for them not to. Anti-racism may be an intellectually bankrupt dead end for the rest of us, as we would be reduced to crude racial caricatures without individual agency. But for him, it is a crowning achievement for which he has been richly rewarded, and a nigh-artistic accomplishment in grift.
Archie takes as his jumping-off point the recent controversies involving Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research, which Kendi founded and runs. The Boston Globe reported last month that he has done so incompetently, wasting millions of dollars showered upon him and the institution and poorly managing its personnel, more than half of whom have recently been fired. These developments are ample reason to gloat over how “Ibram X. Kendi Is Who We Thought He Was,” as Jeff Blehar put it. But from its 2020 launch until recently, the endeavor was being taken seriously enough to warrant such resources and attention as a $10 million gift from Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. Kendi’s mismanagement may be under the spotlight now, but he had quite the run there.
And elsewhere. A public figure of note since at least the 2016 publication of Stamped from the Beginning (which won the National Book Award), Kendi benefited enormously from, first, the gradual creeping of anti-racist logic into national life; and, second, the explosion of racial consciousness produced by the civic catastrophe of Covid-lockdown summer 2020 and George Floyd’s death. That toxic moment helped return his 2019 work How to Be an Antiracist to the top of best-seller lists and paved the way for 2020’s Antiracist Baby, a children’s-book version of the same argument. It also justified a faculty position at Boston University (separate from the antiracism center). In summer 2020, BU announced that he would hold the second-ever Andrew W. Mellon Professorship in the Humanities, after Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize–winner Elie Wiesel, who had held the chair until 2013 (it was vacant in the interim).
Other honors have followed. In 2021, he received a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” of $625,000 over five years. He is receiving plenty of remuneration from other sources. That same year, Fairfax County, Va., schools paid him $20,000 for a one-hour speech. For his plentiful speaking engagements for a variety of clients, he usually goes for around $25,000 an hour.
The entertainment world has also opened itself to Kendi. In 2021, he made a deal with Netflix to adapt two of his books as shows. And earlier this month (amid his current troubles), he kicked off a series on ESPN+ to tackle “racism in the sports world,” according to Axios.
That the Kendi endeavor proceeds despite its intellectual deficiencies and despite his personal failings is, on one level, appalling and worthy of mockery, which is why I have mocked it. In this light, Kendi’s refusal to debate critics (because they’re not arguing against him but “are arguing against themselves”) merely reinforces the weakness of his worldview.
But there’s another level on which one could grudgingly tip a cap to Kendi. Somehow, he has overcome the intellectual failures of his project and prospered personally in the process. Composer Richard Wagner created works that he intended to be experienced simultaneously in multiple artistic media (known as the “Gesamtkunstwerk,” or “total work of art”). As an “artist,” Kendi has given us a total work of grift, straddling multiple fields of American life. In this light, his refusal to debate critics seems less like a philosophical statement and more an affirmation of the old principle: de gustibus non disputandam est — there is no accounting for taste.
If Kendi’s were only a niche grift, it might be possible to hold such grudging respect for it. But, alas, it is not, and thus one cannot. Kendi-ism is indeed a dead end, incompatible with American principles, and a surefire way to perpetuate racial acrimony and to empower and reward those, such as Kendi, deemed (or who deem themselves) its arbiters. We must steer ourselves away from Kendi-ism and hope that the troubles at BU are only the beginning of the process that will lead to its ultimate dissolution.