Ibram Kendi: why we need a new conception of “intellectual” that includes him

Ibram X. Kendi (née Ibram Henry Rogers) has a short article in The Atlantic whose thesis is summed up in the subtitle below. And I think his thesis is both self-pitying and, worse, wrong.  I am not a Kendi expert, though I have read his book How to Be An Antiracist (not that impressive: a strange gemisch of autobiography and strong antiracism that brands everyone not actively working against racism as a racist). I’m told, though, that his earlier book, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, is good.

But this essay is not good. It’s full of false claims about how nobody but straight white Christian men ever counted as “intellectuals”.   No blacks, no gays, no Jews, and no women.  Frankly, I’m surprised that The Atlantic published it, but it’s Kendi, Jake! (I suspect the magazine needs a fact checker for stuff like this.)

Click below to read it, or find it archived here:Kendi’s claim is that the term “intellectual” explicitly includes (and historically included) only white males who assume the mantle of objectivity, denigrate “lived experience”, and engage in work that deliberately avoids discussing or trying to solve what Kendi sees as the most pressing problems of society. Kendi came to this notion, he says, when he was writing How to Be An Antiracist, and worried that his style might not place him among “intellectuals.”

Some quotes to demonstrate what he sees as who counts as an “intellectual” (indented):

The intellectual has been traditionally framed as measured, objective, ideologically neutral, and apolitical, superior to ordinary people who allow emotion, subjectivity, ideology, and their own lived experiences to cloud their reason. Group inequality has traditionally been reasoned to stem from group hierarchy. Those who advance anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-classist, and anti-homophobic ideas have historically been framed as anti-intellectual.

The traditional construct of the intellectual has produced and reinforced bigoted ideas of group hierarchy—the most anti-intellectual constructs existing. But this framing is crumbling, leading to the crisis of the intellectual.

The crisis isn’t really mentioned further: it appears to be a crisis in Kendi’s own head, about whether he or people like him count as an intellectual/

Forty-six years later, when intellectuals of all races produce work on matters primarily affecting white people, the assumed subject of intellectual pursuits, these thinkers are seldom accused of engaging in identity politics. Their work isn’t considered dangerous. These thinkers are not framed as divisive and political. Instead, they are praised for example, for exposing the opioid crisis in white America, praised for pushing back against blaming the addicted for their addictions, praised for enriching their work with lived experiences, praised for uncovering the corporations behind the crisis, praised for advocating research-based policy solutions, praised for seeking truth based on evidence, praised for being intellectuals. As they all should be. But when anti-racist intellectuals expose the crisis of racism, push back against efforts to problematize people of color in the face of racial inequities, enrich our essays with lived experiences, point to racist power and policies as the problem, and advocate for research-based anti-racist policy solutions, the reactions couldn’t be more different. We are told that “truth seeking” and “activism” don’t mix.

I’m wondering who said that “truth seeking” and “activism” don’t mix? There is a whole tradition of people who seek the truth but also had the explicit aim of achieving social justice (in the proper sense). They are most notable in feminism, including Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, Camille Paglia, bell hooks, Virginia Woolf, Betty Friedan, and so on. These women were intellectuals and activists at the same time. The same goes for gay and black thinkers, including James Baldwin (black and gay), Frederick Douglass, Angela Davis, Cornel West, Langston Hughes, and, on the working people’s side, Eric Hoffer.  And yet Kendi says this, which is so palpably false that I’ve put it in bold:

Intellectuals who are people of color, women, non-Christian, LGBTQ, or working class—indeed intellectuals of all identities who have challenged the status quo, especially traditional and bigoted conventions—have historically been cast aside as nonintellectuals.

To support this claim, Kendi cites a few people who have dismissed the work of people like W. E. B. Du Boois or Carter Woodson. But citing a few detractors (of the work, not of the identity) does not show that these people have been “cast aside”.  If they have been, how come they’re still read—and taught on college campuses—today?

As for “non-Christian” intellectuals, well, I’ll omit a list of Jewish or atheist thinkers, starting from Spinoza, because you should be able to think of them (Spinoza, Marx, etc.)   And when you read a paragraph like this, from Kendi, you sense that his definition of a “true intellectual” is “someone like Kendi.” (It’s the “No True Kendi” hypothesis):

American traditions do not breed intellectuals; they breed propagandists and careerists focusing their gaze on the prominent and privileged and powerful and on whatever challenges are afflicting them. Intellectuals today, when focused on the oppression of our own groups—as embodied in the emergence of Queer Studies, Women’s Studies, African American Studies, Native American Studies, Critical Whiteness Studies, Disability Studies, Latino Studies, Jewish Studies, Middle Eastern Studies, and Asian American Studies—are ridiculed for pursuing fields that lack “educational value,” and our books, courses, programs, and departments are shut down and banned by the action of Republicans and the inaction of Democrats. We are told to research, think, and write about people, meaning not our people. We are told to let our people die. We are told to die.

Who, exactly, tells people to die? That’s pure histrionics.

Insofar as the “studies” courses are criticized—and yes, some of these are valid and worthwhile—they are criticized in academia precisely because they do not involve the search for truth. They involve instead the inculcation of propaganda and the denigration of “heterodox” thought.  But seriously, for Kendi to say that these programs, or what he sees as faux intellectuals, argue to let “our people” die, or tell people to die (presumably blacks, LGBTQ people, women, Jews, and so on; see below) is hyperbolic and, in fact, a lie—unless I misconstrue the meaning of the word “die”.

And he says it again:

We are told not to change the inequitable present, and not to expect anything to change in the future. We are told to look away as the past rains down furiously on the present. Or we are told that intellectuals should focus only on how society has progressed, a suicidal and illogical act when a tornado is ravaging your community. Yet again, we are told to let our people die. We are told to die.

He may be referring to Pinker here, who if course has never told anybody or any group to die, but the “die” thing is just unhinged.

In the end, this article feels like a long whine, one in which Kendi, who apparently has faced charges of not being an intellectual (and his antiracism book doesn’t seem very intellectual), wants to change the meaning of “intellectual” to “someone who rationally seeks the truth in their work, but also prizes ‘lived experience”‘and, above all, has the aim of changing society in ways Kendi approves of”. But has he forgotten about Karl Marx, an intellectual by anybody’s account, whose explicit aim was to change society to make it more egalitarian, and is the author of these famous words (inscribed on his tombstone):

“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”

Here’s Kendi wanting to be seen as both an intellectual and an antiracist (he sees the terms as nearly synonymous), while beefing that he hasn’t yet acquired the patina of an intellectual:

Traditional notions of the intellectual were never meant to include people who looked like me or who had a background like mine, who came from a non-elite academic pedigree, emerged proudly from a historically Black university, earned a doctorate in African American Studies. Traditional notions of the intellectual were never meant to include people who researched like me, thought like me, wrote like me—or who researched, thought, or wrote for people like me. Traditional notions of the intellectual were never meant to include people who are not ranking groups of people in the face of inequity and injustice. Traditional notions of the intellectual were never meant to include those of us who are fixated and focused wholly and totally on uncovering and clarifying complex truths that can radically improve the human condition. Traditional notions of the intellectual were never meant to include our conception of the intellectual.

Well, the Oxford English Dictionary disagrees, but really, who cares? (I’ve chosen a few of many definitions that seem to be what Kendi’s talking about.)

(“Intellectual” an adjective) Possessing a high degree of understanding or intelligence; given to pursuits that exercise the intellect; spec. devoted to academic or cultural interests.

(“Intellectual” as a noun): An intellectual being; a person of superior or supposedly superior intellect; spec. (a) a highly intelligent person who pursues academic interests; (b) a person who cultivates the mind or mental powers and pursues learning and cultural interests.

Note the word “cultural” in both definitions. At any rate, here’s some beefing by Kendi about how he thought his antiracism book would be received:

When the traditionalists today disagree with the evidence-based findings of intellectuals—or envy the prominence of our work—too often they do not contest our findings with their own evidence. They do not usually engage in intellectual activity. They misrepresent our work. They play up minor typos or small miscues to take down major theses. They call us names they never define, like “leftist” or “Marxist” or “woke” or “socialist” or “prophet” or “grifter” or “political” or “racist.” All to attack our credibility as intellectuals—to reassert their own credibility. In politics, they say, when you can’t win on policy, you smear the candidate. In intellectualism, when you can’t win on evidence, you smear the intellectual.

 

I knew the smears were coming, because I knew history. What blocked my writing bound my intellectualism. What finally set me free to be an intellectual was the face of death, a face I still stare at to amass the courage to be an intellectual.

Although Kendi is not explicit about what the “crisis” of the intellectual is, it seems to be that people like Kendi, who aspire to be both a rational thinker but also someone with an explicit social agenda, don’t count as intellectuals. It may also sting him that Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University (he founded it and runs it) is in trouble. It has produced virtually no intellectual work, has laid off staff, and Kendi himself has been repeatedly accused of mismanagement. Kendi and the Center remain under investigation.

But I find it bizarre that Kendi even worries about whether he’s seen as an intellectual. Certainly his first two books have had a profound effect on society, whether for good or ill. They are part of the modern canon of Social Justice literature. So yes, he’s changed the thinking of many Americans, even though I see Kendi’s views as misguided and his effect on society neutral at best, malign at worst.  With the fame this young man (he’s only 41) has accrued, why this beef about intellectuals? After all, he’s accomplished what he says intellectuals are supposed to do.

At any rate, I find the ending of the piece ineffably sad, for when I read in his antiracism book that he was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer in 2018, I thought, “Uh oh—this guy is a goner.” Fortunately, he’s still with us, as I wouldn’t want anybody, including an intellectual opponent, to go through that and die. Here’s his ending:

It took me all of 2017 to write six chapters of How to Be an Antiracist. A slog. But when doctors diagnosed me with Stage 4 colon cancer in January 2018, when I figured I probably wouldn’t survive a disease that kills 86 percent of people in five years, when I decided that this book would be my last major will and testament to the world, everything that blocked my writing wilted away, along with my prospects for living. I no longer cared about those traditional conceptions of the intellectual—just like I no longer cared about the orthodoxy of racial thinking. I no longer cared about the backlash that was likely to come. All I cared about was telling the truth through the lens of research and evidence, reaction be damned. And just like that, between chemotherapy treatments, the words started flowing, furiously: 13 chapters in a few months.

Since I wasn’t going to live, I wanted to write a book that could help prevent our people from dying at the hands of racism. Yes, I was told I would die, but I wanted to tell my people to live. Like an intellectual.

It looks like he survived, even if he isn’t seen as an “intellectual” in the way he wants.  Were I to chararacterize him, I’d call him an “activist.”

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Karl Marx’s tomb at Highgate Cemetery, London. I’ve put a rectangle above the famous quote (note: Marx was a “non-Christian”, born of Jewish origin and later a diehard atheist.