When Ibram X. Kendi (born Ibram Henry Rogers) was all the rage, and Boston University (BU) gave him his own Antiracist Research Center, I decided I’d better read his famous book, How To Be an Antiracist. I found the book’s popularity puzzling, as it was a not-too-coherent mélange of autobiography and questionable but authoritative Diktats about racism, which was that it was ubiquitous, a feature of all white people, and that any law or rule that wasn’t explicitly antiracist was racist. Further, if you are not actively involved in antiracist work, you are a racist. As the NYT wrote, quoting a sentence from the first edition of Kendi’s book:
“The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination,” Kendi wrote, in words that would be softened in a future edition after they became the subject of criticism. “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” In other words, two wrongs do make a right.
Well, that was arguable, but in general I found that the book didn’t cohere, though of course its message resonated at the time, what with Black Lives Matter and all, and sold a gazillion copies. Kendi became the doyen of antiracism (his female counterpart was Robin DiAngelo), and Boston University set up a center run by Kendi, funded by $10 million from a donor, and, over the next three years, it got a further $43 million in grants and donations.
Given all this, I wasn’t too surprised to learn that, given the incoherence of his book—and I’ll admit that I haven’t read Stamped from the Beginning, which some of my friends like, and which won a National Book Award—BU’s Antiracist Research Center was not a success. It was dogged by accusations of mismanagement, and really never did anything. Nineteen employees of the Center (nearly half of its staff) were laid off and BU launched an investigation, which, although it found no issues of misuse of money, decided to hire a management consultant firm, whose recommendations led to a revamping of the center about a year ago. On this site I reported on a discussion of Kendi’s efficacy by John McWhorter and Glenn Loury, and said this (Loury was responding to McWhorter’s statement that he didn’t understand the joy that Kendi’s downfall was provoking):
Loury responds that yes, Schadenfreude is not a great emotion, but he feels that Kendi is an “empty suit”—a “little man behind the curtain”—who “doesn’t know anything.” Loury asserts it’s not really about Kendi, but the failure of the extreme antiracist extremists, like Black Lives Matter or the 1619 Project to make any progress.
I agree with Loury about the problems of an unequipped Kendi being made the symbol of a movement, and if you read his book How to be an Antiracist, you’ll see the intellectual vacuity of his ideas. McWhorter agrees that Kendi was chosen to be the symbol of that movement, and wasn’t equipped to lead it, but that’s no reason to be angry at him. In response, Loury asserts that the man is a fraud, and so he does show a bit of Schadenfreude, for Loury adds that Kendi is an “embarrassment and an absurdity.” Isn’t that Schadenfreude?
In response, McWhorter says that Kendi was thrust into a position for which he was not equipped, and it was not his fault that his Institute fell apart. (McWhorter says that what Boston University did in founding Kendi’s antiracist center “was an insult to black achievement.”) In other words, Loury blames Kendi for taking money and doing what he was unequipped to do, while McWhorter blames society and Boston University for thrusting Kendi into a job that was irresistible in order to do performative antiracism.
Now I learn from this tweet, followed by reporting (see below) that Kendi has left BU for Howard University, a historically black institution in Washington, D.C.
BU will just close Kendi’s center, which means he didn’t build anything lasting that could be handed on to others.
He says this move has been in the works for a while, but he only went to BU five years ago. It’s pretty clear he needed an exit after the scandal.
BU supposedly… https://t.co/IiADCHBr0a
— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) January 30, 2025
You can read about Kendi’s move in many places, including BU Today, the Boston Globe, Axios, The National Review, and The Washington Post (I haven’t found a mention in the New York Times). The Center will close on June 30 when its charter expires, and Howard University has also given Kendi his own institute:
Kendi will start at Howard this summer as a history professor and director of the tentatively named Howard University Institute for Advanced Research, according to the university. He will also bring with him the Emancipator, a digital magazine focused on racial inequity that was founded with the Boston Globe but has since gone independent.
The new institute will research the African diaspora through the lens of racism, technology, climate change and a host of other subjects, said Howard Provost Anthony K. Wutoh, and bring on fellows for each academic year with projects they propose. The effort will be funded largely through donors, though Wutoh said the specifics are not yet finalized.
As to why Kendi is leaving BU, the only guesses are from the National Review, which indicts a lack of productivity of the Center and speculates that Trump’s new DEI initiative may have been responsible:
Despite the generous funds, only two new research papers [from the BU institute] had been produced by the time of the employee layoffs. The exact count of total research papers is unclear.
“Despite all the headwinds we faced as a new organization founded during the pandemic and the intense backlash over critical race theory, I am very proud of all we envisioned, all we created, all we learned, all we achieved—the community we built, the people we helped and inspired,” Kendi said in a statement Thursday.
“To all the faculty, staff, administrators, students, supporters, and Boston community members, I feel honored to have been able to do this work with you over the last five years,” he added. “I am departing for an opportunity I could not pass up, but what connected us at CAR remains, especially during this precarious time. Our commitment to building an equitable and just society.”
The center’s closure and Kendi’s departure come as President Donald Trump roots out diversity, equity, and inclusion practices within the federal government and threatens to do the same in the private sector if corporations and universities fail to abandon the leftist ideology.
Taking the hint from the Republican administration, universities are halting research projects and shuttering offices related to DEI, according to the Wall Street Journal. Public higher-education institutions are reversing course because they could lose federal funding if they continue maintaining their diversity and inclusion efforts.
I’m not sure about the involvement of Trump’s DEI plans here, but I do have a few remarks. First, I don’t feel any joy that Kendi is leaving BU, even if he was sort of deep-sixed for non-productivity. If McWhorter and Loury are correct, Kendi was simply unequipped to run a big institute. (As a side note, he also had stage 4 colon cancer, but appears to have survived it; and he did a lot of his work while waiting to see if he would be cured. That diagnosis is a huge burden to carry.) Kendi may, as they said, be good at helping with the “racial reckoning,” but appears to lack managerial skills (he’s only 42).
Second, I think that, in view of what happened at BU, Howard is making a mistake giving Kendi his own institute. As nearly everyone who’s studied the BU debacle admits, Kendi is unequipped to run a big institute. On the other hand, he’s published many books and shows no lack of scholarship, and his presence at Howard will undoubtedly be a magnet for students. In my view, they should have just made him a professor, but one without an institute to run. At any rate, we’ll see how the new Howard University Institute for Advanced Research will fare.
In the meantime, here’s Howard University’s welcome:
We are pleased to announce the appointment of Ibram X. Kendi, Ph.D., as the director of the newly established Howard University Institute for Advanced Study.
The institute will be dedicated to interdisciplinary study advancing research of importance to the global African… pic.twitter.com/BlJIJ1j6Vj
— Howard University (@HowardU) January 30, 2025
“…center run by Kendi, funded by $10 from a donor…”
So Kendi blew his institute’s initial endowment on coffee and one small doughnut? I wonder if the donor got naming rights?
Maybe a word missing there?
–Steve
Kendi is not an empty suit. He had a few good points in “How to be an Antiracist”, such as protests and demonstrations are largely a waste of time, that the acquisition of power is needed to implement anti-racist policies. Is he a historian? That would be for other historians to determine.
Ta-Nehisi Coates is the true empty suit. He damn near makes things up. The irony is it’s whites who have elevated Kendi, Coates, and I would argue Michael Eric Dyson. They owe their success to non-critical thinking white folks…ala American Fiction.
I think the “empty suit” reference is with respect to his managerial abilities.
Could be. Having worked with empty suits, our reference point was lack of intellectual capacity.
From memory his ‘big idea’ was a self-appointed, self-perpetuating censorship board with full override power of ‘white mans’ law and ‘white mans’ government.
Which is what New Zealand has with it’s Waitangi Tribunal and many states in Australia (Just look at Victoria for example) are racing to implement in the form of an ‘Indigenous Voice’.
Has he produced real, actual scholarship, in the way that (for example) Roland Fryer has?
Perhaps Kendi cannot produce real scholarship since his approach is too ideological. One cannot properly study differences in racial outcomes if the only answer one allows oneself is a vague appeal to “systemic racism”.
It seems akin to setting up an institute to study intercessory prayer, while allowing only the conclusion “prayer works”.
Well..to be fair as a younger man he wrote and published that white people were aliens and AIDS was engineered to kill blacks. (See FreePress)
But he looked the look, hair and all, spoke the right magic words, had the right connections. In America a conman can become president and a low rent race grifter can achieve some heights of unjust fame and wealth. Low IQ white guilt pay$.
He’s not actively dangerous like RFK, say, but a deeply stupid con man. Our recent sociological vibe shift is very overdue.
D.A.
NYC
I wonder if his position at BU might have been a soft-money position, and that he had simply run out of money with no other grant in the offing.
I read his “How to Be an Antiracist.” As you say, it was part memoir and part manifesto. The memoir part led me to think that Kendi expresses a certain vulnerability with which I would like to sympathize. But his thesis that a person is racist unless he or she is actively combating racism left me cold. One implication is that simply living your life and treating everyone with dignity and respect means, in fact, that you are a racist. Under Kendi’s thesis it is impossible to falsify the conclusion that a person is a racist—unless that person is actively engaged in the anti-racism movement. This lack of falsifiability is what led me to reject his point of view.
I wish him the best at Howard.
I am pretty much on board with Norman’s viewpoint. Though I would think that as head of the institute, one of his responsibilities would have been to attract continuing funding, which he apparently was unable to do; and I wish Howard the best with him. It appears that Kendi cannot distinguish between, activity metrics, output metrics, and outcome metrics. He may have stayed busy with a lot of activities at BU, but it appears that those activities were not focussed on appropriate outputs or outcomes.
A couple of quotes from Booker T, Washington:
“There is a certain class of race problem-solvers who don’t want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public.”
“There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”
https://www.azquotes.com/author/15322-Booker_T_Washington
Precisely. An institute founded on a grievance.
This sums up my beef with the anti-racist stance. When Loury said:
I would suggest they are not and never were intended to make what I think Loury means by “progress,” which I take to be a less racist world where MLK’s “content of his character” matters more than skin colour. Such endeavours are designed for revenge rather than such progress. They make racial grievances permanent, incurable, unrepairable. Oppressor and oppressed are to be static labels even as they exchange roles. They will get us nowhere on the road to equality.
Martin Luther King wanted preferential treatment for the American Negro to compensate him for the discrimination that had been done to him. This was how the content of his children’s character would be judged, not by an employer or college being colour-blind at all but by hiring/admitting them preferentially so they could demonstrate it. I’m not so sure Mr. Kendi strays from this world view.
But maybe it was just supposed to be temporary.
Dr. King’s legacy was that self-interested non-violence mostly characterized the civil rights movement, to the great relief of white people. Not colour-blindness.
You know when you’re embarrassed when a member of your “tribe” does something stupid or deranged?
Like…. when Mel Gibson or Ken Hamm open their flapping traps I think: “Ohhhh no – I hope Americans don’t think those fools are representative of Australians….”
Or embarrassing woke atheists? My fellow New Yorkers even, on occasion.
Surely when many black people see Kendi they must feel the same: his idiot pronouncements, his phony failed center, his whole racist “anti-racist” ideology, his books (“Anti-racist baby”)…etc. etc. a long list.
“Oh no. Not that damn fool – he’s not representative of us!”
D.A.
NYC
All I can say to this is why is someone like him hirable as faculty but someone like me who can publish in Nature, which I have, is not? Screw this shitty system.
I was once told that being a faculty member is mostly about signaling. I do believe that’s my answer.
He’ll be warmly embraced and celebrated at Howard for his journey and struggle against the whites in Boston — signaling all the way down.
I suppose I wouldn’t want a job which required me to sacrifice my integrity to dance like that, but that IS EXACTLY HOW most faculty jobs are obtained.
(I’m paid the equivalent 3-figure salary that an assistant faculty member makes in Boston but will likely need to pivot to industry for any big career progression, as there is nothing for me in academia unless most of my time is spent signaling and kissing ass for grants I don’t even give a shlit about. So perhaps Howard and Kendi are a match. I just wish being a professor meant more than that.)
I’m waiting for my disillusionment to pass.
I’m curious as to what this should make us think about Howard? Taking on Boston’s failure and happy to do so? Hardly the sign of a first class faculty, and presumably done for the virtue signalling.
I read “How to be an Anti-Racist”. I kept a tally on the racist things that had happened to him. I was (pleasantly) surprised at the dearth of them. He devotes nearly a chapter to describing how, as a child, he saw a white teacher ignore the hand of a young black student to answer a question and chose instead a white student. There were almost no other examples in the book of white-on-black racism that he personally experienced. That school-room anecdote exemplified the core issue of his work – he ignores any alternative hypothesis for what he sees as racism.
Kendi is a perfect example of those who ‘hallucinate’ racism everywhere they look, but only because they conceive of themselves singularly as ‘racial persons’.