Category: racial issues

A hyperbolic and misguided article in the New England Journal of Medicine, prompted by the death of Jason Arday

August 30, 2026 • 8:45 am

Although the respected New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) has the right to publish what it wants, and African-American gynecological oncologist Kemi Doll has the right to write about what she thinks, their intersection in a new NEJM “voices” piece is hyperbolic and misguided to the point of toxicity. Doll’s article simply poisons the debate about merit versus “equity” in America by simply asserting that there are “structural” intentions held by academics to kill—literally exterminate—black professors. The thesis is in Doll’s first sentence—her topic sentence:

“They are trying to kill us.”

And yes, she means that literally.

Doll’s short op-ed, which you can access below, is so over the top that the NEJM has itself gone off the rails, embarrassing itself by publishing it. Its assertions are either distorted or wrong, and there’s no evidence of a conspiracy to exterminate black scholars. Doll’s “evidence” rests on two academics who committed suicide, one being Jason Arday, the Cambridge University professor of sociology who apparently committed suicide after his plagiarism and made-up stories came to light (see my posts about him here).  To Kemi Doll, Arday died because the allegations against him were intended to kill him.

That, of course, is nonsense. The story is complicated, but to couch it as people wanting Arday to die is a ridiculous simplification. There may have been a bit of racism motivating some of Arday’s critics, but most of it came from the realization that Arday, a professor without much merit as well as a serial liar, was promoted largely because of his ethnicity and his claimed disability (he said he was severely autistic). It was an obvious case of ideological capture of academia, a case so clear that it has now become acceptable to talk and write about ethnicity versus quality—a topic previously taboo.

You can read the NEJM piece by clicking on the screenshot below.

I’ll quote a lot of it starting from the beginning. The quotes are indented, and my comments are flush left.

They are trying to kill us.

When Black academics say this, I imagine folks outside of our community think we are being hyperbolic. We are not. I think my non-Black colleagues are starting to get a taste of this as they realize how diabolically opposed to our own well-being most of the movements of our federal health agencies seem to be these days. It’s appalling and scary and also — yes, welcome. This is how it feels to know that there are systemic pressures working against your success, your well-being, and in the case of Jason Arday — your life.

Note that Doll cites racist “systemic pressures” that are aimed at ruining the carers of black academics and even killing them. In fact, the opposite is true.  Affirmative action, DEI, and the “racial reckoning” that’s been occurring for a long time have given minority academics, including women, a leg up. These initiatives, which led to Arday’s promotion and, indeed, sacralization, is clearly what got him the Cambridge professorship in the first place. Until Arday’s fabulism and plagiarism were revealed (starting with a post by Nathan Cofnas, who clearly didn’t want Arday to die), Arday was on a pedestal, told by his own chairperson at Cambridge that “We are so lucky to have you. You are the best in the world in terms of the research that you do.” Doll continues:

Jason Arday had the distinction of being the youngest Black professor in the University of Cambridge’s history. His publications specifically focused on race and racism in the British educational system, and he didn’t shy away from using his own life in his examples. After the deliberate targeting of his veracity as an academic by another former Cambridge professor, dismissed due to his racism and white supremacist views, Prof. Arday came under intense scrutiny with regard to his Ph.D. thesis and the stories in his memoir. Besides making the point that his Ph.D. advisor and the university cleared him of any deliberate plagiarism allegations, I want to be clear that I don’t care whether or not any of these allegations against Prof. Arday were true. None of them were worth his career. And certainly not his life.

Note the penultimate statement: Doll didn’t care whether any allegations against Arday were true. But if they were true (they include made-up positions he put on his c.v.), and they seem to be, then he was unqualified for his position at Cambridge. Remember that Arday killed himself only after Cambridge decided to investigate the allegations. Did anybody predict that those allegations would lead to his (presumed) suicide? I don’t think so, but Doll argues that his death was not only predictable, but engineered by academia and the media:

But Black academics know that we will always be held to a different standard, and it will look “fair” to most until perhaps we are dead. Dr. Antoinette “Bonnie” Candia-Bailey of Lincoln University expressed the severe stress, pressure, and undue criticism she weathered in her position before her suicide in 2024. Dr. JoAnne A. Epps, Executive Vice President and Provost of Temple University, and Dr. Orinthia T. Montague, President of Volunteer State Community College, died enduring the unique stressors of their jobs. Prof. Claudine Gay was hounded by accusations of plagiarism and ousted by Harvard, who bent to those who simply could not stomach a world where a Black woman was president of such a storied institution. Today, I took a moment to appreciate that she is still with us, thank God.

I urge you to check those references for suicide caused by stress, pressure, and criticism. Yes, Candia-Bailey killed herself after claiming she was bullied in academia, but Epps “died. . . . after becoming ill onstage at a memorial service, the university said.” The reference to Orinthia Montague says nothing about suicide, and I can find nothing about that in other places (e.g., here) What is ludicrous about Doll’s claims here is that she simply asserts that the last two died because of “stress and pressure”. But, for crying out loud, being a president or provost of any college is a stressful job, and there is no evidence that Montague or Epps had sufficiently more stress than other administrators because they were black, crossing a stress threshhold that led to death. Neither death is attributed to suicide, so Doll simply asserts that they were due to blackness-induced pressure. Didn’t the NEJM even check the links?

As for Claudine Gay, she was asked to resign by the Harvard Corporation because she did not handle well the allegations of antisemitism at Harvard (she had to clarify her position several times), because she was credibly accused of plagiarism, and because she could no longer lead the University effectively. Rather than boot her out of the Presidency, Harvard stood by her (even dismissing her plagiarism accusations as only examples of “duplicative language without appropriate attribution“) until the pressure from the Corporation became too great. Indeed, some people, as in NYT link I just gave, argued that Harvard was going easier on Gay than it was on students who might have done the same thing.  I see no evidence that Harvard wanted to dump Gay because she was black. Indeed, why was she appointed President if there were structural pressures to ruin her career?

At any rate, Gay landed on her feet. Though she resigned the Presidency, Harvard Magazine says that Gay returned to the faculty as professor of government and of African and American studies, earning “a base salary of $1,397,749, plus other compensation of $150,802 (again, principally the value of a University-provided official residence)”. I don’t know another regular humanities professor making nearly $1.5 million per year! Clearly, Harvard was not trying to ruin her career.

More:

The message to Black academics is clear. Come in, be great and indeed be excellent, but don’t dare dream too big. Don’t dare shine too bright. Walk the line of excellence and humility with perfect grace, and be ready to fight for your life.

The lesson is really that your ethnicity (and, in Arday’s class, his claimed early disability) can elevate you to prestige. Beyond Arday and Candia-Bailey, the argument that universities and academia are trying to exterminate black people is nonexistent.

Doll does mention one white man who lost his job after accusations of falsified data:

In contrast, as a white man, you can rise to be president of Stanford University, and after your falsified data is found and has set back an entire field of research for years — you will only lose your job and then quickly find another one as the CEO of a $1 billion biopharma start-up. Beyond this single story of nauseating privilege, it is a fantasy to act like plagiarism, falsified data, and suspicious, unreproducible results are not major and common problems in academia. We have entire websites devoted to attempting to keep pace with the number of scientific papers retracted amid scandal. Scroll through the recent posts on Retraction Watch and let me know how many of those investigators have been hounded, literally, to death by the news media. I hear the assertions that the British press is particularly vicious and unabashedly racist, which contributed to hundreds of articles attacking Prof. Arday in a matter of days. However, this country is not far behind. The New York Times, before his body was even laid to rest, asserted on social media that Arday’s death was a result of “race, diversity, and academic hiring.” Sure.

I won’t list other white academics who lost their jobs for plagiarism or other accusations, or even killed themselves as a result, as that’s just playing an anecdotes game. Yes, Marc Tessier-Lavigne resigned from Stanford after wonky and apparently falsified data were found in a paper he co-authored, but, like Claudine Gay, he landed on his feet. And remember, the attention directed to Arday was only tangentially because he was black, for it was his ethnicity and claimed disability, as well as the accusations of fabulism and plagiarism that Cambridge University at first ignored, that gave the story its viral status. The striking part was the realization of how far ideological capture had gone in academia—so far that a man totally unqualified for a professorship had gotten there without anybody looking too closely at his qualifications. (Indeed, I think the NEJM publishing Doll’s palpably ludicrous analysis is itself an example of ideological capture of the journal.)

At the end, Doll bemoans her own fate, telling us that she pretty much has it as bad as did Arday, although that cannot be true. She also analogizes her accusations of racism to lynching, for lynching is the subject of the song “Strange Fruit,” made famous by Billie Holiday in 1939 (bolding below is mine):

As someone who introduced herself here as being in it for the long haul in academia, I am in contemplation this week. Not because I am considering leaving, but because it’s important to query whether my systems and boundaries for my own well-being are strong enough to withstand the ever-present winds of white supremacy and anti-Blackness. Are my bonds with my fellow Black academics well-tended to? Are my filters to keep nonsense out of my inbox tight enough? Do I need to ratchet up my “No”s even further?

In these times where trees bearing strange fruit are on the rise (again) in the U.S. South, where Black mothers everywhere heard about Nolan Wells long before it was in the mainstream media, I don’t believe there is such thing as hyperbole. They are trying to kill us. They always have been.

And yet, we are still here.

Rest in peace, Jason Arday.

Ask yourself if you’re an academic: are colleges and universities trying to deny jobs to minorities, impede their progress, or even trying to kill them by putting in motion processes that they know will result in suicide? I’d say that, in these days of DEI, it’s the precise opposite.

But why did the NEJM even publish such a palpably misguided and hyperbolic piece? I would answer this way: the journal’s editors were trying to signal their virtue. And that’s ideological capture.

The taboo idea you can’t discuss in academia

March 20, 2026 • 10:00 am

My friend the Belgian philosopher Maarten Boudry is writing about what he calls, correctly, “the most dangerous idea in academia”—an idea that can get you banned or even fired if you even suggest it. It is, of course, the notion that different “races” differ on average in IQ or intelligence. It’s such a hot potato that many people think that research looking for any differences should be banned or strongly discouraged. (This, of course, is because any potential outcome save exact equality among groups is said to inevitably cause racism and bigotry.)

I’ll leave aside here the idea of what “races” are, for Luana and I explained our take in our Skeptical Inquirer paper “The Ideological Subversion of Biology.”  We can use instead either the notion of “self-defined races” (the boxes one ticks on a form) or, as Luana and I wrote, human populations:

Before we handle this hot potato, we emphasize that we prefer the words ethnicity or even geographic populations to race, because the last term, due to its historical association with racism, has simply become too polarizing. Further, old racial designations such as white, black, and Asian came with the erroneous view that races are easily distinguished by a few traits, are geographically delimited, and have substantial genetic differences. In fact, the human species today comprises geographically continuous groups that have only small to modest differences in the frequencies of genetic variants, and there are groups within groups: potentially an unlimited number of “races.” Still, human populations do show genetic differences from place to place, and those small differences, summed over thousands of genes, add up to substantial and often diagnostic differences between populations.

We discuss some differences between populations and self-diagnosed “races” that are known. There are also known differences in IQ, but the taboo question is whether any of those difference reside in the genes. On this subject I, like Maarten, am agnostic, as I simply don’t know the literature well enough (and am not sufficiently interested in it) to form an opinion.

Click on the screenshot below to read Maarten’s take:

Maarten was impelled to write the piece because one of his colleagues at Ghent University, Nathan Cofnas, is in big trouble because he’s promoted the most inflammatory version of The Forbidden Question: that a substantial portion of the differences in IQ between American blacks and whites (a phenotypic difference of about 15 points) is genetic:

My guest Han van der Maas, a renowned intelligence researcher at the University of Amsterdam, explained that individual IQ differences are highly heritable, but that he does not believe in differences between ethnic groups. His statistical and methodological arguments (e.g. Simpson’s paradox) convinced me at the time. Still, he hedged his bets: future evidence might yet reveal such differences, and we should not try to cancel researchers who claim such differences are real.

Forty-five colleagues from my former philosophy department (and hundreds more in a letter to the rector) clearly think otherwise. They are urging the rector to fire Nathan Cofnas because he claims that the IQ gap between racial groups such as whites and blacks in the US—differences that are themselves well documented—have largely genetic causes, rather than environmental ones like socio-economic disadvantage or discrimination. He makes the same claim about the higher scores of East Asians and Jews (which exceed those of white Europeans, by the way). They dismiss all of this as “pseudoscience and racism.”

The question is whether Cofnas should be fired for his claim, and whether the research supposedly supporting it should be banned.  I would argue that the answer to both questions is “no”, but researchers have to be very careful and sensitive in pursuing it.  Maarten quotes the paper by Luana and me about this (his words indented, ours doubly indented):

Now, I perfectly understand why many people are shocked by Cofnas’s claims, and I agree that such hypotheses should be treated with utmost caution. As my friend Jerry Coyne wrote with Luana Maroja in their influential article The Ideological Subversion of Biology:

In light of the checkered history of this work, it behooves any researcher to tread lightly, for virtually any outcome save worldwide identity of populations could be used to buttress bias and bigotry.

Still, this clearly falls within the scope of academic freedom. If you are not prepared to extend academic freedom to ideas you fiercely disagree with, you do not really believe in academic freedom.

In light of calls for Cofnas’s firing, a number of people have signed an open letter defending Cofnas’s right to study this topic (or any reasonable topic); the letter is at the link below:

My colleagues Peter Singer, Francesca Minerva and Jeff McMahan wrote an open letter defending the academic freedom of Nathan Cofnas. I have signed it as well, together with luminaries such as Steven Pinker, Alan Sokal , Susan Blackmore, Scott Aaronson, and Bryan Caplan. Here it is in full:

And the letter, which is short:

A statement in support of Nathan Cofnas’s Right to Academic Freedom of Expression

Two separate statements have recently been issued by members of Ghent University, in Belgium, calling on the university to rescind the appointment of Nathan Cofnas as a postdoctoral researcher. One claims that his views “violate the university’s code of ethics and are morally beneath contempt”.

We oppose this attack on academic freedom. While we are not endorsing any specific claims Cofnas has made, we believe that academics must be able to put forward controversial or provocative claims without fear of losing their employment. Of course, other academics should be free to criticise or repudiate those claims.

The statements mentioned above do not even attempt to engage with Cofnas’s empirical claims. Disagreements, whether about empirical claims, ethical principles, or the interpretation of the ethical code of a university, should be settled through free inquiry and open, civil discussion.

We commend Petra De Sutter, Rector of Ghent University, for her statement to the Belgian newspaper De Morgen, that “As a university, we have a responsibility to create space for debate, but also to ensure an environment where people feel heard and respected.”

We agree that creating space for debate is an essential element of a university, and that space for debate should not be closed unless this is a last resort to prevent a clear threat of lasting substantial harm.

Note that the letter takes no position on the data itself; it’s a letter about whether Cofnas should be granted academic freedom to do his work.  As Maarten himself says, “As most of the signatories, I do not endorse Nathan Cofnas’s claims and remain agnostic on the issue.”  Luana and I, along with 145 other academics, signed this letter, with some signers named above.

It’s a sign of the ideologically-infused and chilling atmosphere in biology that one has to think for even a second before agreeing with the letter.  Now you might think that finding genetically-based IQ differences betwen populations might cause “a clear threat of lasting substantial harm,” but for reasons outlined in our paper, Luana and I don’t agree.  There are potential upsides in such data, just as there are potential upsides in looking at interpopulation data on medical conditions (the goal is to help individuals, not to demonize one group or another). After all, we don’t even know how the data will come out.

And it’s not at all clear whether finding out that an interpopulation difference has genetic causes will lead to increased bigotry. Since genetic contributions to being gay have been found, prejudice against gays has decreased, not increased. If you reject free will and accept determinism due to genes, physics, and one’s environment, one might see genetically-based differences as “forgiving,” for you cannot be blamed for the genes you get from your parents and that reflect long evolutionary histories.

Maarten goes on to show the difference in long-distance running abilities between Ethiopians and Kenyans on one hand and the rest of the world on the other (these are population differences rather than differences between the classically-defined “races”.  Though I don’t know whether there have been tests to show that these differences are genetic (potential studies could include adoption at birth, rearing in different environments, and so on), I would be willing to bet that they are. But, as Maarten says, “measuring intelligence is far more complicated than crossing a finish line.”

Boudry adds that Cofnas has sometimes been brusque in his public pronouncements about his work, but this is not uncommon among academics:

Finally, what about Nathan Cofnas’s vigorous activism alongside his academic work? It is true that Cofnas is far less measured in his Substack posts than in his academic publications on IQ. For instance, his flippant way of expressing a statistical point about the racial IQ gap in academic achievement (similar to the point above about long-distance running) seems almost deliberately incendiary:

Under a colorblind system that judged applicants only by academic qualifications, blacks would make up 0.7% of Harvard students. […] In a meritocracy, Harvard faculty would be recruited from the best of the best students, which means the number of black professors would approach 0%.

Cofnas is also very combative in his attacks on “woke ideology”, and he genuinely believes only a “hereditarian revolution” can truly dismantle it—otherwise, we’ll be stuck fighting symptoms rather than root causes:

Until we defeat the taboo on hereditarianism, our victories will always be temporary. Every time we cut off a tentacle of the DEI monster, it will grow back.

I’m not convinced, but it’s a clever argument, and I’d encourage you to check it out with an open mind.

Finally, Maarten points out one harmful side effect of demonizing people for the kind of work they do in academia:

Calling for the dismissal of anyone who even touches the third rail of ethnic differences in IQ is also strategically unwise. Such attempts often fuel the phenomenon of “red-pilling.” When academics appear determined to suppress a dangerous idea at all costs, people naturally become suspicious: What are they trying to hide? The result is a further erosion of trust in academia.

And that is not just a made-up reason. When the public perceives scientists to be espousing a political or ideological cause in their research, their view of science is eroded. Have a look at this paper showing that when the journal Nature, in a first, endorsed a political candidate (Joe Biden) for U.S. President in 2020, it reduced the public trust not just in the journal, but in scientists themselves.

Do weigh in below, and because the issue is a sensitive one, you might want to answer this poll.

[poll id=”54″]

Ibram Kendi moves from Boston University to Howard University

February 2, 2025 • 9:40 am

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.

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:

An indictment of DEI for being “prescriptively racist”

April 29, 2024 • 11:15 am

This article by Erec Smith was first published in the Boston Globe, where you can find an archived link here, but has also been published unpaywalled by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank where author Erec Smith is a research fellow (he’s also “an associate professor of rhetoric and composition at York College of Pennsylvania, and cofounder of Free Black Thought”).

Smith’s thesis is that DEI is racist because it rests on prescribing “approved ways” that black people should behave and think, ways that he instantiates by giving two quotes. The first is a now-deleted tweet by Nikole Hannah-Jones:

And from President Biden:

“If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, you ain’t Black.”

That, says Smith, is “a statement that implicitly prescribes how Black voters should think.”

Smith developed this take because as a black kid in a white school he was expected to “act black,” yet when he moved to a mostly black school he was criticized for “acting white”—speaking “white English” and so on.  DEI, he avers, practices “prescriptive racism” by expecting black people to have the opinions that other “progressive” black people have, so that there is an approved and proper way of Thinking While Black promoted by DEI. Smith also criticizes right-wing racists for their past practice of criticizing “uppity Negroes” who didn’t act like black people should, though we don’t see much of that these days.

When Smith got to college and then became a faculty member, he saw this same tendency in DEI, except that the “uppity Negroes” are now those blacks who don’t conform to the prescribed progressive ideology. You can think of some “uppity” blacks, including people like John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, Coleman Hughes, and Thomas Sowell, all worth reading or listening to.

Click to read:

I’ll give a few excerpts:

Unlike traditional racism — the belief that particular races are, in some way, inherently inferior to others — prescriptive racism dictates how a person should behave. That is, an identity type is prescribed to a group of people, and any individual who skirts that prescription is deemed inauthentic or even defective. President Biden displayed prescriptive racism when he said “If you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or Trump, you ain’t Black,” a statement that implicitly prescribes how Black voters should think.

. . .prescriptive racism casts a broader net, disadvantaging people for not abiding by a long list of things a Black person shouldn’t do. A prescriptive racist may not mind that a Black person has a master’s degree, but he may scoff at the sight of a Black man watching the Masters — especially if Tiger isn’t playing. A white prescriptive racist would look at a Black person speaking standard English the way a Black person would look at a white person wearing a dashiki. Lest you think that last statement is mere speculation, I have met several people who have voiced derision and irritation upon hearing standard English come out of my mouth. My use of language was an affront to their expectations and sensibilities.

Many prescriptive racists are often people of the same minority group. A Black person lambasting another Black person for acting in ways deemed racially inauthentic — for example, speaking in dialects coded “white” — is engaging in prescriptive racism.

And how it enters DEI:

And prescriptive racism is not just a social phenomenon; it is now being institutionalized. More and more, it is erroneously labeled diversity, equity, and inclusion, and it is winning out over initiatives more in line with the civil rights movement and classical liberal values like individuality, free speech, reason, and even equality. It is becoming policy in academia, corporate America, and even the military. To put it another way, contemporary DEI is prescriptive racism.

In academia, I’ve found, Blackness is a role, a “pre‐​script,” to which Black people are expected to conform if they want to be accepted or, sometimes, acknowledged at all. A Black scholar cannot simply study and write about Plato; she has to write about Plato from a Black perspective. Nobody shows much interest in a Black graduate student drafting a dissertation on American Transcendentalism that isn’t focused on its relevance to the Black experience. In this sense, applying for graduate school or a professorship is akin to auditioning for “Black person” in some live‐​action role‐​playing event.

I hadn’t realized the expectations outlined in the second paragraph, but I’m sure they’re true, for nearly every black academic I know of is engaged in writing about the connection between their discipline and “blackness”. (This also applies to “studies” programs, in which white people also conform to DEI expectations by imbuing scholarship with ideology approved by DEI.)  What is clear is that DEI is racist in expecting groups to behave in certain approved ways and to hold certain approved views. John McWhorter, for instance, has not done that, and he’s suffered for it. As he says, he’ll never be invited to another linguistics meeting nor get an invitation to speak about linguistics at another university.  What a pity for such a smart guy! But that’s what you suffer for thinking independently—for being “heterodox.”

One more quote on “political blackness”:

Political Blackness made much more sense several decades ago. Both Malcolm X and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. could have been construed as politically Black. Why? Because, when these men lived, whether Black Americans were gay or straight, Islamic or Christian, working class or middle class, none of them could sit at the front of the bus in the Jim Crow South. However, in this third decade of the 21st century, the efficacy of political Blackness has waned significantly. Though things are not perfect and racist environments still exist, policy changes have afforded Black Americans opportunities and resources traditionally denied them. As a result, “the Black experience” has become so varied that the use of “the” is questionable.

The idea of an indefinite abject oppression that justifies essentialism and political Blackness does not reflect reality. The facts that roughly 80 percent of Black Americans are working class or higher and that the number of Black immigrants has skyrocketed (strongly suggesting that the United States isn’t a fundamentally anti‐​Black country) are just two of many things that illustrate this. But activists who still want power must fabricate an insidious specter of oppression, and an essential victimhood has to be prescribed, whether they are homeless or Oprah Winfrey. If you are a Black American who does not abide by this prescription, be you liberal or conservative, you are seen as weakening the political power of Black Americans.

The inherent paradox of contemporary social justice is the essentialism that says “you are bad if you stereotype other people, but you are also bad if you don’t.”

Smith goes on to say that he and others have founded a new organization to combat prescriptive racism:

I and a few others have cofounded Free Black Thought, a nonprofit newsletter and podcast representing “the rich diversity of Black thought beyond the narrow spectrum of views promoted by mainstream outlets as defining ‘the Black perspective.’” We come from a classical liberal standpoint, meaning we believe people should be treated as sovereign individuals and not deindividuated members of a group. In other words, we’re sticking it to the prescriptive racists.

The “free” in Free Black Thought is both an adjective and a verb. We want to promote thought free from the tyranny of prescription, which means we publish and promote a wide array of ideological points and artistic expression, highlighting Black artists and thinkers typically neglected in mainstream media. But we also seek “to free” Black thought by offering alternatives to K‑12 curricula informed by critical social justice, like BLM in Schools and Woke Kindergarten, to let schools know that other ways to promote true DEI do exist.

Another sin laid at the door of DEI, which I’m hoping is on the way out. Note that I said “hoping”, not “predicting.”

John McWhorter: Some white Americans would applaud O. J. Simpson’s acquittal today, and that would show racial progress

April 19, 2024 • 9:30 am

I hope John McWhorter’s latest column, which I see as misguided, doesn’t show that he’s running out of gas. His point is to show that substantial progress in racial relations between blacks and whites has occurred over the years. But who could deny that? African-Americans are represented far more in the media than they were when I was a kid, they are beneficiaries of Civil Rights Acts passed in the Sixties, there is affirmative action so that universities and businesses are far more integrated, and one sees and hears far less bigotry than was evident to me as a kid. Do we need more evidence.

McWhorter has given ample evidence of this progress before, and gives more in this column, including a bit on how Mother Jefferson (Zara Cully, a black woman), despite being a better actress on television than was Mother Dexter (Judith Lowry, a white actress) on “Phyllis”, was given short shrift. That wouldn’t happen today, and black actors are getting far more roles, and good ones, than they used to.

Despite this palpable progress in racial relations—progress that, if you listen to some black activists, is illusory—McWhorter says, correctly, that overall black people are treated worse than white people by the police, and have been for years:

For Black people in Los Angeles recalling how the L.A.P.D. had treated them for decades, for Black people in Philadelphia not long past the all but open racism of the police force there under Mayor Frank Rizzo, for Black people in Chicago remembering the racist profiling and abuse by the cops called the Flying Squad, the sheer fact of a Black man getting off on a murder charge was of epic significance. If anything, the fact that he was obviously guilty only amplified the victory.

For all the statistical discrepancies between Black and white Americans, interactions with the police may be the central driver of how many Black people experience racism. I noted this in my research and conversations in preparation for my book “Losing the Race” in the late 1990s, when I was sincerely trying to figure out why so many Black people spoke of racism almost as if it were the 1890s rather than the 1990s. There is a reason that the main focus of the Black Panthers was combating police brutality, that anti-cop animus was central to gangsta rap and that today Black Lives Matter may be more influential than the N.A.A.C.P.

Well, I won’t comment on whether the differential influence in the last sentence is true, or, if true, is a good thing; but differential police treatment of races surely accounts for the different reactions of blacks and whites to O. J. Simpson’s acquittal of murder in 1995. And to McWhorter, that difference would be reduced today. McWhorter calls this “progress in race relations”. I think that, if it were true, it would be progress in performative antiracism, but not genuine progress.  But read his column by clicking on the headline, or find the article archived here:

 

First, McWhorter makes it clear, as it is be to anyone with neurons, that O. J. was guilty as hell of murdering Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman. McWhorter makes that view clear several times, including in the first paragraph, where he describes the racial differences in reaction to Simpson’s acquittal (all bolding is mine):

Among the signature images of O.J. Simpson’s acquittal of the murders of his ex-wife and her friend was the contrasting tableaus of Black people grouping in front of television screens applauding while white people watching it were shaking their heads — appalled, perplexed and even disgusted by a verdict that flew in the face of obvious fact. Those contrasting perspectives have gone down as demonstrating a gulf of understanding between the races.

That gulf persists, but it narrows apace, and if the verdict came down today, it would be a lot less perplexing to many white people than it was back then. Many would understand why the jury acted as it did. We might even see some of them applauding along with Black people.

To McWhorter, that last sentence instantiates racial progress, but more on that later.  More on his opinion of Simpson’s guilt:

The evidence of Simpson’s deed was overwhelming despite the ineptitude of the prosecution team. The verdict and the response to it among the Black community weren’t signs of support for Simpson; they were protests against a long legacy of mistreatment and even murder at the hands of the police.

. . . the sheer fact of a Black man getting off on a murder charge was of epic significance. If anything, the fact that he was obviously guilty only amplified the victory.

I agree with McWhorter. I was on Simpson’s defense team, and the DNA material I got must be kept confidential. But I will say that it’s my personal opinion, from all the evidence that came out during the trial and thereafter, that Simpson was guilty as hell. But the prosecution apparently could not convince the jury that he was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt, so he walked. (DNA evidence, for one thing, seemed to only confuse the jury. And then there was the glove and the racism of Mark Furman.)

So a black man, in the face of all the evidence (and yes, the prosecution was inept) was acquitted of murder. Black people applauded because, though perhaps many thought him guilty, his acquittal represented a black man beating a racist system. White people groaned because many also thought him guilty, and there may also have been some racism in that reaction.

I can fully understand these reactions. But understanding them doesn’t mean I approve of them.. A man was on trial for his life, yet he was apparently being judged by the public on his pigmentation and historical racism by cops. If you thought he was guilty but applauded the verdict because Simpson was black, you’ve judged the system, not the man.

And now McWhorter avers that if the trial took place today, it’s likely that, because of improved racial relations, many white people would also judge the system and join blacks in applauding the verdict:

Today I see white people far more aware. That’s why when I fast-forward the Simpson verdict to 2024, I picture some white people getting the news on their phones and doing high-fives and group hugs, some of them in tears. They would be no more likely to see Simpson himself as a hero than were the jurors of 1995, especially given that modern America is more sensitized not only to racism but also to abuse of women. But they would be more likely to see the acquittal as a kind of payback for all of the white cops who have been exonerated for murdering Black people. It would be processed, I imagine, as a teaching moment of sorts.

This smacks strongly of Robin DiAngelo. High-fiving and group hugs as a reaction to Simpson’s acquittal is a performative act: it’s saying, “Look, I understand that black people are mistreated by the cops! I’m not a racist!”  But if you’re celebrating and still thought Simpson did the crimes, then you’re happy because a guilty man went free—and only because that guilty man was black. To me, that’s making Simpson stand for all blacks, though, as McWhorter notes, Simpson really wasn’t considered part of the black community,and was not an activist. A verdict should be judged on the content of the man’s crime, not on the color of his skin.

Others may agree with McWhorter, but I think this hypothetical scenario, if it occurred, would be evidence not of real racial progress, but of performative antiracism by whites. If you see that as progress, so be it. I can give a lot of harder evidence that there’s been racial progress in the past three decades, and especially in the past six decades. You don’t need to make up some dumb scenario to show this, just as a way to mark Simpson’s death.

As for me, I am a white man who always thought Simpson guilty. His acquittal was bad for society (look what happened to him afterwards), and that was the last trial in which I acted as an expert witness for DNA.  I didn’t see the acquittal as a sign of improved racial relations, but as a miscarriage of justice largely due to the incompetence of the prosecution. I ran out of gas at the moment he was acquitted, and from then on turned down all requests by defense lawyers to use me as an expert witness.

If the acquittal happened today, I would not be high-fiving others, crying, or engaging in group hugs. That doesn’t prove that I’m a racist, because I agree that cops treat blacks worse than whites. But I also believe in evidence, and the evidence adduced in the Simpson case, and revealed soon after by reporters, is not a reason to celebrate his acquittal.

And I’m wondering why McWhorter had to confect this hypothetical, performative scenario to demonstrate that racial relations have improved in America.

McWhorter:

All that leads me to think that America has a problem with police violence in general. But here’s the thing: I am accustomed to vigorous resistance to that argument from not only Black but white people, too.

It is in this context that the stark racial divide in the reception of the Simpson verdict three decades ago seems rather antique. There has been, regardless of the disagreements that inevitably persist, progress.

There are, I’m sure, better ways to show progress.

******************************

“If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit”:

 

 

Coleman Hughes describes what he means by “color-blindness” when it comes to race

March 31, 2024 • 1:00 pm

Well, I certainly encountered Coleman Hughes on his way up when he interviewed me for a YouTube video. Now he’s he’s hit the big time with a gig as a staff writer for The Free Press and an analyst for CNN, a new book, The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America, which is doing very well on Amazon, a podcast called “Conversations with Coleman,” a YouTube channel, and the ultimate achievement, a stint on The View, in which Whoopi Goldberg asks him to explain his thesis. The ten-minute piece is below.

His thesis, which you’ll see, is that we should use class-based categories rather than racial ones to reduce poverty. Another one of The View women (I don’t recognize her) pushes back hard on Coleman, using quotes from Dr. King that seem to have walked back King’s own famous “colorblind” quote from his “I have a dream” speech.  Coleman keeps his cool in the face of some hostility, and remains as eloquent as ever.  He might be thought of as a younger version of John McWhorter.

He’ll go a lot further, even though what he says doesn’t conform to What Black People Should Be Saying.

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

March 31, 2024 • 10:00 am

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.”

*******************

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.

From Wikimedia Commons