Hey D.C., Ibram X. Kendi's Back in Town

Corporate America's turning away, the universities are fed up, and the NFL is ending "End Racism", but Washington still has a home for woke grifters

Following yet another utterly failed academic endeavor that promised to build “the nation’s largest database” of racial disparity data and instead ending up just making a blog about how Kevin Roberts is racist, it’s time for another new billionaire-funded institute for Ibram X. Kendi:

Kendi will lead Howard University's Institute for Advanced Study, tackling issues related to racial disparities and racism in areas like technology and climate change.

He is leaving Boston University, where he founded the Center for Antiracist Research during the racial justice protests in 2020. The center, which raised at least $55 million over several years, is closing in June, when its five-year charter expires.

"When you think about the Black scholars and Black thinkers who have contributed so much to my way of thinking, it's hard to not think about Howard," Kendi told the Washington Post. "It's the most fulfilling career choice I've ever made."

Kendi is joining the "Mecca of Black Education" at a time of growth. It is aiming to be in the top tier of research schools and has received generous donations, including $175 million from Mike Bloomberg's philanthropy.

My piece from the pre-Summer of Love archives, April 29, 2019:

The first thing I saw at the first National Antiracist Book Festival was a white college kid with a disappointing tuft of an attempted goatee wearing a Colin Kaepernick shirt. I thought about telling him that I was sitting on a plane across from Kaepernick a week earlier – I remain a fan of his play style, and have been ever since he was running the spread at Nevada – and was disappointed when the former quarterback whose corporate Nike-backed mantra is “Believe in Something Even If It Means Sacrificing Everything” declined to give a mild-mannered old lady who humbly requested it an autograph. You should never meet your heroes.

The National Antiracist Book Festival is a project of the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University, headed by Ibram Xolani Kendi, who describes himself as “hardcore humanist and softcore vegan”. In 2013, he changed his middle name from Henry (Xolani apparently means “Peace” in Zulu) and his last from Rogers (Kendi apparently means “loved one” in Meru). He is an Ideas columnist at The Atlantic, where he compiled a syllabus for Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, and author of “Stamped From The Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America”, which includes most of them.

According to Kendi’s invitation letter, The National Antiracist Book Festival recognizes that it is primarily about anti-black racism. In its panel schedule, it is exclusively so. In the absence of other knowledge, one could come away from this conference with the perception that there is only one kind of racism, and only one kind of racist – that all crimes of racism are white on black. It began with segments on “the history and persistence of racism in the Christian church”, was bisected by a screening of the film “I Am Not Racist… Am I?”, and ended with Michael Eric Dyson on Jim Crow. You can probably predict everything that came in between.

Attendees exuded a mix of fashionable wokeness. A woman with a Luis Vuitton bag and $800 Gucci sneakers dutifully took notes as DeRay McKesson spoke in his trademark Patagonia puffy vest, deploying a series of lines and catchphrases that seemed less tied to the topic of the panel (“On White Supremacy”) and more about his personal priorities, such as explaining Brett Kavanaugh’s badness to his aunt. “They hid the White House papers, it was bad!”

McKesson talked about circulating at a Hollywood event, and experiencing an unnamed interlocutor questioning his claimed statistic that “white high school dropouts make more than black college graduates.” (The actual statistic is median accumulated wealth, not income, and doesn’t differentiate between graduates and those who attended some college, who presumably face the attendant debt.) McKesson claimed he responded to his questioner by saying: “The only reason you have more white people is you killed off half the other people and enslaved the other half.” Recognizing the shibboleth, the audience clapped.

“White supremacy is a smog, we all inhale it,” McKesson said. It is “a system of domination that infects every area of society.” His message to white folks: “How did you personally work to make all the Band Aids look like you? What did you do for the Homestead Act? … White supremacy is baked into the structure, it’s intentional. People made this up. It was designed.”