Lessons from Ibram X. Kendi
News broke last week that Ibram X. Kendi—the author of “How to Be an Antiracist”—was being investigated by Boston University for fraud and mismanagement of the $43 million Center for Antiracist Research which he led there.
Kendi (originally known as Henry Rogers) gained prominence among academics for his advocacy of Critical Race Theory and its claim that racism is to blame for disparities between whites and people of color. His radical policies—including defunding the police, restricting free speech, hiring quotas for minorities, and even the creation of a Federal Department of Antiracism—call for treating people according to their skin color. Colorblindness is no longer enough. “The only remedy to past discrimination,” says Kendi, “is present discrimination.”
If that’s not enough, Kendi embraced Marxism. “In order to truly be an antiracist,” he said, “you also have to be anti-capitalist.”
Despite his ideology’s inherent conflict with the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (which was reaffirmed by the Supreme Court this summer) and his criticism of the free market economy, Corporate America, the education industry, and even the US military spent millions purchasing his books and paying for him to speak at the exorbitant rate of $20,000 an hour.
W&L jumped on the bandwagon, inviting Kendi for a virtual speaking engagement in August of 2020.
Kendi was a sensation in post-George Floyd America, and he cashed in like any good huckster would. Fueled by hysteria, academia fell for his nonsensical, anti-American, Marxist message. The virtue-signaling board of trustees at Boston University praised Kendi and voted to make the school an “antiracist” institution, despite Kendi’s inability to provide a coherent definition of racism. Over the past three years, Kendi’s antiracist center at BU attracted at least $43 million in grants.
The same hypersensitivity to all things racial made its way to Lexington in 2020. Driven by the faculty and administration—many of whom subscribed to Kendi’s antiracist ideology—the Board of Trustees eventually took several steps to distance itself from Robert E. Lee to the point that Lee has been almost totally erased from campus.
Thankfully, America is returning to its senses. Kendi’s racist, anti-American ideology is being rejected. DEI programs are being scaled back or eliminated. The founders of Black Lives Matters have been exposed as frauds. Now people are wondering what Kendi did with the $43 million they gave him.
The time has come for W&L to return to its senses, too. It’s time to reconsider the anti-Lee measures that were implemented on campus over the past two years—cancelling Founders’ Day, renaming Lee Chapel, removing plaques, etc.—and to create a more liberated environment where all points of view may be both freely expressed and thoughtfully challenged. And where we no longer take direction from frenzied mobs.
Gib Kerr ‘85
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