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Ibram X. Kendi can’t separate his fame from how to be an antiracist
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/...acist.html
INTRO: "People cast aspersions on me as a director in order to cast aspersions on my scholarship,” says Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, “because they do not see a direct way to undermine my scholarship.” Huddled in a storage room inside Founders Library at Howard University, the 43-year-old historian, speaking softly and deliberately, is reflecting on the roller-coaster arc of his fame.
Nearly seven years ago, his 2019 book, How to Be an Antiracist, was seized upon by liberals as a sacred text, rocketing up the best-seller lists and earning Kendi, already a National Book Award winner for Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, a reputation as a racial-reconciliation guru.
Written as he was being treated for stage-four colorectal cancer, the book is infused with a spirit of personal transformation. (“The heartbeat of antiracism is confession,” Kendi writes in an oft-cited passage.) Both its language and its stakes felt biblical after the killing of George Floyd.
Yet today, How to Be an Antiracist is widely remembered as a self-flagellating manual for bleeding hearts. This baffles Kendi, for whom the book’s thesis — that “racist” is not a pejorative identity, like “evil,” but a descriptive term that should be applied to policies according to whether they shrink or widen racial disparities — is focused on material effects.
“I don’t know how anyone could read any of my books” and think of them as self-help, Kendi says. But the apparent simplicity of its “this or that” labeling system proved irresistible to institutions eager to virtue signal their way out of fixing inequality.
As antiracism became a corporate DEI buzzword, Kendi was excoriated by criticism across the ideological spectrum. Journalist Tyler Austin Harper accused him of peddling “self-help for white people that runs interference for corporations and wealthy universities.” The conservative strategist Christopher Rufo branded Kendi the chief exponent of “critical race theory,” the GOP’s bogeyman for the 2022 midterms... (MORE - details)
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/...acist.html
INTRO: "People cast aspersions on me as a director in order to cast aspersions on my scholarship,” says Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, “because they do not see a direct way to undermine my scholarship.” Huddled in a storage room inside Founders Library at Howard University, the 43-year-old historian, speaking softly and deliberately, is reflecting on the roller-coaster arc of his fame.
Nearly seven years ago, his 2019 book, How to Be an Antiracist, was seized upon by liberals as a sacred text, rocketing up the best-seller lists and earning Kendi, already a National Book Award winner for Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, a reputation as a racial-reconciliation guru.
Written as he was being treated for stage-four colorectal cancer, the book is infused with a spirit of personal transformation. (“The heartbeat of antiracism is confession,” Kendi writes in an oft-cited passage.) Both its language and its stakes felt biblical after the killing of George Floyd.
Yet today, How to Be an Antiracist is widely remembered as a self-flagellating manual for bleeding hearts. This baffles Kendi, for whom the book’s thesis — that “racist” is not a pejorative identity, like “evil,” but a descriptive term that should be applied to policies according to whether they shrink or widen racial disparities — is focused on material effects.
“I don’t know how anyone could read any of my books” and think of them as self-help, Kendi says. But the apparent simplicity of its “this or that” labeling system proved irresistible to institutions eager to virtue signal their way out of fixing inequality.
As antiracism became a corporate DEI buzzword, Kendi was excoriated by criticism across the ideological spectrum. Journalist Tyler Austin Harper accused him of peddling “self-help for white people that runs interference for corporations and wealthy universities.” The conservative strategist Christopher Rufo branded Kendi the chief exponent of “critical race theory,” the GOP’s bogeyman for the 2022 midterms... (MORE - details)