Perhaps the most foundational rule of logic is the law of noncontradiction. It is a fairly simple concept most famously articulated by Socrates and says that something cannot be both itself and its opposite at the same time. For example, someone cannot be both hungry and satisfied, just as something cannot be both dry and wet. It must be one or the other, but not both.
The story of race grievance grifter, sometime author, and Boston University professor Ibram X. Kendi is one full of contradictions. Contradictions so foundational that he even acknowledges their existence while masterfully spinning a web of perceived reasonableness.
“Policies can be like people, both racist and antiracist,” the author of How to be an Antiracist told the New York Times in a recent profile of Kendi that details the many managerial and personal problems that have plagued this celebrity academic, perhaps best known for arguing that new discrimination is the cure for past discrimination.
The quote, which came in response to a question regarding a hypothetical policy restricting air pollution at the expense of local jobs for black people, is particularly telling because it highlights the inherent contradictions of Kendi’s work, as well as the public persona he has carefully cultivated for years as the nation’s preeminent expert on racism and white supremacy.
In 2020, Kendi famously proposed the creation of a Department of Anti-racism staffed by “formally trained experts on racism” that would review every single policy passed by federal, state, or local policymakers in case it would lead to disparate racial outcomes or some other form of racial inequality.
When it came to the hypothetical air quality policy, he tried to have it both ways. “By improving the air quality in black neighborhoods near factories, the policy is being antiracist,” he said. “By exacerbating the area’s racial wealth gap, the policy is being racist.”
Kendi has made his career by calling for an “antiracist” revolution. But as he showed in the hypothetical, his standard of what qualifies as a “racist” or “antiracist” policy is often contradictory or even downright incoherent. The article did not say whether Kendi endorsed the hypothetical policy.
The contradictions in his work mirror the contradictions in himself. The Center for Antiracist Research, which he runs at Boston University, is in dire financial straits, and his former employees describe it as a place where Kendi, who is eager to decry any conservative criticism of his work as white supremacy, ruled with a passive-aggressive but iron fist that left little room for dissent among his allies. “Ibram is so lily-livered he probably jumps when the biscuit tin pops,” one former employee was quoted as saying. He has also been accused of financial mismanagement.
Amid that backdrop, the university offered a pretty harsh statement regarding Kendi, who reportedly resisted financial or administrative oversight, saying, “In hindsight, and with the fuller knowledge of the organizational problems that arose, the university should have done more to insist on additional oversight.”
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No matter how much he claims otherwise, Kendi has never been in the business of building better lives. He is in the business of Ibram X. Kendi, which means exploiting and encouraging racial grievances for personal and financial gain.
Sooner or later, this contradiction was bound to catch up with him. After all, someone cannot be one thing and its opposite at the same time.