Good people should resist schadenfreude. Deriving pleasure from the anguish of others is no virtue. So if we feel glee in observing that this past week has not been kind to Ibram X. Kendi, we must remember that we are celebrating the defeat of his ideas, not the man himself.
Kendi has had a bad past seven days.
First, he posted on X an observation that was in this instance factual: that no, whites do not benefit from institutional racial privilege — in some cases the opposite. Then, when his critics pointed out how he had just “collapsed your entire worldview into a giant sinkhole” (in the cruel words of one antagonist), he deleted the post.
But the internet, like the rest of Hades, is eternal.
Then, the New York Times on Tuesday published an enormous feature painfully cataloguing how Kendi has failed to deliver on his promises. The article quoted a spokesperson at Boston University, where Kendi works, throwing him under the bus.
Again, this was the same newspaper and university which, like so many other institutions, had previously elevated him to Olympian status.
Kendi symbolizes better than anyone else the diversity, equity, and inclusion regime that has implanted itself in institutions and all walks of life since the destabilizing Black Lives Matter riots of 2020. When he is in trouble, DEI and the critical race theory it operationalizes are in trouble.
Kendi is known for many things he has written, but most notably for his 2019 book How to Be an Antiracist, which became de-rigueur reading after 2020. He now runs the Center for Antiracist Research, which he founded in 2020 at BU, which has granted him tenure. He also rakes in the cash. In 2022, Kendi made about $541 a minute for a speech at the University of Virginia.
The best-known Kendi quote (and certainly the most infamous) comes in Page 24 of his book: “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” (Last year, he finally gave up and rewrote these words in the latest edition of the book.)
The inherent logic (if that word can be used in this tortured process, so I advise the reader to follow closely) is that discrimination on the basis of race is not “an inherently racist act.” It is only white supremacists who have connivingly made it appear so.
“The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity. If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist,” he writes. That is because whites have inherent privilege. “Racism itself is institutional, structural, and systemic,” he writes.
All these ideas fly in the face of the Constitution and several statutes, from the 14th Amendment to the Civil Rights Act. This is what makes many people, and their political leaders, so vociferously allergic to Kendi: they recognize that granting benefits on the basis of race is not just unconstitutional, but immoral. Yet Kendi, who is black, claims that racism animates his critics.
On May 31, while summarizing on X an article in the Hill showing that whites are lying about their race on their college applications, he wrote, “More than a third of White students lied about their race on college applications, and about half of these applicants lied about being Native American. More than three-fourths of these students who lied about their race were accepted.”
Critics immediately pointed out that, well, if whites are doing that, then maybe they don’t agree they have privilege. And if they don’t, then discriminating against whites is racist, after all. And if that is the case, then, no, we shouldn’t have present or future discrimination.
Kendi, in other words, burned his entire worldview in a single post. His immediate deletion did not work, for people had captured it. Chris Rufo posted: “Behold, the tweet that ended it all. There has never been a self-debunking this spectacular, this glorious.”
Kendi tried to defend himself by saying that the white applicants only “think” they have an advantage in lying about their race, but they really don’t. That, too, didn’t wash.
And then the New York Times feature dropped, and while it was praiseful of Kendi and tough on “conservatives” — this is still the New York Times — it pointed out how Kendi had used his sudden fame to turn himself into a brand, while becoming little more than a “self-help guru.”
Employees at Kendi’s center questioned his leadership, wrote the New York Times, which described how he had to fire many staff members last year after funding dried up. BU investigated Kendi, and finally cleared him this year. But in the end, Kendi has been such a terrible administrator that he has had to terminate his center’s projects.
“Boston University provided significant financial and administrative support to Dr. Kendi and the center. Dr. Kendi did not always accept the support,” the New York Times quoted a BU spokesperson as writing in an email.
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Kendi’s troubles, of course, do not mean that DEI is necessarily doomed. A federal judge in New Hampshire, for example, has just overturned the state’s ban on critical race theory. But it’s always a good sign when the New York Times writes that even many of Kendi’s allies “dismiss his brand of antiracism as unworkable, wrongheaded or counterproductive.”
If liberals can do that without fear of cancelation, we are making progress.
Mike Gonzalez serves as a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation. The Heritage Foundation is listed for identification purposes only; no endorsement of a candidate by the organization is implied.