How Ibram X. Kendi Became a Brand

The name Ibram X. Kendi has become synonymous with the phrase ‘anti-racism’ - the same way Francis Fukuyama is synonymous with ‘the End of History’ or Adam Sandler with ‘movies that never get past 20% on Rotten Tomatoes’. Since the publication of his 2019 bestseller ‘How To Be An Anti-Racist’, the National Book Award winning, MacArthur Genius Grant recipient has come out with such titles as ‘Antiracist Baby’, ‘How to Raise an Antiracist’, and ‘Goodnight Racism’. In July of 2020, he assumed the position of director of the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University. In the following year, Kendi partnered with Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast network Pushkin Industries to launch a podcast titled (you guessed it) ‘Be Antiracist.”

This alarms many of my friends on the Right, as it does in the Right-leaning punditocracy. It is understandable, of course - the mainstream elevation of a man with half-baked ideas about dismantling the American constitutional structure should worry anybody who cares about America, its Constitution, and good ideas in general. However, it is my contention that with the excessive branding of Kendi-ism, and its author’s willing participation in the process, Kendi’s ideas will carry less weight as he becomes more of a household name.

I would like to compare Kendi’s example to that of Ta-Nehisi Coates, another prominent writer of the anti-racist milieu who has resisted making a brand out of himself. Like Kendi, Coates also received the National Book Award and the MacArthur Fellowship. Like Kendi, Coates’s most famous book, Between the World and Me, is also a treatise on race relations in America. But unlike Kendi, Coates has chosen to move on to other creative endeavors, from writing a novel (The Water Dancer) to taking on iconic Marvel comic book heroes such as Black Panther and Captain America. Regardless of these works’ artistic merits, it is clear that Coates has resisted the temptation to put himself in an easily definable category. The same cannot be said for Ibram X. Kendi, who is determined to make sure that every man, woman and child in America knows what ‘antiracism’ means.

To examine how Kendi became a brand, let us go back to the book that made him famous, Stamped From the Beginning. Readers of this piece will not be surprised that the author has since reissued (or ‘remixed’) the book under the title ‘Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You’. Nevertheless, ‘Stamped From the Beginning’ was an earnest, scholarly look at the history of racist ideas in America. The writer Coleman Hughes, who was critical of ‘How To Be an Antiracist’, praises Kendi for “ambitiously attempting to make 600 years of racial history digestible in 500 pages.” And when the term ‘antiracist’ comes up in the book, Kendi has this to say:

“That is what it truly means to think as an antiracist: to think there is nothing wrong with Black people, to think that racial groups are equal. There are lazy and unwise and harmful individuals of African ancestry. There are lazy and unwise and harmful individuals of European ancestry. There are industrious and wise and harmless individuals of European ancestry. There are industrious and wise and harmless individuals of African ancestry. But no racial group has ever had a monopoly on any type of human trait or gene—not now, not ever.” (my emphasis)

Here, Kendi admirably channels the color-blind view of his hero, the author Zora Neale Hurston, who wrote in her memoir ‘Dust Tracks on A Road’: 

“Race pride is a luxury I cannot afford…[S]uppose a Negro does something really magnificent, and I glory, not in the benefit to mankind, but the fact that the doer was a Negro. Must I not also go hang my head in shame when a member of my race does something execrable?...That is incidental and accidental. It is the human achievement which I honor.”

However, in his more famous work, How To Be An Antiracist, Kendi discards the same philosophy of color-blindness which he previously cherished: “The common idea of claiming ‘color blindness’...fails to see racism and falls into racist passivity. The language of color blindness—like the language of ‘not racist’—is a mask to hide racism.” (my emphasis) Other boilerplate observations in the book includes : “To love capitalism is to end up loving racism. To love racism is to end up loving capitalism.”; “Queer antiracism is equating all the race-sexualities, striving to eliminate the inequities between the race-sexualities.”; “To truly be antiracist is to be feminist. To truly be feminist is to be antiracist.”

By trying to expand the umbrella of ‘antiracism’ to include every identity group which the mainstream progressive Left finds acceptable, Kendi has watered down his scholarship to take on the role of activist. In an interview with Ezra Klein, he doubles down on the fashionable identitarian rhetoric:

 “[W]hen [a proposed] bill is making its way through Congress, we would do an assessment on the racial impact on each aspect of the bill. So if, for instance, we know that one aspect of the bill is going to cut childhood poverty in half. OK, that’s all children of all racial groups. OK, what type of impact will it have on child poverty within the Black community, within the Native community, within the white community?”

 As a work of scholarship, ‘How To Be an Antiracist’ is, to quote Coleman Hughes, “poorly argued, sloppily researched, insufficiently fact-checked, and occasionally self-contradictory…ultimately teaching the reader less about how to be antiracist than about how to be anti-intellectual.” But as a work of propaganda, it succeeded beyond Kendi’s wildest imaginations. ‘Antiracism’ has become the word de jure in American political discourse after the horrific killing of George Floyd in June of 2020. The social unrest sparked by this act of injustice boosted the sales of Kendi’s book, all the while making its author the most sought-after authority on America’s racial ‘reckoning’. 

As Ibram X. Kendi’s name becomes more and more entangled with the loose ideology of ‘antiracism’, I suspect that the thinking public would take him less and less seriously once they take time to examine what ‘antiracism’ really means. The good news is that Kendi makes it painfully easy to understand his true intentions: “What’s the problem with being ‘not racist’? It is a claim that signifies neutrality: ‘I am not a racist, but neither am I aggressively against racism.’ But there is no neutrality in the racism struggle. The opposite of ‘racist’ isn’t ‘not racist.’ It is ‘antiracist.’” The bad news is that, at this moment in time, the mainstreaming of ‘antiracism’ in American culture will compel those questioning the ideology to self-censor for fear of social ostracization or career setbacks. Nevertheless, I share in the observation articulated by the Columbia linguist John McWhorter: “I suspect that deep down, most know that none of this catechism makes any sense. Less obvious is that it was not even composed with logic in mind. The self-contradiction of these tenets is crucial, in revealing that Third Wave Antiracism is not a philosophy but a religion.” It will be a matter of time before the American public realizes that Kendi-ism is either nonsensical or racially divisive, or both.

Until then, it is my belief that, to paraphrase the title of Stanley Kubrick’s iconic film, we should learn to stop worrying and love the Antiracist. Challenge his ideas we must, but we should put away our alarm bells when Kendi’s name comes up in our political discourse. To borrow a phrase from Alan Sokal, Ibram X. Kendi and his followers have subscribed to the latest form of fashionable nonsense. The High Priest of Antiracism has successfully painted himself into a corner, where any future attempt to produce a scholarly work like ‘Stamped From the Beginning’ will not be as well received as yet another ‘antiracist’ picture book aimed at the neonatal demographic. We should stop treating him as the Boogeyman of racial identity politics, and see him as the shallow pseudo-scholar he truly is.