Black Supremacy: The Man and the Scam

When white liberals want to be masochistic fools, help is readily at hand.

Race huckstering Leftism is, ironically (until you think about it), lethal to black people like very little else going on in the country. See, e.g., my post here. When you’re pushing de-policing and de-incarceration, what else did you expect but a spike in murder? And what demographic suffers to a grossly disproportionate degree from a spike in murder?

And there’s one other thing you can expect from race huckstering: to be taken to the cleaners in the good old-fashioned sense. We’ve known this for at least a year, when it came out that the leaders of Black Lives Matter bought themselves a $6 million mansion in Southern California (a “safehouse,” dontcha know). I guess living in a mansion is the new version of “community development.”

But that’s old news. More recently, there have been revelations about perhaps the leading voice of the “anti-racism” movement, Prof. Ibram X. Kendi. (Prof. Kendi was born as Ibram Henry Rogers to middle class parents in New York City). The story is told with acid beauty by Spencer Klavan, writing in the Spectator. The subhead of Klavan’s piece is, “When racial grifters tell you who they are, believe them.” I’m going to quote a good deal of it, because there’s no way I can improve on its delivery.

Ibram X. Kendi has done as he promised. In 2020, freshly anointed as the director of Boston University’s new Center for Antiracist Research (CAR), Kendi announced his intention to “transform how racial research is done.” Previously, “research” had been understood to involve collecting data, analyzing trends and gathering new insights through the careful application of sustained thought. But these expectations were hallmarks of white supremacy. This week, as allegations of wanton mismanagement emerge from Kendi’s staff, it appears that what it means to do “racial research” has indeed been transformed: it now entails taking vast sums of other people’s money, then using it to produce almost nothing.

And in this, Kendi is an expert. Amid the orgy of performative guilt that followed the death of George Floyd, CAR amassed $43 million in funding, including a $10 million donation from then-CEO of then-Twitter Jack Dorsey. Three years later, the Boston Globe reports, the fruits of this investment include the Emancipator (an online magazine featuring such masterworks as the comicstrip Everything’s Racist) and some short essays collected over the course of a year. They conspicuously do not include a graduate degree program, an “American Antiracist Society,” or a database on racial disparities. All of these and more were supposed to materialize under Kendi’s leadership; one former staffer described the Racial Data Tracker as a “centerpiece” of the organization’s mission.

That mission is now being “transformed” as well.

I guess it’s not just Amerika that needs transforming. And one must admit that transformation has more than just the ordinary appeal when it involves stuffing your pockets with moola.

Last week, Kendi laid off between twenty and thirty of CAR’s employees, around half of the total. Reports from those involved indicate that the whole affair has been an exercise in burning cash. “The Center has very, very much failed to deliver on its promise,” said Spencer Piston, the faculty head of CAR’s policy branch. “It’s been a colossal waste of millions of dollars.” From the start, it barely seems to have occurred to Kendi that he would be expected to produce something in exchange for the lavish investment of funds and attention with which he’s been favored. “To the best of my knowledge, there is no good faith commitment to fulfilling funded research projects at CAR,” wrote BU Sociology Professor and former CAR employee Saida Grundy in 2021.

Is anyone surprised at this? But wait, it gets better.

It’s not that Kendi tried and failed to generate meaningful scholarly output; he seems to have had no interest in doing so to begin with — and no concept of what would have been involved if he tried. Phillipe Copeland, a professor at BU’s School of Social Work who resigned from CAR in June, described his difficulty even getting a meeting with Kendi. Scheduling is a white supremacist construct, after all, and celebrity activists can’t be expected to trouble themselves with administrative minutiae while engaged in the urgent restorative justice work of publicizing children’s books. His underlings found themselves chiefly in the business of trying to get their boss’s attention, but Kendi wouldn’t even see fit to delegate his managerial responsibilities. The Center “was just being mismanaged on a really fundamental level,” Copeland said.

I think “mismanaged” is being used here as a euphemism for “plundered.”

In other words, Kendi’s performance at Boston University has been perfectly consistent with the rest of his work: deceitful, opportunist and intellectually worthless. Ibram Henry Rogers, as he was called before he appropriated his African names, has made a career out of peddling self-serious mid-wittery to the breathless patsies of the chattering class.

I now find myself wondering if Ringside would bring in more paid subscriptions if I changed my name to William X. Otis. My mother might not be real pleased at this, since my middle name, Graham, comes from her great grandfather, but, hey, look, the bottom line is the bottom line.

He already demonstrated his willingness to grab the bag and run in 2019, when he took a $50,000 donation from the Ford Foundation to produce a “racial reporting guidebook” that never saw the light of day. The well-heeled penitents at BU have now repeated this experiment at scale and obtained precisely the same results. The university is launching an inquiry into the Center’s shortcomings, but Kendi himself insists that “the work of CAR will continue.” Even if he’s wrong about that, it is unlikely that he will be altogether discredited among his most devoted acolytes. If they didn’t learn in 2019, they won’t learn now: like Charlie Brown with Lucy’s football, they will keep entrusting him with positions of authority, which he will continue to disgrace through incompetence and neglect. The perversity of incentives in this sector of the intelligentsia is such that Kendi will never lack for sinecures or fawning accolades from backers who think they deserve whatever slop he chooses to feed them. The punishment is the point.

When Leftists talk about reparations, they mean money but not just money. They mean revenge across the board. Paul has discussed this point recently. And there’s more to their revenge than just taking jobs or slots at prestigious colleges away from whites or Asians who earned them on the merits. They mean washing away the basic foundations of anything that might once have been recognizable as useful work or education.

This is what we need to understand: They think the country stinks and they aim to bring it down.

When confronted with the yawning chasm between his reputation and his output, Kendi typically responds by blaming his dupes for expecting him to be anything other than his glorious authentic self. Academics who criticize the merits of his arguments just don’t understand that true intellectuals today are “focused on the oppression of our own groups,” not on such mundanities as logic. This kind of racialized self-promotion, passed off as insight, is the grand total of what Kendi has to offer.

His point of view, such as it is, can be summarized in one sinister assertion from his most famous book, How to Be an Antiracist: “The only remedy to negative racist discrimination that produces inequity is positive antiracist discrimination that produces equity.” He has subsequently done his best to generate and encourage this “positive discrimination,” chiefly by extracting funds from anguished white liberals and redistributing them toward himself. It is an exchange that gratifies the Olympian narcissism of both parties, confirming the white liberals in their core belief that they personally will deliver America from its racist past if they just emote hard enough, and confirming Ibram X. Kendi in his core belief that America will be delivered from its racist past if everyone just gives enough money to Ibram X. Kendi. What reactionary slob would dare ask how he will use the money? The point is: it used to be yours, now it’s his.

As noted, I can’t put it any better than that.