I do love this essay, it brings a lot of different strands of thought together. As such there are a lot of different arguments that can be made for and against the authors point of view. The bit at the end about the Roman Empire is interesting. There are a lot of reasons it took a 1000 years to reestablish a reason based society in the West and of course other civilizations carried on such as Islamic, Chinese and even the Mongols (who's history is often overlooked). It should be noted that influences from these civilizations allowed the West to reestablish a rationalist tradition. It should also be noted that rationality never disappears even in the darkest dark age as superstition is also present in the most modern secular society. Superstition, violence, and chaos are always choices a individual or a society can make.
Has Kendi, his Center or anyone of his ilk ever started a school either here or elsewhere in the world that teaches children using their theories of education and anti-racism? If so, how successful are the graduates in the "real" world or even their world?
His books deserve a careful proof reading and fact checking, not awards.
I add a small point. On page 42 of How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi quotes a statistic on the proportion of black people killed by police 40 years ago. I could not find the source but suspect it to be overstated. If true it would mean police have dramatically reduced the proportion of black victims of police shootings.
Extremely useful article. Has even had the effect of making me buy Finkelstein's book... a feat, as I avoid reading him or Chomsky both for fear of getting an embolism. But I will never refuse to hear a good argument because I dislike the speaker.
Still, don't you get tired of all these people who are not historians, spewing history assessments right and left? (Kendi as well. He has a degree in African American Studies, in which universe does this makes him a historian, as his biography repeats?) Not directed to Kaiser, History of Science is a respectable branch.
But just a couple small points.
"Like the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony—which has become practically the alternate national anthem of Japan"... uh, nice to know. It also happens to be the actual anthem of the European Union. It means a lot. To a lot of us from across the pond.
"The last time that such ideas fell off the radar—at the end of the Roman Empire—it took about one thousand years for their renaissance to begin" ... fine effect statement, but about a completely not comparable historical, social and cultural context.
You mean the Western Roman Empire of course, as the Eastern one continued for approximately the same thousand years you mentioned after the end of the Western. The Western Roman Empire was not particularly keen on the Greek-Roman culture of reason (which itself was extremely different in principles and practice from the Enlightenment, even though it is one of its roots), as Christianity had dealt it a fatal blow since the time of Constantine, well before it was entrenched by the Edict of Thessalonica -- and that was it for the cultural part of the fall; which yet could have been less serious, and develop rational antibodies earlier, if it were not for the socio-political part: the great migrations of Germanic peoples that happened in the last 300 years of the Empire. Enter what old historians called the Dark Ages.
Bear with me, I am a Medievalist. It is a fascinating aphorism for today's problems, but it does not stand actual comparison.
And last. The situation is dire in the USA, I can see it. It is somewhat stupid in Canada too, Australia and New Zealand. Much less so in Europe, aside from some fields, because this is a fever mostly of the English speaking world. Postmodernism is rampant in academia and the elite institutions almost everywhere (efficient corporations do, by the way, pay lip service to it while continuing their unspeakably evil merit-based practices, because, look, there's that to say about capitalism, that inefficiency is punished by bankruptcy. Just try to run modern technology with "other ways of knowing"). I sincerely doubt that the Sciences will fall very low, for they are based on results. The Humanities might for a while, and especially those disciplines in the middle, Social Sciences. But scholars are already setting up alternative institutions, and there is pushback in the existing ones, not just as a reaction of the pendulum in the direction of censorship of an opposite political brand.
Reason, once unleashed, is more resilient than many would think. What we need is to adapt to the wave of technological innovation that has blurred our perception of reality, allowing each of us to live (and even make a living) in a virtual world; great freedom, great danger. From that there is no turning away. And of course these ideas will stay... ideas have persistency, even without the echo chambers of media, especially those that hit some subconscious spot in our minds. But stay does not mean that they will be, or remain, hegemonic.
(And if I may: use Foucault. He was a clever chap, whom the 'woke' camp misuses at its peril. Take these new grand narratives and look where they build power, and for whom. The grievance industry is huge. Its power and its revenue, though, can be deconstructed. Case in point it seems, this last debacle.)
Thank you for your comment. You are right about the eastern Roman Empire, although I'm not sure if it did much to keep the ancient intellectual tradition alive. I could be wrong about that.
I have to correct a misimpression, however--the historian of science at MIT is a different David Kaiser. For a list of my books see historyunfolding.com.
My deepest apologies for the misapprehension. I searched databases and the one David Kaiser historian I found was the MIT one, so I assumed. It is also a matter of prolific production of papers -- and my bad that I seldom look into popular books.
My apologies as well for the nitpicking. I am a nitpicker, it is one of my major traits, and at this peculiar time the concentration on details allows me to evade the state of deep anguish that I experience.
I hope that despite the nitpicking, I managed to get through my appreciation for your article.
As for the Byzantine Empire... it depends on what you mean by keeping the ancient intellectual tradition alive. Christianity had put its lens over everything very heavily and there was no corner of that which could be lifted. This prevented the rational tradition from progressing AS IF it were a homogeneous flow from the scholarly tenets of classical antiquity. But while in the territories of the Western Roman Empire the classical texts disappeared from the cultural discourse, mostly except from references used to bolster religious positions, and they were preserved, when this happened, in the scriptoria of monasteries by being copied by amanuenses who more often than not did the work as mindless labour and were ignorant of the language they copied (especially when this was Greek) -- in the Byzantine Empire, where people spoke Greek despite Latin remained the official language until Heraclius, and where most of the great libraries of Constantinople were never destroyed (that is, until the sack by the Fourth Crusade at the beginning of the 13th Century), things were different. Most classic texts that had been lost for centuries and their commentaries came back west from the Eastern Empire (partly also because of the exodus caused by that ignoble act of war), which is widely held to be one of the first causes of the Early Renaissance until another exodus from the East, after the Fall of Constantinople, fully started what we call Renaissance in the 15th Century.
In fewer words, classical culture was retrieved in the West from the Byzantines and from the Arab scholars that had translated Greek philosophical and scientific works (the reason that allows Dante to put Avicenna and Averroes in Limbo together with Vergil, among the great wise men who had not known Christ and so could not be damned).
On the Byzantine preservation of Greek and Roman classical culture (albeit enveloped by Christianity) this article expounds more than I ever could as I am not specifically a Byzantinist: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43577272
My whole point is, I guess, that there never was a complete disappearance of classical culture from the fall of the Western Roman Empire to the Renaissance, and that it was not due to a different set of ideas taking over. The hiatus in the west was caused by overwhelming material factors: the collapse of the entire administrative structure of the Empire under the pressure of a new religion on many points incompatible with it, added to the the influx of great masses of war-waging populations with vastly different culture from the Greco-Roman one, who yet were rapidly subsumed under Christianity. This cultural, economic and social earthquake almost obliterated classical antiquity in the West. Not so much in the East, from where it came back several centuries later.
And if we consider that the Enlightenment is born not as ideas exclusively descended from classical culture, but from classical culture mediated through Christianity and the ancient Germanic ethos both, together with the demands of the new state of things engendered by the Industrial Revolution -- then we see the inevitable continuity rather than the dividing chasm.
To say: I strongly agree on the need to support the Enlightenment at a time when its principles are being attacked from within and without. But I do not believe that the comparison with the cultural upheaval that caused the fall of the Western Roman Empire is warranted -- not until a similar socio-cultural-economic cataclysm happens, including war, devastation, famine and drastic regime changes.
In the first 40 years of last century the West found itself very close to that edge, with Fascism and Communism threatening the existence of the Enlightenment begotten world from within and without. We may find ourselves today in a similar though different plight. But I do not believe it is time yet to sound the death toll.
Oddly, I am reading this piece experiencing an unusual amount of sympathy for Kendi and his ideas. Not because he is not wrong on many points; he is. But am trying to put myself in his shoes. Anyone would feel uncomfortable if it were their race or demographic group that seemed to be the manifestly unsuccessful one, and he is trying to find reasons that relieve that discomfort. Some are not terribly valid and perhaps some are better than we think.
Regarding his statement "What if the intellect of a low-testing Black child in a poor Black school is different from—and not inferior to—the intellectual of a high-testing White child in a rich White school?", I understand the impulse behind it. Though I think the real drivers of the low-test scores are poverty, legacy of Jim Crow, breakdown of family, culture that doesn't value academics, etc.
I guess what I am saying though is that, while we have to read Kendi critically and notice his many errors, it's important to understand what creates his point of view, mistaken though it may be.
And I'd add that letting his critique of America "interrogate" some of our fixed notions is ok by me, whether that critique has value or not.
This is how I see it. Resentful for the racism that still exists, and for being part of a culture that doesn’t have cultural dominance because numbers. (Although black culture is indivisible from American culture and is celebrated. But that’s apparently invisible because it’s not good enough I guess) I agree with Kendi that people without conventionally recognized intelligence should still be valued. Black or white. Where this leads him is bizarre. Achievement doesn’t have a race. Achievement can be living a decent life using what talent you have, no matter who you are. But kendi himself plays the game he’d define as a white man’s game. He’s obviously playing a racist game himself for reducing a human being to one factor. Just from the other side. It’s puzzling why the educated classes went so far down this road with him. Does resentment plus white guilt produce an intellectual Procrustean bed?
I've never read any of KI's work, but if this summary is reasonably accurate, it should take an only minimally trained critical thinker twenty minutes to understand how contradictory it is, and how clueless KI is of human nature.
So I simply do not understand how his religion has taken hold, other than pathological altruism.
Why should racism be given the status of "original sin"? I know you get in trouble for arguing that there is nothing that special about the sin of racism compared to a host of other human sins.
Racism is not "original sin", and unquestioningly accepting that title has created the horribly flawed idea that if we fix racism all our other problems will be solved. It also, undeservedly, elevates racism above all other human shortcomings.
But using the word "original" in front of "racism" is BRILLIANT marketing. I would argue that single decision has resulted in all his success.
The inception of America wasn't Genesis...just another start of the European horror show of rape, torture, genocide, the breakup of families, the uncontrollable white lust for riches by any means necessary....
y'all gotta figure out something new to hate...this anti-white shit is getting really stale...but you feel oh so virtuous about yourself right about now, don't you...cha ching - more virtue signaling coin in the bank!!!
btw...there has not been a single race in history that does not have an uncontrollable lust for riches by any means necessary...except maybe Inuits...
...there has also not been a single race in history that has created more wealth and done more good for living standards around the world...
The Homestead Act, enacted during the Civil War in 1862, provided that any adult citizen, or intended citizen, who had never borne arms against the U.S. government could claim 160 acres of surveyed government land. Claimants were required to live on and “improve” their plot by cultivating the land.
40 acres and a mule for freed black slaves? Blacks didn't receive free Indian land like the whites. Improvement for who? Land increases in value (wealth creation). Moreover, redlining in the urban areas was a motherf*cker too. Lol!!!!
"...there has also not been a single race in history that has created more wealth and done more good for living standards around the world..."
You're certainly correct with that statement. After appropriating gunpowder and navigation technology from China, Europeans sailed around the world and just took stuff with force and violence from indigenous people---genocide, slavery, and colonization (semi-slavery). Wealth and power was aggressively and violently maldistributed to whites over generations.
Prior to the above, Europe was a 'shithole" characterized by extensive poverty and crime, pervasive diseases wiping out half its population, lack of resources/growth, and debauchery (i.e., priest raping children).
Due to black chattel slavery and Jim Crow, it will take approximately 240 years for blacks to catch up with white wealth, per the PEW study and other corroborating studies.
How can facts be equated to hate? 2 plus 2 equaling 4 isn't hate.
Nukes staring down my and grandkids' throats isn't a better place.
Facts: The 500-year European reign over the world and its resources are decaying. Historically, many empires have come and gone. The closer the difference the greater the animosity---Lewis Cosser (one of my favorite social scientists during the early 70s while studying at a university). The issues I studied then have come to fruition, especially gentrification and other urban problems. I was a criminal justice major. One conservative white professor said not to expect major changes in criminal justice reform. After working in the prison industrial complex for 34 years, I became increasingly disillusioned. The white fuckery I consistently witnessed?
Your white supremacist condescension and compensatory whiteness are clearly on display. You offer no substance apart from your very fragile nervous system.
Whiteness by itself is insufficient to specifically address my comments. My k through 12 public education (1950s-1960s) was primarily your people whitewashing American history---the founding fathers owned slaves and large amounts of land violently taken from native Americans by European migrants---facts!!!!
I live in Georgia, where the Cherokee and Creeks once lived. They were part of the 5-civilized tribes created by white European migrants as a [buffer class] to help insulate themselves from black slave resistance and rebellion. They were influenced into owning black slaves and large plantations. The Cherokee owned 5,000 black slaves---facts!!!!
These native Americans who set up their own constitutions and laws modeled after the white settlers (infidels), were stabbed in the back by Andrew Jackson and forced to relocate, along with their slaves to make way for whitey to grow cotton in the South. Cotton was king---facts!!!!
BTW, Thomas Jefferson is on record stating that blacks smelled bad and were inferior. Yet, he loved f*king a mulatto slave girl, Sally Hemings. He fathered 6 to 7 children with her. White men raping African women on the slave ships and on American soil and not being real fathers? Lol!!!!
Thanks for this warts-and-all exposé of the intellectually bankrupt notions of Ibram X. Kendi. Will people ever laugh at themselves for thinking he was some sort of prophet?
It's a tough one though . . . the Enlightenment makes a claim to universality, but it cannot be denied that it arose within a somewhat culturally-specific context. For a good couple of hundred years plus, nobody operating within it had much of a problem with declaring not only the ideas but the culture that produced it superior to all others. Nobody had much hesitation about essentially spreading the principles of the enlightment via European culture "at the point of the sword". Nobody had any hesitation forcing Stanford undergraduates to survey "Western Civilization" as the foundation of their career in higher education.
No more obviously. While some may make the case that Enlightenment principles are universal and superior, hardly anyone is ready to make that case for the culture from which it arose. Basically nobody is arguing that that culture should be spread and/or maintained even in Europe itself by force of arms, much less anywhere else. Realistically, I don't see it happening any other way.
I now see how places like San Francisco arrive at delaying algebra until the 9th grade. It isn't that some cultures need to catch up, it's that they must be treated equally, including preventing the dominant culture from enjoying the benefit of their abilities, unless and until their advantage ceases to exist. As if they didn't earn their advantage by they or their ancestors doing the hard work that they eventually passed down to their families.
I remember the so-called illustrious whites in San Francisco degrading and murdering Chinese immigrants. Here in Georgia, whites went as far as to severe and cook the manhood of Chinese males who competed in the harvesting of gold.
That social algebra experiment for the last 10 years in the sfusd turned out to be a huge failure. Duh. There is now a concerted effort to reverse it and put advanced math back in 8th grade. Maybe math really isn't racist after all.
Rogers indicates this explicitly in his schtick. Why is anyone still discussing this hack? Critical Theory is absolute garbage, and discussing it an utter waste of neural activity.
Because there are a substantial number of people in academia and political bureaucracies who subscribe to this idiocy. They needed to be rooted out of positions of influence for the sake of our children and for any chance of a positive future for humanity.
not all critical theory, people who hate kendi might still like sloterdjk, agamben, even derrida or deleuze. i think kendi is more harvard business school in the 80s than yale english in the 80s...
for the longest time i was trying to think of ways to describe politics outside of the traditional left right paradigm. enlightenment verse anti-enlightenment is quite accurate
Two quick, additional points about David Kaiser's thoughtful analysis:
1. When I first read Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning, pretentiously subtitled, "The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America," I was immediately reminded of an older book I had read as an undergraduate, Winthrop Jordan's 1969 classic, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro 1550-1812. Incidentally Jordan won the the 1969 National Book Award for that SCHOLARSHIP. Indeed, Kendi footnotes Jordan at one point. However, if one reads Kendi's stories and vignettes about 18th and early 19th century American racism, one finds barely amended versions of Jordan's painstaking research. It's instructive, for example, to compare Kendi's discussion of Benjamin Banneker's correspondence with Thomas Jefferson to Jordan's discussion of the same correspondence. The language and sequence of the the two narratives are disturbingly similar. If I had seen this from a doctoral student, I'd have been torn between having a serious private conversation and turning the case over to an academic integrity office. Since this work derived from Kendi's dissertation, I can only assume that he was ill-served by his department. This confirms John McWhorter's argument that Kendi is not an academic in the traditional sense, but rather an activist/polemicist who happens to have an advanced degree. The real blame, however, falls on the institutions like the National Book Foundation that bestowed its highest award on Kendi's book.
2. It always struck me a more than a bit bizarre that Kendi (and other social justice warriors) decry the Enlightenment, science, and the western scholarly tradition as bastions of racism, while deploying unsophisticated and frankly sophomoric applications of that tradition. Kendi's tortured concept of equity is, as David Kaiser implies, low grade social science; just count up differences based on race and compare, with no meaningful statistical controls. Similarly, Kendi's outlandish proposal for a national Department of Anti-Racism staffed by credentialed experts is a bastardization of classic Progressive Era programs, which Daniel Rogers in his study, Atlantic Crossings, brilliantly traces back to the Verein für Socialpolitik, Humbolt University, and the German scholars (e.g. Gustav Schmoller and Adolph Wagner, etc.) with whom many American Progressives studied.
Sadly, I suspect Kaiser is correct that we are not going back to an Enlightenment hegemony any time soon...too much money and too many careers, especially administrative ones, are tied up in the Social Justice Industrial Complex.
Oh, emergency: https://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory/bu-finds-ibram-kendis-antiracist-research-center-managed-104693852
What's this mean? Hard to believe. Too much money went in to admit it got flushed down the porcelain throne?
I do love this essay, it brings a lot of different strands of thought together. As such there are a lot of different arguments that can be made for and against the authors point of view. The bit at the end about the Roman Empire is interesting. There are a lot of reasons it took a 1000 years to reestablish a reason based society in the West and of course other civilizations carried on such as Islamic, Chinese and even the Mongols (who's history is often overlooked). It should be noted that influences from these civilizations allowed the West to reestablish a rationalist tradition. It should also be noted that rationality never disappears even in the darkest dark age as superstition is also present in the most modern secular society. Superstition, violence, and chaos are always choices a individual or a society can make.
--> I have my thoughts about him
So do I. He's a clown who should be ignored.
Has Kendi, his Center or anyone of his ilk ever started a school either here or elsewhere in the world that teaches children using their theories of education and anti-racism? If so, how successful are the graduates in the "real" world or even their world?
Excellent critique. Long overdue.
His books deserve a careful proof reading and fact checking, not awards.
I add a small point. On page 42 of How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi quotes a statistic on the proportion of black people killed by police 40 years ago. I could not find the source but suspect it to be overstated. If true it would mean police have dramatically reduced the proportion of black victims of police shootings.
Extremely useful article. Has even had the effect of making me buy Finkelstein's book... a feat, as I avoid reading him or Chomsky both for fear of getting an embolism. But I will never refuse to hear a good argument because I dislike the speaker.
Still, don't you get tired of all these people who are not historians, spewing history assessments right and left? (Kendi as well. He has a degree in African American Studies, in which universe does this makes him a historian, as his biography repeats?) Not directed to Kaiser, History of Science is a respectable branch.
But just a couple small points.
"Like the last movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony—which has become practically the alternate national anthem of Japan"... uh, nice to know. It also happens to be the actual anthem of the European Union. It means a lot. To a lot of us from across the pond.
"The last time that such ideas fell off the radar—at the end of the Roman Empire—it took about one thousand years for their renaissance to begin" ... fine effect statement, but about a completely not comparable historical, social and cultural context.
You mean the Western Roman Empire of course, as the Eastern one continued for approximately the same thousand years you mentioned after the end of the Western. The Western Roman Empire was not particularly keen on the Greek-Roman culture of reason (which itself was extremely different in principles and practice from the Enlightenment, even though it is one of its roots), as Christianity had dealt it a fatal blow since the time of Constantine, well before it was entrenched by the Edict of Thessalonica -- and that was it for the cultural part of the fall; which yet could have been less serious, and develop rational antibodies earlier, if it were not for the socio-political part: the great migrations of Germanic peoples that happened in the last 300 years of the Empire. Enter what old historians called the Dark Ages.
Bear with me, I am a Medievalist. It is a fascinating aphorism for today's problems, but it does not stand actual comparison.
And last. The situation is dire in the USA, I can see it. It is somewhat stupid in Canada too, Australia and New Zealand. Much less so in Europe, aside from some fields, because this is a fever mostly of the English speaking world. Postmodernism is rampant in academia and the elite institutions almost everywhere (efficient corporations do, by the way, pay lip service to it while continuing their unspeakably evil merit-based practices, because, look, there's that to say about capitalism, that inefficiency is punished by bankruptcy. Just try to run modern technology with "other ways of knowing"). I sincerely doubt that the Sciences will fall very low, for they are based on results. The Humanities might for a while, and especially those disciplines in the middle, Social Sciences. But scholars are already setting up alternative institutions, and there is pushback in the existing ones, not just as a reaction of the pendulum in the direction of censorship of an opposite political brand.
Reason, once unleashed, is more resilient than many would think. What we need is to adapt to the wave of technological innovation that has blurred our perception of reality, allowing each of us to live (and even make a living) in a virtual world; great freedom, great danger. From that there is no turning away. And of course these ideas will stay... ideas have persistency, even without the echo chambers of media, especially those that hit some subconscious spot in our minds. But stay does not mean that they will be, or remain, hegemonic.
(And if I may: use Foucault. He was a clever chap, whom the 'woke' camp misuses at its peril. Take these new grand narratives and look where they build power, and for whom. The grievance industry is huge. Its power and its revenue, though, can be deconstructed. Case in point it seems, this last debacle.)
Thank you for your comment. You are right about the eastern Roman Empire, although I'm not sure if it did much to keep the ancient intellectual tradition alive. I could be wrong about that.
I have to correct a misimpression, however--the historian of science at MIT is a different David Kaiser. For a list of my books see historyunfolding.com.
My deepest apologies for the misapprehension. I searched databases and the one David Kaiser historian I found was the MIT one, so I assumed. It is also a matter of prolific production of papers -- and my bad that I seldom look into popular books.
My apologies as well for the nitpicking. I am a nitpicker, it is one of my major traits, and at this peculiar time the concentration on details allows me to evade the state of deep anguish that I experience.
I hope that despite the nitpicking, I managed to get through my appreciation for your article.
As for the Byzantine Empire... it depends on what you mean by keeping the ancient intellectual tradition alive. Christianity had put its lens over everything very heavily and there was no corner of that which could be lifted. This prevented the rational tradition from progressing AS IF it were a homogeneous flow from the scholarly tenets of classical antiquity. But while in the territories of the Western Roman Empire the classical texts disappeared from the cultural discourse, mostly except from references used to bolster religious positions, and they were preserved, when this happened, in the scriptoria of monasteries by being copied by amanuenses who more often than not did the work as mindless labour and were ignorant of the language they copied (especially when this was Greek) -- in the Byzantine Empire, where people spoke Greek despite Latin remained the official language until Heraclius, and where most of the great libraries of Constantinople were never destroyed (that is, until the sack by the Fourth Crusade at the beginning of the 13th Century), things were different. Most classic texts that had been lost for centuries and their commentaries came back west from the Eastern Empire (partly also because of the exodus caused by that ignoble act of war), which is widely held to be one of the first causes of the Early Renaissance until another exodus from the East, after the Fall of Constantinople, fully started what we call Renaissance in the 15th Century.
In fewer words, classical culture was retrieved in the West from the Byzantines and from the Arab scholars that had translated Greek philosophical and scientific works (the reason that allows Dante to put Avicenna and Averroes in Limbo together with Vergil, among the great wise men who had not known Christ and so could not be damned).
On the Byzantine preservation of Greek and Roman classical culture (albeit enveloped by Christianity) this article expounds more than I ever could as I am not specifically a Byzantinist: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43577272
My whole point is, I guess, that there never was a complete disappearance of classical culture from the fall of the Western Roman Empire to the Renaissance, and that it was not due to a different set of ideas taking over. The hiatus in the west was caused by overwhelming material factors: the collapse of the entire administrative structure of the Empire under the pressure of a new religion on many points incompatible with it, added to the the influx of great masses of war-waging populations with vastly different culture from the Greco-Roman one, who yet were rapidly subsumed under Christianity. This cultural, economic and social earthquake almost obliterated classical antiquity in the West. Not so much in the East, from where it came back several centuries later.
And if we consider that the Enlightenment is born not as ideas exclusively descended from classical culture, but from classical culture mediated through Christianity and the ancient Germanic ethos both, together with the demands of the new state of things engendered by the Industrial Revolution -- then we see the inevitable continuity rather than the dividing chasm.
To say: I strongly agree on the need to support the Enlightenment at a time when its principles are being attacked from within and without. But I do not believe that the comparison with the cultural upheaval that caused the fall of the Western Roman Empire is warranted -- not until a similar socio-cultural-economic cataclysm happens, including war, devastation, famine and drastic regime changes.
In the first 40 years of last century the West found itself very close to that edge, with Fascism and Communism threatening the existence of the Enlightenment begotten world from within and without. We may find ourselves today in a similar though different plight. But I do not believe it is time yet to sound the death toll.
Thanks very much--that all makes sense.
Oddly, I am reading this piece experiencing an unusual amount of sympathy for Kendi and his ideas. Not because he is not wrong on many points; he is. But am trying to put myself in his shoes. Anyone would feel uncomfortable if it were their race or demographic group that seemed to be the manifestly unsuccessful one, and he is trying to find reasons that relieve that discomfort. Some are not terribly valid and perhaps some are better than we think.
Regarding his statement "What if the intellect of a low-testing Black child in a poor Black school is different from—and not inferior to—the intellectual of a high-testing White child in a rich White school?", I understand the impulse behind it. Though I think the real drivers of the low-test scores are poverty, legacy of Jim Crow, breakdown of family, culture that doesn't value academics, etc.
I guess what I am saying though is that, while we have to read Kendi critically and notice his many errors, it's important to understand what creates his point of view, mistaken though it may be.
And I'd add that letting his critique of America "interrogate" some of our fixed notions is ok by me, whether that critique has value or not.
This is how I see it. Resentful for the racism that still exists, and for being part of a culture that doesn’t have cultural dominance because numbers. (Although black culture is indivisible from American culture and is celebrated. But that’s apparently invisible because it’s not good enough I guess) I agree with Kendi that people without conventionally recognized intelligence should still be valued. Black or white. Where this leads him is bizarre. Achievement doesn’t have a race. Achievement can be living a decent life using what talent you have, no matter who you are. But kendi himself plays the game he’d define as a white man’s game. He’s obviously playing a racist game himself for reducing a human being to one factor. Just from the other side. It’s puzzling why the educated classes went so far down this road with him. Does resentment plus white guilt produce an intellectual Procrustean bed?
I've never read any of KI's work, but if this summary is reasonably accurate, it should take an only minimally trained critical thinker twenty minutes to understand how contradictory it is, and how clueless KI is of human nature.
So I simply do not understand how his religion has taken hold, other than pathological altruism.
Kendi sounds like Hamas of America.
Why should racism be given the status of "original sin"? I know you get in trouble for arguing that there is nothing that special about the sin of racism compared to a host of other human sins.
Racism is not "original sin", and unquestioningly accepting that title has created the horribly flawed idea that if we fix racism all our other problems will be solved. It also, undeservedly, elevates racism above all other human shortcomings.
But using the word "original" in front of "racism" is BRILLIANT marketing. I would argue that single decision has resulted in all his success.
The inception of America wasn't Genesis...just another start of the European horror show of rape, torture, genocide, the breakup of families, the uncontrollable white lust for riches by any means necessary....
eye roll...
y'all gotta figure out something new to hate...this anti-white shit is getting really stale...but you feel oh so virtuous about yourself right about now, don't you...cha ching - more virtue signaling coin in the bank!!!
btw...there has not been a single race in history that does not have an uncontrollable lust for riches by any means necessary...except maybe Inuits...
...there has also not been a single race in history that has created more wealth and done more good for living standards around the world...
The Homestead Act, enacted during the Civil War in 1862, provided that any adult citizen, or intended citizen, who had never borne arms against the U.S. government could claim 160 acres of surveyed government land. Claimants were required to live on and “improve” their plot by cultivating the land.
40 acres and a mule for freed black slaves? Blacks didn't receive free Indian land like the whites. Improvement for who? Land increases in value (wealth creation). Moreover, redlining in the urban areas was a motherf*cker too. Lol!!!!
"...there has also not been a single race in history that has created more wealth and done more good for living standards around the world..."
You're certainly correct with that statement. After appropriating gunpowder and navigation technology from China, Europeans sailed around the world and just took stuff with force and violence from indigenous people---genocide, slavery, and colonization (semi-slavery). Wealth and power was aggressively and violently maldistributed to whites over generations.
Prior to the above, Europe was a 'shithole" characterized by extensive poverty and crime, pervasive diseases wiping out half its population, lack of resources/growth, and debauchery (i.e., priest raping children).
Due to black chattel slavery and Jim Crow, it will take approximately 240 years for blacks to catch up with white wealth, per the PEW study and other corroborating studies.
How can facts be equated to hate? 2 plus 2 equaling 4 isn't hate.
Nukes staring down my and grandkids' throats isn't a better place.
oh! Now I get it. You are colorblind - the ONLY color you see is white.
And your knowledge of history is breathtakingly narrow and shallow. And your understanding of the human species even more so.
And your logic...or lack thereof...projections are estimates of THE FUTURE therefore CANNOT be facts.
Public education on display!
Facts: The 500-year European reign over the world and its resources are decaying. Historically, many empires have come and gone. The closer the difference the greater the animosity---Lewis Cosser (one of my favorite social scientists during the early 70s while studying at a university). The issues I studied then have come to fruition, especially gentrification and other urban problems. I was a criminal justice major. One conservative white professor said not to expect major changes in criminal justice reform. After working in the prison industrial complex for 34 years, I became increasingly disillusioned. The white fuckery I consistently witnessed?
Your white supremacist condescension and compensatory whiteness are clearly on display. You offer no substance apart from your very fragile nervous system.
Whiteness by itself is insufficient to specifically address my comments. My k through 12 public education (1950s-1960s) was primarily your people whitewashing American history---the founding fathers owned slaves and large amounts of land violently taken from native Americans by European migrants---facts!!!!
I live in Georgia, where the Cherokee and Creeks once lived. They were part of the 5-civilized tribes created by white European migrants as a [buffer class] to help insulate themselves from black slave resistance and rebellion. They were influenced into owning black slaves and large plantations. The Cherokee owned 5,000 black slaves---facts!!!!
These native Americans who set up their own constitutions and laws modeled after the white settlers (infidels), were stabbed in the back by Andrew Jackson and forced to relocate, along with their slaves to make way for whitey to grow cotton in the South. Cotton was king---facts!!!!
BTW, Thomas Jefferson is on record stating that blacks smelled bad and were inferior. Yet, he loved f*king a mulatto slave girl, Sally Hemings. He fathered 6 to 7 children with her. White men raping African women on the slave ships and on American soil and not being real fathers? Lol!!!!
Whitey's narratives? Lol!!!!
Thanks for this warts-and-all exposé of the intellectually bankrupt notions of Ibram X. Kendi. Will people ever laugh at themselves for thinking he was some sort of prophet?
It's a tough one though . . . the Enlightenment makes a claim to universality, but it cannot be denied that it arose within a somewhat culturally-specific context. For a good couple of hundred years plus, nobody operating within it had much of a problem with declaring not only the ideas but the culture that produced it superior to all others. Nobody had much hesitation about essentially spreading the principles of the enlightment via European culture "at the point of the sword". Nobody had any hesitation forcing Stanford undergraduates to survey "Western Civilization" as the foundation of their career in higher education.
No more obviously. While some may make the case that Enlightenment principles are universal and superior, hardly anyone is ready to make that case for the culture from which it arose. Basically nobody is arguing that that culture should be spread and/or maintained even in Europe itself by force of arms, much less anywhere else. Realistically, I don't see it happening any other way.
Could you name any culture that hasn't tried to spread its culture by force of arms?
No. I suspect that any such culture would be unknown to us for obvious reasons!
I now see how places like San Francisco arrive at delaying algebra until the 9th grade. It isn't that some cultures need to catch up, it's that they must be treated equally, including preventing the dominant culture from enjoying the benefit of their abilities, unless and until their advantage ceases to exist. As if they didn't earn their advantage by they or their ancestors doing the hard work that they eventually passed down to their families.
I remember the so-called illustrious whites in San Francisco degrading and murdering Chinese immigrants. Here in Georgia, whites went as far as to severe and cook the manhood of Chinese males who competed in the harvesting of gold.
That social algebra experiment for the last 10 years in the sfusd turned out to be a huge failure. Duh. There is now a concerted effort to reverse it and put advanced math back in 8th grade. Maybe math really isn't racist after all.
Making everyone dumber is not a great strategy
Rogers indicates this explicitly in his schtick. Why is anyone still discussing this hack? Critical Theory is absolute garbage, and discussing it an utter waste of neural activity.
Because there are a substantial number of people in academia and political bureaucracies who subscribe to this idiocy. They needed to be rooted out of positions of influence for the sake of our children and for any chance of a positive future for humanity.
not all critical theory, people who hate kendi might still like sloterdjk, agamben, even derrida or deleuze. i think kendi is more harvard business school in the 80s than yale english in the 80s...
All of it is sociological mumbo-jumbo disguising itself as psuedo-scholarship. Why defend something so caustic?
Poison Ivy does a number on exposing the utter crap put forth by those schools you mention.
for the longest time i was trying to think of ways to describe politics outside of the traditional left right paradigm. enlightenment verse anti-enlightenment is quite accurate
Donald Trump idealizing having sex with his daughter? Whose enlightenment? Lol!
That's been the MAIN argument for the last DECADE, ffs!
has it?
Yes. Unequivocally, yes.
Two quick, additional points about David Kaiser's thoughtful analysis:
1. When I first read Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning, pretentiously subtitled, "The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America," I was immediately reminded of an older book I had read as an undergraduate, Winthrop Jordan's 1969 classic, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro 1550-1812. Incidentally Jordan won the the 1969 National Book Award for that SCHOLARSHIP. Indeed, Kendi footnotes Jordan at one point. However, if one reads Kendi's stories and vignettes about 18th and early 19th century American racism, one finds barely amended versions of Jordan's painstaking research. It's instructive, for example, to compare Kendi's discussion of Benjamin Banneker's correspondence with Thomas Jefferson to Jordan's discussion of the same correspondence. The language and sequence of the the two narratives are disturbingly similar. If I had seen this from a doctoral student, I'd have been torn between having a serious private conversation and turning the case over to an academic integrity office. Since this work derived from Kendi's dissertation, I can only assume that he was ill-served by his department. This confirms John McWhorter's argument that Kendi is not an academic in the traditional sense, but rather an activist/polemicist who happens to have an advanced degree. The real blame, however, falls on the institutions like the National Book Foundation that bestowed its highest award on Kendi's book.
2. It always struck me a more than a bit bizarre that Kendi (and other social justice warriors) decry the Enlightenment, science, and the western scholarly tradition as bastions of racism, while deploying unsophisticated and frankly sophomoric applications of that tradition. Kendi's tortured concept of equity is, as David Kaiser implies, low grade social science; just count up differences based on race and compare, with no meaningful statistical controls. Similarly, Kendi's outlandish proposal for a national Department of Anti-Racism staffed by credentialed experts is a bastardization of classic Progressive Era programs, which Daniel Rogers in his study, Atlantic Crossings, brilliantly traces back to the Verein für Socialpolitik, Humbolt University, and the German scholars (e.g. Gustav Schmoller and Adolph Wagner, etc.) with whom many American Progressives studied.
Sadly, I suspect Kaiser is correct that we are not going back to an Enlightenment hegemony any time soon...too much money and too many careers, especially administrative ones, are tied up in the Social Justice Industrial Complex.
This essay shows how kind and complementary Glenn's "empty suit" description of Kendi is.