Who's Responsible for the Ibram X. Kendi Phenomenon?

with John McWhorter

You’d think that, after years of bemoaning the pernicious influence of Ibram X. Kendi on racial politics in this country, John and I would find ourselves on the same page in the wake of the scandal at Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research. But we didn’t! Or at least not entirely on the same page. In this clip from our most recent conversation, John and I debate where the responsibility for the Kendi Phenomenon really rests, with the man himself or the institutions that have elevated him.

One thing we can infer with some confidence is that Kendi, while espousing some bad ideas, is no nefarious puppet master orchestrating racial strife from his academic perch. He lacks the administrative competence for that. John is right insofar as he indicts the institutions and corporations that have elevated and used Kendi to soothe their consciences, cleanse their public images, drum up donor funds, and position themselves on “the right side of history.” As though they could know which side will turn out to be “right,” as though the enormously complex history of race in this country could be boiled down to comic book heroes and villains, as though the struggle to walk a righteous path could amount to paying the right speakers to show up at your event and telling your employees to read Antiracist Baby to their kids.

No, Kendi is not solely responsible for the false racial Manichaeism of post-George Floyd America. But neither can we regard him as a mere “useful idiot” who stumbled into a position of influence without understanding what was happening to him. Regarding him as a hapless stooge treats him with the wrong kind of condescension. His ideas are shallow and contemptible, but he was perfectly willing to play the part assigned to him. He took the fame, he took the prestige, and he took the money, and along with all that comes a measure of responsibility. To deny that would be to deny his agency. Even if he and his ilk believe that systemic racism negates the agency of black people in this country, I don’t. If I’m going to insist that young black men in America’s ghettos start taking responsibility for their actions, I’ll damn sure insist that a wealthy black celebrity professor do the same.

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This is a clip from the episode that went out to paying subscribers on Monday. To get access to the full episode, as well as an ad-free podcast feed, Q&As, and other exclusive content and benefits, click below.

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GLENN LOURY: Looks like it's Ibram X. Kendi again. It's the brouhaha at Boston University. The piece in the New York Times, the Boston Globe pieces, people speaking out, disgruntled colleagues, administrative review of the Center for Antiracist Research.

JOHN MCWHORTER: What I want to know is this: Why is there so much joy about what happened to Kendi? Not only among conservatives, but in the media, it's people of all stripes who are so happy to see that guy getting his butt kicked. What is all this joy about? You're joyous. Why?

Eh, how do you know I'm joyous?

'Cause you are. I mean, there's a part of me that's saying it's about time. But not for the reasons that a lot of people are thinking. For example, I don't think he's a grifter. I don't think that he's been trying to put one over on people. It's not that this near-criminal is being brought to justice. I don't think of it that way at all. Do you?

Oh, John. I almost don't know what to say. But because we're friends, I'm going to pay you the respect of being honest with you. That just feels like a pose. The line that you were describing to me coming from you feels like a pose. Schadenfreude. Everybody's enjoying the disaster. They're crowing.

Sure, that's not very honorable. That's not very edifying, that kind of response. Chickens coming home to roost. What did Malcolm X say after the Kennedy assassination? That kind of thing, that's cheap. And I don't think that's where I'm coming from. But you, instead of going to the heart of the matter ... which is an empty suit was elevated to an academic guru position and a ton of money fell on him and the whole thing fell apart because he was an empty suit, which reveals the superficiality of the virtue-signaling mania that ensued after George Floyd got killed in Minneapolis in 2020. There was never any there there. The emperor had no clothes. This is precisely Hans Christian Anderson's “The Emperor's New Clothes” situation. This is the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain that's been revealed.

Instead of that, you use your lofty position and your megaphone of influence to ask questions about the people who are happy to see the whole thing fall apart. It was rotten to the core. The whole thing was absurd. He was going to solve the racial inequality problem through antiracist research.

He's an empty suit. He doesn't know anything. That's been obvious from day one. So it's not about him, right? It's about the institutions and about the mania of that moment. And by the way, the consequences of the mania of that moment are playing out in real lives all across this country, with cities overrun with ill-behaved people, with law enforcement apparatuses being pulled back, with ridiculous ideology, with failed school systems, with mediocrity everywhere you look.

Kendi is just a symptom of something that was very deeply and profoundly wrong. What about Black Lives Matter? What has become of them? What about Ta-Nehisi Coates and Nikole Hannah-Jones? Yes, I will go there. What has become of them? They were going to go to Howard and build some kind of center. Where is it?

I'm disappointed that you didn't go for the jugular. That's what I'm saying.

Well, the thing is, whose jugular? Kendi is not an academic. He is not a scholar. And I don't mean that as a put-down. I mean that's not what he does. What he wants to be is an antiracism activist. He happened to get a doctorate. You get a doctorate, it does open certain doors. That's understandable. But it's painfully clear from his CV, from frankly, just listening to him for about five minutes, that he's not an academic. And if you put it the right way, you could even say it to him and he might even agree. He's out in society trying his version of trying to change real lives. But that's not a scholar.

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However, all of a sudden in 2020, he gets swept up into this institution where he's supposed to be supervising real research. You know, if you tried to have me administrate something, I would have that thing a smoking hole in the ground in two weeks. I would have no idea what I was doing. I don't want to do it. I get the feeling he's similar. He hadn't had any experience running anything, and he's not terribly interested in doing it. I feel him there. But he gets thrust into this position, why would we expect him not to take it? Is he really supposed to say, “No, no. I'm not a real researcher. I don't do what these people do. What would I be doing supervising these people?”

The jugular here is Boston University. The jugular is anybody in 2020 and thereon who has casually referred to him with terms like “scholar” and “academic” and “intellectual,” and it's clearly ...

What about the MacArthur Foundation?

You don't want to sound like you're jealous, but frankly that too.

Didn't he win a National Book Award?

Yes, he did. And frankly ... meh. So that's the jugular that you go for, in that there is sometimes a lowered sense of what an academic is when it comes to what black figure is going to be celebrated. I cannot be mad at Kendi for that. I mean, he just got swept up into something where I think all of us would have taken the money. All of us would have taken the fame. All of this fell apart because he was chosen for something that he shouldn't have been chosen for. But why be mad at him?

I don't know why defending him from anybody's anger is of concern to you, but you can keep your own counsel on that. Let me just posit, I'm not, as it were, mad at him when I point out that he's a fraud, when I point out that he's an empty suit, that, as I said, he's a lightweight, when I call attention to the vacuity and the emptiness of the rhetoric. How to raise an antiracist baby? Come on. So I'm not mad at him [when I] say, “You're an embarrassment. You're an absurdity.” That's simply a description.

That's not accurate, Glenn. You can't call him an embarrassment or an absurdity when he was put into a position by other people. If anything, they made him make himself into an embarrassment. It wasn't his fault. If things were the way they ordinarily would be under normal standards of evaluation, he would be an obscure black studies professor teaching at some state university. That's what he was before all these things happened to him by chance. But he got swept up into something. How can you call that person an embarrassment, when it's not his fault?

The embarrassment is BU. I'm embarrassed for Boston University as a representative of what American higher education can be.

Well, then let's talk about that. Because I agree with you that that's really the issue. I don't have a stake in up or down on Kendi as such. I think his own biography and arc of his career speaks for itself. Why don't we talk about the institutional problem here? Because as I say, it's not just BU, it's much broader than that.

What BU did is an insult to black intelligence. Let me change that, because that's too mean to Kendi. He doesn't deserve it. What BU did is an insult to black achievement. The best defense I can imagine they would have is that, of course, show biz is part of things, and show biz does attract funds. But the idea that you, on the one hand, could be heading an antiracist center that was so excellent 30 years ago, as if he was remotely capable of doing the same thing—he's utterly miscast—is a diminishment of blackness. The people who did that ought to be ashamed of themselves, frankly.

What about the people who paid him forty grand to show up and give a half-hour-long talk without a Q&A? Do you want to put them on the list of people to castigate?

It almost feels like they're displaying that woman who was supposed to be George Washington's nursemaid, and she was supposed to be 104 years old. It's like they're showing off a Negro. I don't have any problem with him taking the money if it's offered. The idea that they would pretend that anything that that particular person has to say is worth that much money, it's an insult. It's making a black person a show, in a way, and yeah, I think that's disgusting. But it's not him. It's them.

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