Jeffrey Blehar writes for National Review Online about the not-so-surprising end of an unusually successful scam: the “antiracism” of Ibram X. Kendi.
[N]obody impressed me more than the Cut Creator, Ibram X. Kendi. … [T]he experience of Kendi (born Henry Rogers in Philadelphia, name changed at age 32) was like witnessing the advent of the anti-racist messiah himself. Why, it was even right there in the title of his book. How to Be an Antiracist — which came out in mid 2019 to significant (and retrospectively ominous) plaudits among the “woke set” but complete indifference among the world at large — was one obscure black academic’s solution to all the textbook American racial oppression he had read about as a child but never quite suffered during his middle-class upbringing yet felt he should have. …
… The man had hustle and an easy way with conversational patter, as well as the willingness to fearlessly reductio his thesis all the way to absurdum. It captured a certain zeitgeist. No wonder he was showered with $55 million for his Boston University “antiracism center,” and no wonder he fumbled it all. It all collapsed when we shuddered ourselves out of the 2020–21 punch-drunk daze. Being surprised at the fact of Kendi’s mismanagement is like being surprised that you can’t really promote Eddie Murphy from street hustler to floor trader in the span of a month.
Strangely enough, I end with today’s “news hook” instead of beginning with it: The New York Times Magazine is out this week with an autopsy on the rise and fall (to date) of Kendi. …
… I lament the twilight of the fanaticism that gave us such brief phenomena as Ibram X. Kendi, if only from a detached, aesthetic, “may you live in interesting times” perspective. This man gave America the simplest, most easily applicable binary solution to all of our racial problems. It didn’t matter that it was stupid, at least not from the perspective of his personal enrichment. For a while, it sold.
