Intellectually empty ‘antiracist’ center is moving to Howard University from Boston

Intellectually empty ‘antiracist’ center is moving to Howard University from Boston
Ibram X. Kendi, the product of critical race theory (Image: YouTube screen grab via CBS News)

Ibram Kendi is the famous race-baiting radical who progressive academics and journalists love to quote when they say capitalism is racist, and that people of color need to be hired based on race. Kendi’s center at Boston University — which received millions from progressives like Twitter founder Jack Dorsey — is shutting down after having produced virtually no academic output, and moving to Howard University.

“To love capitalism is to end up loving racism. To love racism is to end up loving capitalism…Capitalism is essentially racist; racism is essentially capitalist,” said Kendi’s best-selling book, How to Be An Antiracist. That book was praised as a “comprehensive introduction to critical race theory,” by the leading progressive media organ SlateThe “key concept” in Ibram Kendi’s book was that discrimination against whites is the only way to achieve equality: “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination,” wrote Kendi in that book.

The College Fix reports:

Professor Ibram Kendi and Boston University will shut down the Center for Antiracist Research on June 30 as the “antiracism” proponent moves to Howard University. Kendi will start a similar center at the Washington, D.C. historically black university… Kendi’s Boston U. center failed to deliver on many promises….The center started off with strong fundraising, including $10 million from former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey….Kendi himself did quite well during that time, hauling in $35,000 for 60-minute speeches….His center existed at Boston U. for five years…For the last two years, representing 40 percent of his time there, the center did practically nothing, while Kendi wrote zero academic papers at least during the first three years he was there…..On a [2024] page titled “What We’re Working On,” nothing is listed from this year. No policy reports or convenings have been published since 2022…[In 2024] The Antiracist Legal Education Project advertises an event from September 2023 as “upcoming,” while the annual Antiracist Book Festival was not held in 2023 or 2024. A Vertex Symposium, which is also described as an annual event, has not occurred since 2022.

Kendi was quick to accuse his critics of racism when questions were raised about his leadership, even though some of them were racial minorities, such as scholar Saida Grundy.

“I have been disappointed in journalists who report criticisms of a Black leader without asking for evidence to substantiate those allegations,” he told The Daily Free Press. “Racist ideas about a corrupt Black leader running a dysfunctional or toxic organization are so ingrained that reporters don’t feel the need for evidence.”

Under the Biden administration, Kendi’s anti-capitalist, racist book How to Be an Antiracist was recommended reading in the U.S. Navy.

School libraries often carry Kendi’s books, even as they fail to carry books that are sympathetic to capitalism, such as Nobel Prize winning economist Milton Friedman’s book Capitalism and Freedom.

In the Free Press, James Fishback observes that

How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi, which argues that the “only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination,” is stocked in 42 percent of the U.S. school districts I surveyed. . . . only a single school district — Northside Independent School District (ISD) in San Antonio, Texas — offers students Woke Racism by John McWhorter, a book that challenges the borderline religious “anti-racist” ideas advanced by Kendi.

Students in many school systems have been assigned a book by Kendi that is historically inaccurate.

LU Staff

LU Staff

Promoting and defending liberty, as defined by the nation’s founders, requires both facts and philosophical thought, transcending all elements of our culture, from partisan politics to social issues, the workings of government, and entertainment and off-duty interests. Liberty Unyielding is committed to bringing together voices that will fuel the flame of liberty, with a dialogue that is lively and informative.

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