Four years ago, Ibram X. Kendi was the academic star of the moment, topping the bestseller lists, receiving a MacArthur Genius Grant, and being handed a plum position at Boston University (BU) with a research centre given more than $30 million. And BU, where I worked at the time, didn’t stop there. After the murder of George Floyd, BU cancelled classes and events for a virtual “Day of Collective Engagement” where Kendi took a starring role as presenter. The message was clear that the star hire would be the one telling BU what we were supposed to do from now on: not only were there no presenters expressing alternate views of race that challenged Kendi’s, such views were actively discouraged. My friend and former colleague David Decosimo recalls how he pointed out in a Zoom meeting that Kendi’s definitions were controversial and asked if the university was officially endorsing Kendi’s views. The response:

Immediately, several deans came after me in the chat. I was clearly uninformed and confused; now wasn’t the time for “intellectual debate.” They implied I might not actually oppose racism.

That was how these conversations went in those days: even in a university, a place supposedly devoted to critical inquiry, merely to raise questions about Kendi was to risk being tarred with the scarlet R, to imply that you were not anti-racist and therefore – according to Kendi’s ideology, which we will get to in a later post – must be racist. Kendi’s views were simply swallowed as the correct position, to be imparted and followed. And unlike Decosimo, I did not have the security of tenure; I did not dare to raise questions as he did.

How could I, when I looked around at what was happening at other universities? When a professor was suspended for asking the question of whether the pros of early global trade outweighed the negatives? When another was forced onto leave for harsh criticism of the BLM movement? When the president of the American Historical Association was required to apologize for mild criticism of a project that tried to erase its own history? When a black director of diversity, equity and inclusion was fired for treating racial abolitionism as an ideology equally worthy to Kendi’s? When not only did one professor lose her job for having a frank conversation about race that involved the N-word, another was suspended merely for saying a Chinese word that sounds like the N-word? The message from upper academic administrations came loud and clear: if you appeared insufficiently committed to “antiracism”, as defined in terms like Kendi’s, you were putting your livelihood in potential peril.

Kendi’s star has faded considerably in the years since, for at least two reasons: one, he never did anything that anyone could discern with all those millions, with his centre producing barely any research; and two, the vagaries of fashion that gave him his fame then also took it away, as most houses that put up Black Lives Matter signs quietly took them down and replaced them with Ukrainian flags or Free Palestine. Beyond that, with Twitter out of the way, the online mobs that get people fired for heterodoxy are less prevalent these days. Working at BU at the height of Kendi’s popularity, I’d been terrified to say anything critical of the university’s golden boy. In 2024, now that I’m no longer at BU, I no longer face that fear. I’m now free to criticize Kendi in a way I had not been.

I had started to wonder whether it would even be worth criticizing Kendi anymore: is that beating a dead horse now? But then, as I happily began my new job at Northeastern University, this year, in 2024, as one part of my onboarding I was required to take a “Racial and Cultural Literacy Training”. “Training” is absolutely the right word: there was no education involved, no questioning, no discussion, no thought, just a requirement to watch videos explaining the settled correct way to think about race and racial issues, as if they were explaining the university’s medical insurance program. The BU day had made room only for sycophantic clarifying questions; with the canned video, there was no room for any questions at all. And this training explicitly quoted Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist, especially on his famous claim that you must be either racist or antiracist, you cannot be in the middle. So not only are Kendi’s ideas still very much with us, they are being presented as the official position that new hires – no matter what their own diverse and informed opinions on racial issues might happen to be – are expected to imbibe. His views, then, are very much alive in 2024 – and require detailed attention and refutation for that reason.

I want to be clear: I’m happy to be at Northeastern, and I have no intention of singling it out for particular criticism in this regard. It would be misguided to do that, for there was nothing singular to Northeastern about that training. It was a standardized one-size-fits-all training packaged by some company called Academic Impressions, which likely packages the exact same training to hundreds of other institutions. That is, it is just normal, standard academic practice to provide a packaged racism training that cites Kendi as gospel – and that’s the problem. Top-down one-size-fits-all endorsement of Kendi, to be swallowed whole as training rather than engaged with critically as education, is just how universities do things these days. And that is a big problem, for at least two reasons. First, the last thing a university should be doing is attempting to shove any one particular political viewpoint down its faculty’s and staff’s throats, no matter what the viewpoint is; universities are places for different ideas to be developed and differences to be expressed. Second, the specific ideas being advanced in such trainings, the ideas of Ibram X. Kendi, are wrong and fail on their own terms. I’ll be establishing that point in the posts to come.

The Academic Impressions training did also claim its goal was “being able to critically develop your own point of view on race” – all the while providing you with nothing critical, no internal debate, no room to question, only giving you the official Kendist gospel from on high. So I will take the training up on that stated goal, even though the training’s own pedagogy was antithetical to it. I have critically developed my own point of view on race, one coming out of my reading and education and learning as well as my personal experience, and it disagrees strongly with the one I was force-fed.

I didn’t read Kendi’s work during the time I was BU – because I was not at liberty to criticize it. Knowing what his ideas were while having to remain silent about them would only have frustrated me more. Now, though, not only am I not at BU, but the hold of Kendi’s ideas on people in educated American circles has loosened in general. I’m happy to say that at Northeastern no further mention was made of the “literacy training” after it was over; instead, “diversity, equity and inclusion” in my work at Northeastern has largely meant things that are actually positive and helpful, like giving fellowships to black students or introducing more non-Western philosophy into the Ethics Institute’s work. Now, I feel comfortable breaking my silence.

So I’ve read through How to Be an Antiracist – a work which I’m told is less rigorous than Kendi’s earlier Stamped from the Beginning, but it is nevertheless his most important work, the one that was and remains most influential in the culture. In the next few weeks’ posts, I will examine it critically. Because as long as people are still getting mandatory Kendi trainings, that will be a task that still needs doing.