I Think Ibram Kendi is Just... an Academic

with academic problems, of multiple kinds

I quite liked this profile of Ibram X. Kendi by Rachel Poser, which leaves me thinking that there’s nothing nefarious in Kendi, just something a little hapless. Of course, your preexisting thoughts on racial politics will help determine how you see his project. But I find ongoing rightwing conspiracy theorizing about Kendi a little weird and quite tired, at this point; he’s just a professor who got in a bit over his head. I’ve spent my life surrounded by academics and he reminds me of so many I’ve known, in ways good and bad.

The story is mostly about his life as an administrator, a role he clearly finds uncomfortable, but we should reflect on ideas first, given his status as an ideas man. Let me start with the big thing: in the profile, he comes right out and moderates his most central claim, which makes it much less provocative but much more defensible. And there is something so archetypal about that, when it comes to the life of ideas in the 21st century.

Some of Kendi’s ideas are softer than they appear at first. Kendi told me that people who believe that his binary applies to “everything” are misreading him. Though he writes that “there is no such thing as a not-racist idea, only racist ideas and antiracist ideas,” he says he never meant that sentence to apply to the whole universe of ideas, only to ideas about race.

There goes my ham sandwich objection. I first heard about Kendi’s notion of racist vs. antiracist ideas and practices on a YouTube video that I listened to while making a ham sandwich. In the video (I cannot for the life of me find it) the people discussing Kendi’s ideas were speaking about it in exactly the binary way that made the idea famous - that every idea and every action, no matter how small, was either racist or anti-racist, with no in-between. And I wondered, at the time, whether making my ham sandwich was racist or anti-racist, whether preferring ham to roast beef was racist or anti-racist. They seemed to be clearly absurd questions, and yet ones implied directly by Kendi’s ideas. And I got varying responses at different times and from different people when I asked about whether his position really was that binary. Now, the man himself has made it clear that it’s not - and in doing so extinguished everything that made the idea provocative in the first place! It’s a classic motte-and-bailey. “Some ideas support racism while others are contrary to racism” just isn’t saying much, certainly not enough to get you on late night talk shows and earn you an enviably lucrative spot on the paid speaking circuit. So he built his reputation on the bailey, the controversializing expression of the idea, and now that he’s found himself the subject of relentless criticism, he’s retreated to the motte, the unobjectionable version of his major idea.

The thing is… this is kind of how the ideas industry functions in general, these days. Many, many arguments that find their way into the public consciousness have this general two-faced nature, a more incendiary side to generate publicity and a more equivocal side to evade criticism. I don’t exonerate Kendi for the deficiencies of his thinking, at all, but I do think that advancing a more provocative version of academic ideas as a way to garner attention and then retreating to a more limited and qualified version of those ideas when challenged is just how it works. (I will leave it to you to determine if things have always been this way or if this is a new development.) And yeah, I mean… alas. This stuff isn’t good. But it’s how things work. It happened with power posing. It happened with nudging. It happened with the importance of sleep. It’s not good, a problem for academia. But nothing nefarious. And anyway, Kendi’s claim is political and philosophical, not empirical, so the boundaries of the truth are necessarily more porous. He’s also asserting, in the quote, that he never meant to be construed as believing the more reckless version, although if you’ve followed his work for the past half-decade, you may find that as hard to believe as I do.

Another work that falls into this same sort of liminal space of provocation comes from the same milieu, the 1619 Project. I have always found the hyperventilating about that endeavor to be a bit much, while I recognize that some very serious historians take issue with its claims of fact. It’s the overall claim and the way it interfaces with media coverage that really interests me, particularly. As I’ve written before, the problem with the 1619 Project isn’t that it’s offensive or dangerous. The problem is that the more restrained version of its central claim isn’t notable, and the more extreme version isn’t true. That is, one way to represent the essential point of the 1619 Project is “American independence was deeply influenced by the desire to perpetuate African chattel slavery.” This is fine, but then, “fine” doesn’t really get it done when it comes to justifying extravagantly-funded New York Times vanity projects. You don’t get Pulitzers for fine, generally. Plenty of earlier texts have argued that our declaration of independence from Great Britain was driven in part by a desire to practice slavery unfettered by burgeoning British abolitionism; it’s a hard point to simply reject, largely because it’s true. The trouble is that the more incendiary version, “American independence was all about perpetuating African chattel slavery” actually isn’t true. Nothing in history is monocausal.

When I said that on this newsletter, a reader reacted very badly, accused me of throwing my lot in with the MAGA crowd, losing my principles, etc. (I think he canceled his subscription.) Which is strange! Again, an accusation that academics make more extreme version of their claims while seeking publicity and less extreme when responding to criticism just doesn’t sound that harsh to me. The reality isn’t ideal but it is a widely-shared reality. And that applies to Kendi too. This sense that Kendi may be more or less worthy of criticism, but is a weird figure to freak out about, is broader than that, too. I think the profile also does a good job of demonstrating that, while his branding has suggested a radicalism that was useful in a recently-radical moment, Kendi just isn’t temperamentally a radical. His scholarship does accept contemporary academic norms regarding the ubiquity of racial animosity - that we are all guilty - yet he actually has a more reformist definition of what racism is and how to fight it than many in academia. You can complain that the academic norm is wrong, which is fine, but I don’t think you can say that Kendi himself is the bomb thrower so many of his conservative critics say he is. There are of course people who think that anyone who talks about structural racism is dangerous, but, well - that’s its own kind of radicalism, wouldn’t you say?

Or consider his failures as an administrator. The specific complaints from his staff (who incidentally are mostly all people of color) are certainly worth listening to, and I’m not exonerating him. But “professor gets administrative role, fails” is about as clear of a “Dog Bites Man” story as I can imagine. His inability to manage a team and seeming difficulty in keeping his attention on day-to-day operations are a hallmark of professors who have suddenly been put into administrative positions. Of course, the financial woes are frankly incredible. The NYT stresses that there’s no evidence that Kendi was involved in any fraud or chicanery, but burning through $55 million in less than four years is pretty scandalous in and of itself, right? There are many similar academic offices that don’t spend that in a decade or more. But, again, I find this understandable if not excusable. A lot of people were talking about how nothing would ever be the same, in 2020 and 2021, how “the reckoning” had permanently changed the world, and the donations were flowing fast and furious, and it probably looked like the good times were here to stay. Then the spigot unexpectedly got turned off. You see, when you make supporting a political movement into a matter of public fashion, in short order that movement will fall out of fashion. And so you had this in-over-his-head academic who had never managed that kind of money before in a high-profile spot with a vague research mission while caring for a very sick wife. I don’t condone it, but I do get it.

Look, Kendi is an extremely visible public figure who has voluntarily engaged in issues of controversy as a public intellectual, and his ideas are of course worth engaging with critically. He’s also become a wealthy man who does not need protection from the likes of me. I personally was not impressed by Stamped From the Beginning, which has that aggravating pop-academic quality and ultimately says little that’s fresh. I’m not here to tell you not to criticize Kendi. I just think he’s a mostly-harmless dork professor, again like so many I’ve known, clearly more comfortable in academia than in the more intense media environment he’s found himself in. His struggles running a too-rich research center reflect very quotidian realities of academic bureaucratic bloat and how ill-equipped many PhDs are to run a team or balance books. I’d call him a victim of his own success, but he’s doing fine and he’s not a victim. Instead I think he’s a fairly typical academic celebrity with more of a talent for provocation than for coming up with constructive solutions, a guy with some dopey opinions and some inoffensive ones that have become MAGA ragebait. He’s mildly hapless in the way of professors, and someone who rode the wave in a profoundly weird and quickly-receding moment in history.