Tag: ibram x kendi

Ibram Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research Hasn’t Produced Any Research

Ibram X. Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research made headlines this month when it announced it would axe a third of its workforce. But those layoffs may not have much of an impact, considering the center has hardly produced any original research at all.

The Boston University-based center has produced just two original research papers since its founding in June 2020, according to a Washington Free Beacon review. Output from the center’s scholars largely consists of op-eds or commentary posted on the center’s website. The group’s plans to “maintain the nation’s largest online database of racial inequity data in the United States” quickly fizzled out, and the database has been dormant since 2021.

The Center for Antiracist Research is the latest left-wing group to fall on hard times. George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, which gave $140,000 to Kendi’s center, cut 40 percent of its staff in June. The Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation’s revenues fell 88 percent from 2021 to 2022, as support for the movement plummeted to an all-time low.

It is unclear how much money remains in the Center for Antiracist Research’s coffers. Boston University did not respond to a request for comment.

Kendi had high hopes for the center, which employed at least 45 employees as of July. The nonprofit would “foster exhaustive racial research, research-based policy innovation, data-driven education and advocacy campaigns, and narrative-change initiatives,” Kendi said, in order to “figure out novel and practical ways to understand, explain, and solve seemingly tractable problems of racial inequity and injustice.”

In December 2020, the center launched the “Racial Data Lab,” which Kendi claimed would “give us the ability to see the hotspots of racial inequity in real time in this country.” As of September, the Racial Data Lab only compiled information on COVID-19 infections and deaths. That COVID-19 tracker stopped collecting information in March 2021. The center has since removed the names of anyone who worked on that project from its website.

The center’s scholars have produced only two research papers, both of which were co-authored with a number of other academics. Elaine Nsoesie, who leads the Racial Data Tracker project at the center, appeared last in a list of co-authors of the January paper “Association of Neighborhood Racial and Ethnic Composition and Historical Redlining With Build Environment Indicators Derived From Street View Images.”

Nsoesie’s low ranking among her co-authors could suggest she contributed the least to the paper, which concluded that neighborhoods with a higher concentration of black residents had more “dilapidated buildings.”

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Like other ‘antiracist’ activists, Ibram X. Kendi proves he’s only in it for himself

The real measure of an individual’s character isn’t what he portrays to the public but how he treats people in private.

Truly righteous people treat others with respect and dignity when there is no one else around and no social credit to be earned for doing the right thing.

This distinction matters — especially for people who’ve made a career lecturing others on the appropriate way to treat people, especially those perceived as having less power in society.

But when no one was looking and nothing was to be gained, it seems Ibram X. Kendi used his power and privilege as the director of a think tank to exploit and mistreat the people who worked under him as if they were people who are beneath him.

Amid confirmation of layoffs being made at Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research, former and current faculty have spoken out about Kendi’s mismanagement, “exploitation” and enrichment.

“There are a number of ways it got to this point, it started very early on when the university decided to create a center that rested in the hands of one human being, an individual given millions of dollars and so much authority,” stated Spencer Piston, a BU political science professor. 

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Push To Ban ‘Assault Rifles’ Like Fight To End Slavery, CRT Backer Ibram X. Kendi Tells CBS News

The ongoing effort to ban so-called assault weapons is similar to America’s bloody fight to end slavery, a CBS contributor and chief proponent of Critical Race Theory (CRT) said Sunday.

In a segment commemorating Juneteenth, Ibram X. Kendi told “Face the Nation” host Margaret Brennan he teaches his young daughter that the struggle for emancipation continues today. Kendi, the network’s “Racial Justice Contributor,” said “freedom” today means liberation from poverty and guns.

“I’m actually going to teach her that … throughout this nation’s history, there’s [sic] been two perspectives on freedom, really two fights for freedom,” Kendi said. “Enslaved people were fighting for freedom from slavery, and enslavers were fighting for the freedom to enslave.”

“And in many ways that sort of contrast still exists today,” he continued. “There are people who are fighting for freedom from assault rifles, freedom from poverty, freedom from exploitation. And there are others who are fighting for freedom to exploit, freedom to have guns, freedom to maintain inequality.”

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‘Anti-racist’ prof Ibram X. Kendi wondered if daughter inhaled ‘smog’ of ‘white superiority’ amid attachment to white doll at daycare

“Anti-racist” professor and author Ibram X. Kendi in his Tuesday essay for the Atlantic wondered if his daughter inhaled the “smog” of “white superiority” amid her attachment to a white doll at daycare.

What are the details?

Kendi wrote that in the summer of 2017, he and his partner, Sadiqa, and their 1-year-old daughter, Imani, moved to Washington, D.C. During that time, Imani grew attached to a white doll with blue eyes and began throwing fits when she had to put it down, Kendi’s essay states.

He added that he and his partner “wondered if our black child’s attachment to a white doll could mean she had already breathed in what the psychologist Beverly Daniel Tatum has called the ‘smog’ of white superiority.”

Kendi detailed the history of dolls’ skin color, including a recent study concluding that white children “displayed a high rate of ‘white bias,‘ identifying lighter skin tones with positive attributes and darker hues with negative ones.” He added that black children also displayed white bias, but far less than white children; the study’s author said that’s because “black parents actively work to protect their children from bias by ‘reframing messages that children get from society’ about racial preference.” White parents “don’t have to engage in that level of parenting,” the study’s author found.

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Ibram X. Kendi is the false prophet of a dangerous and lucrative faith

Ibram X. Kendi’s name appears everywhere: in school curricula, corporate training programs, even the Navy’s official reading list. The Boston University prof is a blazing supernova in the constellation of radical-chic race activism. But be warned: His philosophy would jeopardize the bedrock American ideal of individual dignity and equality under law. 

Kendi’s rise was swift and significant. He published a bestselling book, “Stamped from the Beginning,” in 2016. After the death of George Floyd in 2020, Kendi’s next book, “How to Be An Antiracist,” began selling an astonishing number of copies, including institutional sales to public schools, government agencies and professional groups, all seeking to understand the ongoing racial unrest; he was a campus and media fixture at the height of the crisis.  

But after the protests died down, Kendi’s work faced new scrutiny, revealing a simple truth: Kendi is a false prophet — and his religion of “antiracism” is nothing more than a marketing-friendly recapitulation of the academic left’s most pernicious ideas.

Born Ibram Henry Rogers, Kendi presents himself as a radical subversive. But in reality, he is an ideologist of elite opinion, buoyed by government and corporate patronage. Kendi’s work has been endorsed by Fortune 100 companies, the federal bureaucracy and the US military — the very power structures he claims to oppose.

Kendi’s core thesis — that racism is the single, self-evident cause of racial differences in everything from school grades to incarceration rates to income and thus must be rectified using “antiracist discrimination” — reiterates critical race theory’s basic concepts. Kendi’s “gift,” in other words, is for translating ivory-tower theories into media- and corporate-friendly narrative.

“When I see racial disparities, I see racism,” Kendi says, to the exclusion of other explanations. His logic often descends into dizzying circularity and tautologies. When asked to define the word “racism,” he told attendees at the Aspen Ideas Festival that it is “a collection of racist policies that lead to racial inequity that are substantiated by racist ideas.”

In another nod to 1960s-style radicalism, Kendi also claims to oppose capitalism. “The life of racism cannot be separated from the life of capitalism,” he says. “In order to truly be antiracist, you also have to truly be anti-capitalist.”

But Kendi, like his counterpart Black Lives Matter co-founder Patrisse Cullors, is a prolific capitalist in his personal life. He charges $20,000 an hour for virtual presentations and has merchandised his entire line of ideas, releasing self-help products and even an “antiracist” baby book. He gratefully accepts millions from tech and pharmaceutical companies on behalf of his Antiracism Center. Fighting Big Capital, it turns out, is a lucrative enterprise.

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