In her remorseful, oblique and wussy column about the fall of Ibram X Kendi’s disastrous scam, The Center for AntiRacist Research at Boston University, Michelle Goldberg takes classic white-liberal evasive action:
Many on the right see the center’s apparent implosion as proof that the antiracist politics that flourished three years ago were always and only a con. “The point was always to line grifters’ pockets off of the white guilt of liberals and the major corporations they run,” said a Washington Examiner column.
It’s almost hard to blame right-wingers for their delight; Kendi’s mistakes played right into their hands. But for the rest of us, it’s important to understand that the center’s seeming breakdown is more the result of a failed funding model than a failed ideology. It exemplifies the lamentable tendency among left-leaning donors to chase fads and celebrities rather than build sustainable institutions.
Uh, no. It’s not that the collapse of Kendi’s Institute gave aid and comfort to conservatives, and it’s certainly not the result of a “failed funding model.” Kendi was a con artist from the start, the latest in a long line. His syllogism—you’re either racist or anti-racist, but there ain’t no nothin’ in between—was a binary fraud that gave succor to conservative wingnuts from the start. He was a living argument that not only were liberals incapable of thinking clearly about race, they also were witlessly intent on going blind at a time of unprecedented racial progress.
The left-liberal donors weren’t chasing “fads and celebrities,” they were chasing the propitiation of their endless, overweening guilt. It’s a formula as old as the Civil Rights Movement: If you indulge black anger, you need not feel so guilty. I call it Spike Lee Syndrome, the promulgation of black victimhood by talented people who aren’t victims at all. The hucksters are almost always college-educated—Shelton Jackson “Spike” Lee is a middle-class preppy from Brooklyn who has a Masters in Fine Arts from NYU—and they are too often motivated by a delusion: that if they act angry and streety enough, they can absolve themselves of their own version of white guilt, the notion that because they’re middle-class and smart and sometimes scholarly, they’re not black enough.
Spike Lee Syndrome has a convenient escape hatch for destructive behavior: if you’re not a gangsta, you’re a Tom; if you don’t dress egregious-street at the Knicks game and make a noisy fool of yourself, you’re a house slave. From there, it’s only a stroll to: if you study in school, you’re acting white; if you believe that black criminals should face bail and jail, you’re in favor of mass incarceration. Looting stores and flash-mob shoplifting, as we saw in Philadelphia last week, is seen as tragic but inevitable, almost understandable behavior in the Chesa Boudin fantasy-Candylands of urban governance. Anti-Racism is an anti-social socialism that flies in the face of reality as it is lived by most black people.
Too many black people lead terrified lives, and not because they are intimidated by white people. They are more concerned about crime, according to the polls, than white liberals are. Read the relentless and ever-sane Colbert King in The Washington Post:
People don’t feel safe. And most don’t fear “state-sanctioned violence,” shorthand for the police misconduct that some justice advocates ascribe to local cops. D.C. residents certainly understand that there are rogue cops in the ranks. They also know that perpetrators of violence aren’t the men and women in blue but people in masks and hoodies who roam the streets with guns in their waistbands.
Ibram X. Kendi had his shining moment—along with Black Lives Matter, another demi-scam that cultivated white guilt and was riddled with corruption (and which ignored the intra-racial murders that actually wreaked havoc on black lives)—after the police killed George Floyd in Minneapolis. It was an outrageous murder, and it created one of those periodic but valuable reminders that American history has been an embarrassment of bigotry and depraved racial violence. The vast outpouring of white people peacefully marching in protest was yet another sign that racism is scorned in this country. But George Floyd was far from the norm when it comes to police behavior. Police violence has declined precipitously as a result of body-cams, iPhones and the cultivation of black, brown and especially women cops; it would decline further if cops were better trained. And yet, it became fashionable for lefties, especially in the cant-clogged cloisters of academia and the media, to buy into the notion that race relations are immutable, that they can never change because white people don’t want to give up their “privilege.” It supposes that there are structural impediments to equality, a resonant but empty claim nowadays. (That used to be true, of course—and in isolated cases still is—but all those seg laws and secret race covenants have been changed or eliminated.)
It was around that time that Random House quietly insisted that all its editors read Kendi’s How to be an Anti-Racist. It was also around that time most New York publishers suggested that every manuscript be given a “sensitivity” read, to eliminate the possibility of hurt feelings (and severely diminish the possibility of enlightened conversation.) It was also around that time that a friend summarized the sociology of the New York book-publishing world: “It’s a bunch of 70-year-old Boomer Editors who are about to retire and their 27-year-old Maoist assistants.” Never has such an assembly of toxic ingenues been gathered since Leonard Bernstein had a cocktail party for the Black Panthers.
In the event, I read Kendi’s book. It wasn’t overwhelming. It was the latest product of the Black Anger factory, a commercial niche that goes back to Stokely Carmichael and Eldridge Cleaver. It was fluently written, if overwrought—part of the African tradition of embroidered rhetoric described so brilliantly by Amiri Baraka in Blues People (a book New York publishers might do well to assign their editors). It’s been a few years now since I read Kendi, so I don’t remember it all, but I do remember this: While arguing for anti-racism, Kendi also argued against integration—against black assimilation into American society. This is prime, chuckleheaded liberal bait. The man simply doesn't understand how subtle and glorious American assimilation is; that we—generations of Jews and Irish and Italians and Latinos and Africans—contribute as much to the culture as we surrender to it. As I’ve written here before, American music—that sublime amalgamation of European, Jewish, Black and Latino strains—is the operative metaphor. We need a society as good as our music, and we’re working at it. American culture is constantly growing, changing, becoming ever more creative.
Now don’t get me wrong. A certain amount of anger over America’s racist history is not only justified, but also necessary. The outrages of slavery and Jim Crow should be a constant presence in our schools. But the definition of that history shouldn’t be left to buck-raking ideologues like Ibram X. Kendi any more than it should be left to Ron DeSantis.
And the left-liberal notion that only blacks have “agency”—a terrible new Human Resources cliche—to talk about race is phony guilt-agitation. I mean, back in the 1980s, Spike Lee and I had a similar “life experiences” (Another lame HR cliche.) We lived three blocks away from each other, in a neighborhood that very much resembled the one in Spike’s Do The Right Thing. Only it didn’t really, which is why I didn’t much like the movie, even if the art and energy of it were admirable. I’ve always thought Spike was a talented film-maker—loved She’s Gotta Have it, respected Malcolm X—but Do was police-hate propaganda designed to absolve Spike of his crime of middle-classyness. The relationship between cops and residents he portrayed was a cartoon. The truth was more complicated; our neighbors wanted more policing, not less. My next-door neighbor, the kind and ancient Mrs. Pilgrim, was thrilled when a brief attempt at community-policing put a cop on the corner; she was able to walk to the grocery to buy a quart of milk without fear. (The grocery store was owned by Palestinians, who overcharged spectacularly—but that’s another story, an ancient New York ethnic tale, though the ethnicities change with the generations.) In Brooklyn, we saw crime the way Colby King describes it above; in fact, it was a lot worse. Crack came in and we middle-class gentrifiers—white and black and mixed-race—scattered. You couldn’t keep a baby seat in the car, and certainly not a radio. I live in an upper-middle-class integrated suburb now. I don’t know where Spike lives, but I’m pretty sure it’s not Adelphi Street.
As recently as three months ago, Spike described me as a racist, which is a classic white-liberal-intimidation tactic. It is as empty and ugly as it would be for me to call Spike an anti-Semite because he didn’t like my reaction to Do the Right Thing. But that sort of race-bullyragging works too often. It’s why wealthy libs give millions of dollars to Ibram X. Kendi’s foundation. It makes them official Anti-Racists.
There are at least two spectacular unintended consequences to this dilettantism. One is mentioned by Michelle Goldberg: The spectacle of white guilt, which has been inflicted on too many of our institutions through Diversity, Equity and Inclusion programs, gives substance to the anger of Donald Trump and his foul horde. The other consequence is far more serious: the white assumption of eternal African victimhood impedes the assimilation and empowerment of the black community, which has already done wonders to build America and deserves a lot more credit and success than it has been allowed. Anti-racism is a quiet form of condescension, enabling the soft bigotry of low expectations—great line, by the way, President Dubya—and it impedes the possibility of honest conversation. It glorifies anger and gangsta; it cancels the vast majority of black people who strive and succeed. This has nothing to do with “funding models.” It has everything to do with elitism and cowardice. It is just and right that black people scourge whites for centuries of lethal brutality; but if white people can’t discuss the mistakes and rhetorical excesses of blacks, and the very real cultural problems of poverty in the underclass, then we can’t have the “honest” conversation about race that liberals always say they want.
Sully At Play
And if you don’t believe me, read Andrew Sullivan on the intellectual strait-jacket of wokery.
And you might also read this piece by a black environmentalist, Tyler Austin Harper, about the pressure of being drawn into the maelstrom. Sub-head: “White American elites are always ready to turn a Black intellectual into a mouthpiece for their political agenda.”
If you lived in Brooklyn in the ‘80s and ‘90s - and worked with them, as I did - you could not fail to notice the difference in the attitudes of blacks of Caribbean and (direct) African descent vs that of “American” blacks. I believe that difference was attributable to immigrants NOT having leadership (and academics) telling them they had no chance due to the systemic racism in society. These groups are assimilating quite well, for the most part, because they believe in themselves not the trolling of sympathy for decades on end. That said, you’re a little rough on Spike but crossing swords with a prickly pear like him will do that to a man.
For further reading/extra credit, go back and read Tom Wolfe's companion piece to "Radical Chic," "Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers."
Lemme tell you, I worked at Penguin Random House when the post-George Floyd white guilt anschluss took place and it was simply unbearable. I'd spent a lot of my editorial career publishing books that addressed both the richness of African-American culture and the racial inequities and atrocities of our history -- I mean, when I was at Penguin I used to work on revisions and updates of BEFORE THE MAYFLOWER, the book by Lerone Bennett that inspired the 1619 Project -- and to be constantly hectored by these overprivileged munchkins that I needed to be sent to a reeducation camp to get my mind right was beyond infuriating.
Racism is an American disease and I am sure that I harbor prejudices and unfortunate preconceptions that could stand correction. But I've put a whole lot of work into it, and I don't need instructions from Mr. Kendi on how to do it. James Baldwin I will listen to.