Me & Kendi

Good afternoon,

As you know, I deal with race a lot in my work and sometimes I will post thoughts to X (twitter) to try them out. Several days ago, I posted one on Ibram X. Kendi that resonated with many people. I did not expect Kendi to reply and he did.

If you don’t know who Kendi is, he founded the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University and has suggested that our government create the Department of Anti-racism (DOA). He has written books: “How to Be an Antiracist” and “Antiracist Baby.”

At the risk of oversimplifying his work, he believes in systemic racism and that we must be antiracist and actively work to dismantle it. If one doesn’t, then one is a racist. In this binary world of racist and antiracist there is no grey area. He also believes in the controversial idea of using racial discrimination, if necessary, to create equitable outcomes between the races. His ideas heavily influenced the DEI movement that has changed America’s schools and institutions since George Floyd.

Here is my original tweet:

.@ibramxk (Kendi) is not much different than a doctor who makes up a disease for an otherwise healthy person in order to profit off of it.

He knew that we Americans are fundamentally good people — we despise racists and seek real solutions for a better world for all.

So he and others created and perpetuated the disease of systemic racism to trap and confuse us. Then he mandated the extremely profitable manichaeism of antiracism as the cure — a cure that cures nothing but divides us Americans into the racist or antiracist box.

But if the disease was never real to begin with, then what he has done is impose a false and pernicious racial order upon us. And that is the true systemic racism that we must eradicate today.

There is racism around us everyday. However, the systemic racism charge is deeply flawed and relies on selective and manipulated data that undermines its credibility. If you have seen “What Killed Michael Brown?” then you will remember my father and I exposing the flaws in Eric Holder’s charge of systemic racism in Ferguson.

Kendi then replied to my post:

What makes your disease analogy painful for me is that I wrote most of How to Be an Antiracist in 2018 while battling stage IV colon cancer. Only 14 percent of people are still living after 5 years. So according to you, while suffering from a disease that was likely to kill me, I made up all the datasets showing widespread racial inequality from wealth to health; I made up all the scientific studies identifying the policies and practices behind all this inequality; I made up all the circulating ideas of racial hierarchy justifying all this inequality; I made up all the videos documenting people being mistreated because of the color of their skin; I made up all the people denying or not actively striving to eliminate all this suffering and harm; and I made this all up for money that I was unlikely to see since I was unlikely to survive the cancer I was battling while writing this book. That’s what you want people on this platform to believe.

I don’t know what is more outrageous. You saying I am making up all this racial inequality. Or you saying I did it “to profit,” which of course ignores all the threats and slurs and trolling and harassment and envy and surveillance and painful misrepresentations I weather every single day to do this work—while striving to survive a deadly disease over the last five years.

Find another way to misrepresent me as a grifter, to make people aggrieved, to delegitimate my work, to harm your credibility with anyone who has read my work since they will know you are spreading misinformation and trying to manipulate people. Find another way to make up who I am to cover up who you are.

I was surprised that he responded on such a personal level. I had read “How to Be and Antiracist,” “Stamped,” as well as other books like “The Color of Law” while working on “What Killed Michael Brown?” In making a film about post-60s liberalism, I had to understand how today’s Left viewed the past when it came to blacks and we responded with evidence. So why hadn’t Kendi countered in the same manner?

My response:

I did not know you had faced a life-threatening disease while writing your book. I hope you understand what I wrote was not a personal attack but an attempt to frame your work through an analogy. If it had been a personal attack as your response implies then, yes, I would be punching below the belt, so to speak. That is why intent matters more than impact.

Having said that, what struck me about what you wrote was how you chose to pursue your passion and career ambition despite the all-too-close-possibility of death. It takes a certain person to possess that proud spirit of overcoming.

While I admire your spirit in this regard, I disagree profoundly with your work. It is important to understand here that you are one of the creators of the antiracist ideology and that I write to you as a citizen whose family has been impacted negatively by your works, and unwillingly so.

Over the past years, I have witnessed our society quietly move away from the American and Judeo-Christian principles and embrace your antiracist ideology that divides us into the racist (oppressor) and the antiracist (oppressed). This move traps us in a Manichaean world that dehumanizes us into black and white boxes, literally and figuratively. There is no grey area to be found for those troubling human complexities.

Perhaps the worst thing about this Manichaean trap is that in moving us into an ideological world, it divorces us from reality. It causes us to be weak before the true problems before our eyes -- rising illiteracy, rising fatherlessness, rising poverty, rising criminality, and on.

That is why we're seeing schools across America lower their standards in the name of antiracist equity. We abandoned standardized testing and inflate grades to make everyone the same. We let violence go unpunished because we fear the widening racial gap. We blame the phantom of systemic racism for whatever societal ills because we've been conditioned to believe it is racist to hold people of color responsible. We're witnessing people engage in actual racial discrimination in the name of "the good."

The overriding dehumanizing belief here is that blacks cannot achieve so we must lower the standards in their name. How insulting! My grandfather was born to slaves. My kids are expected to continue our family's upward progress and lowering standards in the name of some utopian version of racial equity will only turn the solid ground beneath their feet into quicksand.

This is the disease that your ideology has imposed upon all of us who believe in America. Race has always been poison and you cannot cure society with more poison.

Overall, the primary reason why I object to your antiracist ideology is because it kills the "soul power" within us. We used to say "soul power" back in the day, but it has largely been forgotten in favor of black power, the politics of being black.

Soul power is different. It's the spirit within. James Brown described it in an interview and, to the best of my memory, it went something like this: "Soul power is like hearing the word 'can't' your whole life. Can't, can't, can't, can't, can't, can't..and then you f****ing do it, you f****ing overcome."

That's the story of America and why people love America. That is the existential spirit that is missing from your ideology, but one that you know all too well for it is what fueled you to not only conquer a disease but write a book as well! It is the same spirit that allowed me to overcome a profound hearing loss so devastating that I truly should not be where I am today.

America is the most unfair and unforgiving nation there is. We're not all born equal but we were born with the greatest gift of all: freedom. Freedom can crush us but it also makes anything possible. One cannot have soul power without the freedom to break through obstacles and personal doubts and that is what James Brown's eternal message to us was. Most of all, freedom is the cure to the soul-crushing disease that your manichaean ideology has imposed upon us, and that is why we refuse to give it up.

Kendi’s response?

I ended my book, How to Be an Antiracist, narrating my battle with stage IV colon cancer in 2018. Since you didn’t know about my cancer, then that means you haven’t read my work, which shows in how wrongly you describe it. How can you “disagree profoundly” with work you have not read?

An ad hominem attack. For those of you not familiar with X (Twitter) this is a common and tiresome tactic to save face by any means. At this point, I know there was no winning going down this rabbit hole with him. Having “scalped” me, he posted his victory to his page:

What struck me was how proud he was of “winning” this argument with me — he has since posted other things as well. Clearly, the man who largely exploited white guilt with shoddy work to attain fame and wealth was bothered by my words.

But the reason why I am showing you this exchange is to show you a microcosm of what black conservatives have experienced at the hands of the Left, especially its blacks, for several decades. The way Kendi behaved reminds me of a quote by Sartre in his book “Anti-Semite and Jew.” Substitute Kendi’s “antiracist” for Sartre’s “anti-Semite” and you have my thoughts:

“Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert.”

When my father started publishing in the 80s, the liberals had no true response to the truth he was portraying. They wanted to hold onto race and eternal victimization — it was power for blacks and virtue for whites. Rather than engage him on merit, they accused him, a staunch liberal at that time, of belonging to some radical, racist organization that he never heard of and whose name eludes me at the moment. When that didn’t work, they called him every name under the sun. When that didn’t work, they shut him out and that is why you cannot find his books in most stores to this day.

Yet my father’s work still stands and rings true. And as more liberals break off from the intolerant Left, they are finding hope for a better America in his works as well as that of Sowell. (Is it any wonder that Sowell has been experiencing a pop culture surge of late!)

Deep down, Kendi knows that his race hustle is a dead end. He sees signs everywhere. The fall of Claudine Gay. Al Sharpton’s pitiful protest outside Bill Ackman’s office. Charges of plagiarism against Harvard’s chief diversity officer. Kaepernik’s beyond humiliating Netflix show. Blacks protesting the lowering of education standards in the name of antiracist equity. And on.

Even Kendi, on a personal level, was recently investigated for financial malfeasance and mistreatment of colleagues at his antiracist center. Merit based criticism of his work remains unrelenting and the fact that his new ESPN show was unserious didn’t help.

One can only do so much with race and everything with America and her principles. Perhaps that is why what I wrote struck a nerve with Kendi.

All my best,

Eli