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How To Be an Antiracist Ibram X. Kendi attempts to discuss the racism of cross-cultural adoption, fails miserably

How To Be an Antiracist Ibram X. Kendi attempts to discuss the racism of cross-cultural adoption, fails miserably

White people’s motives are suspect, clearly

public domain https://twitter.com/MarkMeadows/status/1309978451080810497

Ibram Kendi is molding young minds at Boston University as the recently-appointed head of the Center for Antiracist Research. He’s a popular author who’s ridden the antiracism wave as it has been building over the last few years.

Now he weighs in on multi-racial adoption from third-world countries, in reaction to Amy Coney Barrett, who has seven children, two of whom were adopted from Haiti:

If you go to Twitter and take a look at the responses, you may note that many of the readers there don’t think this tweet was Kendi’s finest hour – or anyone’s finest hour.

But I doubt Kendi will miss a step, because many of his fellow academics probably think such sentiments are insightful and “courageous ” (a word sometimes used to describe his book How to Be an Antiracist). He’s won many writing awards and has been the subject of admiring articles (see this in GQ).

There’s also the following: “In 2020, Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world.” I don’t think that’s empty hyperbole, either. Right now, Kendi might indeed be one of the most influential people in the world.

Kendi is also the author of a picture book for young children called Antiracist Baby.” And no, I am not making this up:

…[It’s] a new 9×9 picture book that empowers parents and children to uproot racism in our society and in ourselves, now with added discussion prompts to help readers recognize and reflect on bias in their daily lives.

Take your first steps with Antiracist Baby! Or rather, follow Antiracist Baby‘s nine easy steps for building a more equitable world.

With bold art and thoughtful yet playful text, Antiracist Baby introduces the youngest readers and the grown-ups in their lives to the concept and power of antiracism. Providing the language necessary to begin critical conversations at the earliest age, Antiracist Baby is the perfect gift for readers of all ages dedicated to forming a just society.

Which brings us full circle. Maybe if white people who are adopting children from Haiti read Antiracist Baby to their children, Kendi will forgive them their colonialist adoption virtue-signaling, which is not the approved sort of virtue-signaling – unlike his book, which is the “perfect gift for readers of all ages dedicated to forming a just society.”

And a lot of people must want that perfect book, because as I wrote this, the book was #1 on Amazon in children’s Values Books, #1 in Children’s Books in the US, #2 in Children’s Prejudice and Racism books, and #133 in Books of all types. So yes, Kendi is a highly influential person, both with the older and the younger set.

As far as I can tell from reading Kendi’s Wiki page, some interviews with him, and his website, he appears to have grown up in an intact family in Queens and then Virginia (last name: Rogers, a name he later changed), with parents who were a tax accountant and a health care business analyst but who later became Methodist ministers (of Black liberation theology bent). I also found this perhaps-relevant inteview with Kendi from November of 2019:

For Kendi, the “civilized theology” often espoused in middle-class black churches meets his definition of racism. Civilized theology is the idea that the function of the church is to bring wayward people into the church to save and civilize them. Those wayward people tend to be working-class and poor black people. According to Kendi, the church is saying that behavior-deficiency is causing their plight. “The reason why this is racist is because it suggests that there is something wrong groups of people,” said Kendi, who revealed that he is not a member of any church. “Racism is anytime we perceive the problem as the people instead of addressing the problems of the people,” he asserts.

To further explain his theory, Kendi compared two types of preachers. “There are preachers who fundamentally preach about the problem being structural, racism, and society. They use Jesus and the word to galvanize people to challenge society,” he said. This is what most people know as liberation theology.

Then there are those preachers who focus on the individual. “You have preachers who say the fundamental problem is the laziness of people, or the inability to not be violent,” Kendi said. Further, “Basically, people need to change. The way you change people first is by becoming saved?”

So it seems that to Kendi, religion is not about the individual, and Christianity is not about the need of the individual to be saved, but it is or should be political in nature – at least, for black people. The sinner is not to ever be blamed, and only by changing society can that person be helped or saved.

But Kendi takes it even further than replacing the religious with the political. He appears to believe that a church or pastor (even a black church or pastor) is racist if giving the message that a black person’s “wayward behavior” needs changing. And not only that, but Kendi conflates a black pastor telling a black person to straighten out his/her life with “suggest[ing] that there is something wrong [with] groups of people.” Did you catch that transition from the individual to the group?

What is Kendi suggesting here? That black individuals who make bad choices cannot change until some undefined “systemic” change happens to all of society? That such individuals have no – to use a popular word these days – agency? No responsibility for their actions, and no hope of changing on their own or through religion? And does this admonition only apply to “middle-class” black churches? What’s middle-class got to do with it?

And what of white people in churches – middle-class or otherwise? Do they have agency? Are they to be considered a “group” when a pastor speaks to them as individuals with individual responsibility?

I will add that one possible result of Kendi’s tweet is that any black child, adopted by white parents, who might be reading Kendi’s Twitter feed (such as, for example, teenagers) might react by becoming convinced that he or she was adopted not out of love but instead through parents’ narcissistic desire to deny their own innate racism. Can you imagine the effect on some of those children and their parents, on reading that the antiracist expert Kendi has spoken thusly?

[Neo is a writer with degrees in law and family therapy, who blogs at the new neo.]

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Comments

So every Hollyweirdo can do this and it’s wonderful and we need to applaud. A conservative does it and the world spinning off its axis.

Simply more proof that the real racists are always on the left.

    Progressives, liberals et al subscribe to diversity dogma (i.e. color judgment) that denies individual dignity, denies individual conscience, normalizes color blocs, color quotas, and affirmative discrimination. This belief forms the foundation of their ostensibly “secular” Pro-Choice, selective, opportunistic quasi-religion (“ethics”), which is, among other things, notorious for its advocacy of selective-child or wicked solution for inconvenient babies… Fetal-Americans.

I know that they’ve done very well for themselves at the race hustle, but, I assume that Ta-Nehisi Coates and Al Sharpton must be jealous of this upstart hustler, a black nobody from Queens who’s re-branded himself as “Ibram X. Kendi,” and, who now commands a $20K speaking fee to appear on a video chat for twenty minutes. Plus, of course, landing a cushy gig at Boston University. And, the book royalties and other perks. I predict that a Martha’s Vineyard beach house next to St. Obama the Infallible will represent the natural progression of this twit’s filthy lucre, earned spewing his racist stupidity.

AIUI the black girl who was adopted was in such poor condition that doctors predicted she would never be able to talk or walk. Now she is a healthy teenager.

Do people who oppose transracial adoption think it was wrong to adopt her?

    I have read that Judge Barrett testified at her 2017 confirmation hearing that she adopted her Haitian daughter Vivian when she was 14 months old, and Vivian was so ill at the time that doctors predicted she might never walk or talk. At the time of the hearing, the teenage Vivian was a track star who, according to her mom, had no trouble talking. Judge Barrett said she adopted her Haitian son John Peter when he was three years old, following the big earthquake in Haiti.

    Kendi assumes that these two children had biological parents in Haiti who were willing and able to care for them, but what is his evidence for that? I haven’t read anything that gives any details about the Barrett kids’ adoptions (and understandably so). There were many Haitian children orphaned by the earthquakes there, and not enough Haitian families willing or able to take them in. Does Kendi think it would have been better for these Barrett children to languish in some squalid Haitian orphanage, as opposed to being welcomed into a loving family in the U.S.? Both children have obviously flourished in the Barrett family, and Vivian no doubt received health care here of a quality that would not have been available to her in Haiti. Is Kendi really so heartless and selfish that he would have denied her that?

    And if Kendi is so concerned about black children being raised by whites, then why didn’t he and his wife volunteer to adopt some of the Haitian orphans themselves? We all know why: he’s an arrogant hypocrite, preaching his racist grifting con from the the security of his cushy academic gig, in a country full of virtue-signalling white people who are stupid enough to give this ignorant fool a platform. He, and his bullshit books, belong on the trash heap of history, and hopefully that is where he will soon end up.

    “Do people who oppose transracial adoption think it was wrong to adopt her?”

    In a word: yes. Among leftists there is a growing nuclear-hot hatred of anything interracial: adoption, marriage, or friendship.

    And any suffering that the child would have experienced by not being adopted and cared for would be blamed on “white colonialists”. It is an ugly world that “antiracists” seek to create.

    Is she ready for Biden to molest her?

    Imagine the fun Biden would have, in the middle of that group.

Ugh. Not this guy again.

Maybe a few more black families should step up and adopt black children…

I worked on a adolescent psych unit and the black children left to rot by drugged our parents was hard to see. One group of 12 kids down near Bryan, Tx were found eating out of dumpsters and living in a vacant house with no running water or electricity, apparently for months. Some teacher got concerned about their welfare..

Common story around here.

So come on man, get your car and pick up 10-30 of these kids, they are waiting for your smart ass to give a shit.

This “Ibram” guy is probably one of the dumbest “smart” people I’ve ever read about…

WHY does anyone listen or fund this moron anyway?

Leftists are the most racist people in America.

LITERALLY EVERYTHING is about race with these people.

Morning Sunshine | September 29, 2020 at 6:14 pm

I was with a friend today who was talking about her family. I then told her that her parents are now racists, since they – a middle-class white Christian couple – had adopted a child of color (two actually) and stole them from their homeland (Korea) to “civilize” them. She about died laughing. She is one of the adopted children.

Wait a minute, isn’t he telling racists that there’s something wrong with them and they have to change?

This race hustler doesn’t want white folks to adopt children of color to alow the black folks not to do it.

This is similar to building new schools for the hood rats not to go to.

So he’s recycling an old Marxist concept that man is good but a free society makes him appear evil…got it.

This stuff is not new or original. It’s just recycled garbage that has been largely forgotten because it was so flawed the first time.

Gee, as a Catholic, I was raised with the concept of Original Sin. I suppose that is a racist concept, as in human racist. There is only on race, the human race. Original Sin applies to all of us.

I put this out on Twitter last night with regard to Ibram Kendi and I’ll let it stand:

“Well educated, yet lacking the discernment to recognize the irony of an ‘antiracist’ assigning a motive, a ‘belief,’ to a diverse group of people based on their skin color.”

https://twitter.com/DDsModernLife/status/1310743319891316737

buckeyeminuteman | September 30, 2020 at 12:56 am

White people hate black people so much that they adopt black kids… FFS!

Leftists read their opponent’s minds when they have no other means of attack. Then they resent it as if they are reporting some sort of “fact”. This is how this feller can expertly propound on white people’s motives for adopting. It’s how they attribute bad motives to good deeds by conservatives, white people, men, whoever.

    GatorGuy in reply to orlop. | October 1, 2020 at 12:55 pm

    And always a derogatory conclusion claimed, but rarely, if ever, solid, reliable support or reasons for such “argument”.

    So much “wisdom,” so little basis = unbaked buffoonery, or not one to be taken seriously; or, if appropriate and socially in order, denounced outright.

…and black people cannot figure out why they’re not trusted more by white people? I marched in the streets in the 1970’s for equality, for blacks and women, and while I still believe that everyone is equal, the way that minorities and women have sidled up to the Marxists looking to destroy this country is distressing. If you want to show us that you want equality and to be trusted as a brother and sister, QUIT attaching yourself to ideology that wants to lay waste (philosophic and nuclear) to this great nation. MARXISM is not going to free you from ANYTHING…

Another BU person? First AOC, now this clown.