Now that Ibram Kendi’s ‘anti-racist’ think tank at Boston University is being examined for possible financial mismanagement, it’s incredible how quickly people on the left are turning on him.
Aren’t these people supposed to be his supporters?
FOX News reports:
Ibram Kendi assailed by left as ‘huckster’ ‘charlatan’ as backlash to antiracism center grows: ‘Real damage’The backlash against Ibram X. Kendi and Boston University doesn’t appear to be fading, as two academics wrote scathing commentaries attacking the liberal figure and the university for peddling his “antiracist” ideology.Last week, following many layoffs at the center, workers came forward with bombshell allegations that the center “exploited” staff and “blew through” millions of dollars in grant money while failing to deliver on its promises.Progressive professor Tyler Austin Harper said the center’s “implosion” proved how “White American elites on both sides of the political spectrum,” were “always waiting in the wings to turn a shiny new Black intellectual into a mouthpiece for their political agenda,” in his Washington Post op-ed, Thursday.Harper, an assistant professor of environmental studies at Bates University, described Kendi as a “huckster” who was “happy to cash in on America’s racial trauma” by transforming into an “antiracism guru” during the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement…BU professor of theology David Decosimo also commented on the center’s downfall in an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal. He blamed university leaders for contributing to the “cultural hysteria” on racism following the death of George Floyd.
Here’s more from that Washington Post piece:
As one of a number of left-wing commentators who have been critical of mainstream anti-racism — and who believe the movement is little more than self-help for White people that runs interference for corporations and wealthy universities — I’ve watched the Kendi crisis unfold with a touch of schadenfreude. Yet though this public reckoning feels long overdue, I can’t help but also have a smidgen of empathy for the embattled anti-racism guru…The prospect of Kendi’s unraveling is not — or at least, is not only — the story of a huckster who was happy to cash in on America’s racial trauma, slapping his name on strange children’s books, including “Antiracist Baby” and “Goodnight Racism,” while raking in hundreds of dollars a minute to give short talks at American universities. Instead, the Kendi affair is yet another example of an age-old truism: White American elites on both sides of the political spectrum — academics, publishers, members of the media, corporate leaders — are always waiting in the wings to turn a shiny new Black intellectual into a mouthpiece for their political agendaThough conservatives tended to focus on the book’s famous catchphrase — “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination” — in my view the real damage that Kendi’s philosophy has wrought on American culture is in the way he turned words like “racism” and “white supremacy” into banal, everyday terms like any others.
It looks like it’s all falling apart.
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