Ibram X. Kendi's approach to fighting racism contains glaring inconsistencies and contradictions that might undermine his own project. EricLevitz writes
The author Ibram X. Kendi. Photo: Michael Loccisano/Getty Images America’s sitting president is decades older than its democracy. From the time of the Constitution’s founding until Joe Biden’s junior year of college, our federal republic counted authoritarian white ethno-states among its members.
Ibram X. Kendi’s work takes dead aim at those convenient fictions. The historian and pop-theoretician of “antiracism” seeks to disrupt white America’s complacency about racial progress by spotlighting Black-white disparities in incarceration, wealth, and other social ills. And he seeks to stigmatize victim-blaming accounts of Black social disadvantage by insisting that all racial disparities derive from a history of white supremacy .
Within blue America, there is much debate about whether the discourse of antiracism is conducive to such a transformation. Some on the center-left detect an illiberal tribalism in anti-racist thought. In their view, the ideology’s penchant for stigmatizing ideas instead of refuting them, and concern for equity between groups instead of between individuals, “makes true equality, based on common humanity, impossible,” as The Atlantic’s George Packer has put it.
• While valuable for illuminating the scale of Black disadvantage, racial-disparity statistics can promote misunderstandings of social problems by eliding class distinctions within racial groups. Thus, when such stats are presented in the absence of an intersectional class analysis, they may foreclose potential openings for interracial solidarity.All of these liabilities can be found in Kendi’s recent interview with Ezra Klein.
It’s now common practice to use “community” to describe heterogenous demographic groups whose members do not necessarily consider themselves kin. But the artifice of the construction strikes me as especially conspicuous, even dangerous, when applied to America’s white population.
A distinct pitfall of Kendi’s mode of rhetoric and analysis is its tendency to mask intraracial inequality. One focal point of antiracist discourse is the racial wealth gap. And for good reason. The disparity between the median white family’s net worth and that of the median Black family gives quantitative testament to myriad historical crimes.
Late in their conversation, Klein asked Kendi about a potential problem that crime poses for him, given his simultaneous commitment to police abolition and technocratic disparate-impact analyses. Klein noted that Black Americans are disproportionately likely to be victims of criminal violence, and that the consensus view of criminologists is that slashing police staffing levels would produce an increase in criminal victimization.
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