Free Republic

Critical race theorist Ibram X. Kendi declared this week that the expression “legal vote” used to describe votes cast in conformity with U.S. laws is “functionally racist.” “The term ‘legal vote’ is as fictionally fraught and functionally racist as the terms ‘illegal alien’ and ‘race neutral’ and ‘welfare queen’ and ‘handouts’ and ‘super predator’ and ‘crackbaby’ and ‘personal responsibility’ and ‘post racial,’” Kendi wrote on Twitter. When Kendi added in a follow-up tweet, “There are so many more terms like this. What did I leave out?” his woke followers jumped on the bandwagon, insisting that any terms questioning the Left’s...

Some of us have been warning for some time that there is something unsavoury about the new ‘anti-racism’ – sometimes referred to as critical race theory or racial identity politics. Something, well, a bit racist. It was therefore not remotely surprising that the infamous ‘white nationalist’ Richard Spencer was able to find common ground with one of America’s most celebrated anti-racist activists, Ibram X Kendi. Kendi, born John Edwards, is the author of How To Be An Antiracist, which rocketed back up the bestseller list during the summer of Black Lives Matter. His basic thesis is that everything can be...

The campus battle over what I’ve previously called the equity agenda has recently shifted almost completely from a focus on gender to a focus on race. This has been accompanied by a series of surreal spectacles at the University of Washington in Seattle, where I teach. In the aftermath of the George Floyd protests, student activists have made new demands upon the school’s administration, while scathingly denouncing anyone they perceive as dissenters. Just consider our university president, Ana Mari Cauce—a Latina lesbian whose activist brother was murdered by the Ku Klux Klan. One would imagine that she’d command a certain...

Ibram X. Kendi, director of Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research, wrote on Saturday that white people who adopt black children may be “racist,” joining a growing group of Democrats and leftists commenting on Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s Haitian son and daughter. Kendi wrote on social media: “Some White colonizers ‘adopted” Black children. They ‘civilized’ these ‘savage’ children in the ‘superior’ ways of White people, while using them as props in their lifelong pictures of denial, while cutting the biological parents of these children out of the picture of humanity.” “And whether this is Barrett or not is not the...

How to Be an Antiracist, by Ibram X. Kendi (One World, 320 pp., $27.00) In 2016, Ibram X. Kendi became the youngest person ever to win the National Book Award for Nonfiction. His surprise bestseller, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas, cast him in his role as an activist-historian, ambitiously attempting to make 600 years of racial history digestible in 500 pages. In his follow-up, How to Be an Antiracist, Kendi––now 37, a Guggenheim fellow, and a contributing writer at The Atlantic––reveals his personal side, weaving together memoir, polemic, and instruction as he invites the reader...

This violent spring and summer, two runaway best-sellers provided the theoretical framework for the anti-white racism that lay behind the Black Lives Matter riots. One was White Fragility, which explains that white people are racists by birth, regardless of anything they say, do, or intend.[1] The other was How To Be An Antiracist by a National Book Award recipient named Ibram X. Kendi, which The New York Times hailed as, “The most courageous book to date on the problem of race in the Western mind.” How To Be An Antiracist is already a required text in schools across the...

A little more than 20 years ago, Dr. Ibram X. Kendi delivered the speech that changed his life forever. Kendi, who grew up in New York and went to school in Virginia, was a finalist in the Prince William County Martin Luther King, Jr. oratorical contest. Hosted by the Delta Theta Sigma Alumnae Chapter, the contest encourages children from across Northern Virginia to display extraordinary oratorical and rhetoric skills in honor of Dr. King. He took the stage and made a presentation that he later came to regret. “I more or less expressed many of the ideas that had been...