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Kendi’s center failed because his ideas are bad history

Ibram Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research is failing fast, facing a financial crisis and accusations of mismanagement of staff and funding.

After ignoring questions about Ibram Kendi’s work, or lack thereof, for years, Boston University will now look into management at the Center for Antiracist Research, The College Fix reported.

In an article published last week, The Spectator raised questions about the center’s funding and staff management.

“What happen to the $10 million (£8 million) from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey?” the publication said. “Where are the donations from discount retailer TJ Maxx, food emporium Stop & Shop, and exercise empire Peleton? Why did the centre lay off almost all its staff last week?”

The Spectator argued that the roots of the “antiracist” center’s crisis can be found in Kendi’s flawed work purporting to be history:

To see why the centre has not held, it is useful to go back to the beginning. That is Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, which Kendi published in the spring of 2016. …

Kendi’s book is jammed with historical anecdotes derived from myriad sources, but it is not really a work of history. It is a testament of sorts to Kendi’s self-professed discovery that all ‘racial disparities must be the result of racial discrimination’.

The Kendian lens filters out all possible explanations of social, cultural, and even medical explanations other than racial discrimination. It is racism pure and simple, all the way down. Kendi explained in the prologue that he was ‘able to self-critique, discover, and shed the racist ideas that I had consumed over my lifetime while I uncovered and exposed that others had produced over the lifetime of America’.

The result is a work of towering conceit, beginning with the outrageous claim in the subtitle. ‘Definitive history’ is a claim that no historian since Thucydides has ventured, and even he was circumspect about the parts of the Peloponnesian wars he hadn’t seen first hand.

Kendi’s “definitive history” is a work of hubris, so it’s no wonder that the center based on his ideas is imploding, according to The Spectator.

Read the whole essay.

MORE: Ibram Kendi hasn’t published a new paper in 4 years

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