The College Fix

Kendi argues America still racist despite vast successes of black Americans 

“Anti-racist” writer and Boston University humanities Professor Ibram Kendi said that Republican Sen. Tim Scott, a presidential hopeful, needs to look at “communities” to understand racism.

“I think Senator Scott wanted to focus on individuals, because there certainly have been individuals who, over the generations, have been rising into positions that previous generations, they would not have been able to,” Kendi said in a Thursday MSNBC interview with Al Sharpton, the Washington Free Beacon reported.

“But at the same time, you have black people who are being—their votes are being suppressed,” Kendi said. “Both are happening at the same time.”

Scott had said on The View last Wednesday that “progress in America is palpable­—it can be measured in generations.”

“We’ve had an African-American president, an African-American vice president,” Scott said. “We’ve had two African Americans be secretaries of state.”

“In my home city, the police chief is African-American, who’s now running for mayor,” Scott continued. “The head of the highway patrol for South Carolina is African-American. In 1975, there was about 15 percent unemployment in the African-American community. For the first time in the history of the country, it’s under 5 percent.”

Kendi teamed up with a fellow Boston University professor to make Kendi’s 2016 book “Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America” available to a “broader readership,” The College Fix reported June 6. Kendi and artist Joel Gill did so by turning it into a comic book-style graphic novel, BU Today reported.

The book “indicted some surprising historical figures, white and Black, for racist thoughts, among them abolitionists William Loyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, NAACP co-founder W.E.B. Du Bois, and former US president Barack Obama,” BU Today reported.

“Among the racist ideas that even civil rights heroes harbored, Stamped says, were assimilation—Black culture is inferior but can be bettered if African Americans assimilate into ‘traits held in esteem by the dominant White Americans,'” according to the news outlet.

“Another is uplift suasion, the idea that Black Americans can purge white racism by working hard and succeeding,” it stated. “Not only does that put the burden of eliminating racism on its targets, the book says, but it has never worked: white people dismiss upwardly mobile Black people as exceptional, ‘Extraordinary Negroes.'”

MORE: Ibram Kendi targets young adults with new ‘How to Be a (Young) Antiracist’ book, tour

IMAGE: The View/YouTube

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