As blue-collar philosopher Eric Hoffer reportedly observed some years back, “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” Ibram X. Kendi’s brand of antiracism skipped the first two phases. It was conceived as a racket.
Like most rackets, Kendi’s depended for its success on finding suckers to support it. Kendi found his at Boston University. In a perverse effort to atone for imagined sins, the BU administration funded a Kendi brainchild, the Center for Antiracist Research. Hysteria over the death of George Floyd inspired the center, but hysteria alone cannot sustain it.
“After suddenly laying off over half his employees last week and with his center producing almost nothing since its founding,” writes David Decosimo in the Wall Street Journal, “Mr. Kendi is now facing an investigation and harsh criticism from numerous colleagues complaining of financial mismanagement, dysfunctional leadership, and failure to honor obligations attached to its millions in grant money.”
No surprises here. Kendi is just one racial bunco artist out of many. Doing research for my new book, Untenable: The True Story of White Ethnic Flight from America’s Cities, I reviewed the work of four of the leading lights in this movement, specifically on the subject of white flight.
Two, Kendi and Ta-Nehisi Coates, are Black; two, Robin DiAngelo and Tim Wise, are White. What they have in common is that none of them gives any evidence of ever having spoken to a White person who fled. Evidence only spoils the con.
Not even academics who specialize in White flight bother to speak to its victims. Princeton’s Leah Boustan concluded a New York Times op-ed with the remarkable observation, “To complicate the picture, few of [the fleeing Whites] left personal accounts, and they may not have been able to articulate exactly why they moved.”
For my book, I spoke to at least fifty White people who fled collapsing ethnic communities. Everyone with whom I spoke knew exactly why they left. It’s just that no one bothered to ask them. What I heard over and over was the rationale one childhood friend, a Democrat, gave for finally leaving our Newark, New Jersey, neighborhood.
“It became untenable,” my friend told me. What I asked what “untenable” meant, he answered calmly, “When your mother gets mugged for the second time, that’s untenable. When your home gets invaded for the second time, that is untenable.” Multiply my friend’s experience by a million or so, and you have the true story of White flight as it unfolded in cities big and small across the northeast and north central United States.
The antiracists traffic not in truth but in propaganda. “Most urban whites preferred ‘flight over fight,’” wrote Kendi in his National Book Award winner, Stamped from the Beginning. “Real estate agents, speculators, and developers benefitted selling fleeing whites new suburban homes. America experienced an unprecedented post-war boom in residential and new highway construction as white families moved to the suburbs and had to commute farther to their jobs.”
This conspiratorial caricature of post-war urban America may help Kendi win awards, but it bears little relation to reality. In 1954, my parents used the GI Bill — a “model welfare system” writes Kendi sarcastically — to buy an 1880s fixer-upper on a Newark block home to several black families as well as immigrants from 14 different countries. An elderly female boarder came with the house. We would live in that house for the next ten years until the Highway Department took it.
