Really wish I could find a non paywalled article to read up on the fall of Dr. Kendi. I bought his book on the recommendation of a friend back in 2020, and I can say it has definitely helped me...
Really wish I could find a non paywalled article to read up on the fall of Dr. Kendi. I bought his book on the recommendation of a friend back in 2020, and I can say it has definitely helped me check myself and be more cognizant of implicit racism here in the US.
I wasn't aware that Dr. Kendi "fell", but from what I'm reading it looks like he has some, perhaps several, ideas that aren't exactly democratic. He's also got a failed school in Boston, that appears to have fallen in much the same manner that one iteration of Black Lives Matter did - money mismanagement at best, and fraud or embezzlement at worst.
Are people pushing back wholesale again, at yet another Black American scholar, because they said a few things in not quite the exact perfect way? Or is there something more here? My main curiosity is that most, if not all of the grift accusations I've seen leveled at Dr. Kendi are from legitimate grifters like Ben Shapiro.
I mean, I can't say it's not possible, but it's hard to distill the truth from all the noise.
If you open the link in Firefox, there's a little button to the right of the url (looks like a lined sheet of paper) that'll reload the page and clear out the noise, including the "subscribe to...
If you open the link in Firefox, there's a little button to the right of the url (looks like a lined sheet of paper) that'll reload the page and clear out the noise, including the "subscribe to read" pop-up. Idk if chrome or any other browsers have this, but I haven't had it not work in Firefox yet.
I did not like How to be an anti-racist. The university I worked at gave a free copy to anyone who asked for it, as did I. So many asians (who historically have been the victims of murderous...
I did not like How to be an anti-racist. The university I worked at gave a free copy to anyone who asked for it, as did I. So many asians (who historically have been the victims of murderous violence and still are) reacted negatively to the book that the university had to give them a voice to rebut it.
They were numerous things I disagreed with in the introduction (establishment of a black/white dialectic, anti-black racism being unique in character, …) but the one that bothered me most was the call for me as a white person to develop a plan to stamp out racism.
It bugs me because when I first came to town I teamed up with a friend to unite all the left wing activist groups on campus and we went at it with a vanguardist perspective because that was what we knew. We were going to meetings of all the activist groups on campus and writing a newsletter.
The leaders of the black program house chewed me out for going at it that way (believing we could get everyone to follow our lead) and they were right. I don’t know if they were the only ones who felt that way but they certainly told us. Black people want to be in charge of their own destiny and insofar as they have a problem they “own that problem” in that they decide if a solution is acceptable or not. As a white person I might have a desire to help, a duty to help and all of that, but the movement to make things better for black people has to be led by black people, not by white people, particularly because they read some book that tells them they have to do so.
Wait… at the risk of sounding totally out of the loop, what actually happened? I read the whole article, which seemed to mention some kind of financial mismanagement and talks about why he maybe...
Wait… at the risk of sounding totally out of the loop, what actually happened?
I read the whole article, which seemed to mention some kind of financial mismanagement and talks about why he maybe wasn’t the anti-racist superstar the world needed, but what did he actually do that made him “fall”?
Right so the fund mis-management is all it is? Usually for a public figure to have something described as a “fall” they have some kind of scandal, like it turns out they were friends with Harvey...
Right so the fund mis-management is all it is? Usually for a public figure to have something described as a “fall” they have some kind of scandal, like it turns out they were friends with Harvey Weinstein or something, but it seems like this guy is just not a great manager…
It's as much a structural failure as an individual one honestly. There's normally a fuckton of oversight with grant funding, but I think the level of ferment around BLM after George Floyd led to a...
It's as much a structural failure as an individual one honestly. There's normally a fuckton of oversight with grant funding, but I think the level of ferment around BLM after George Floyd led to a lot of money getting thrown at people and organizations with no meaningful experience managing anything at that scale. On top of that they fostered a culture that discouraged scrutiny and oversight which allowed rampant mismanagement, borderline fraud, and general waste and abuse to run riot.
BLM itself got hit this way. They just took a ton of money they had no idea what to do with, and a lot of it just ended up in various peoples' pockets. Many corporate DEI functions have had such a reckoning as well, where they've soaked vast amounts of funding and produced little more than some reports and powerpoints to show for it. Where it does translate into concrete things it has often ended up being vaguely disturbing and dystopian.
I'd chalk a lot of this up to growing pains. A lot of committees of mostly White people had to think about how to function in a genuinely pluralistic way for the first time and had no Earthly idea how to do so. They outsourced all their judgement on the matter to whoever said the right woke shibboleths at TED talks or on LinkedIn because that's the only framework they ever got to think about these things, even if it's a very specific and not particularly nuanced view of things. They didn't have any real sense for how to maintain a diverse and pluralistic environment so, predictably, everything got overrun with grifty, social media influencer types because none of these influential people had any Black or POC friends that were vetted through the informal vetting processes. Of course, that's always been the root problem with representation in the first place . . .
Really wish I could find a non paywalled article to read up on the fall of Dr. Kendi. I bought his book on the recommendation of a friend back in 2020, and I can say it has definitely helped me check myself and be more cognizant of implicit racism here in the US.
I wasn't aware that Dr. Kendi "fell", but from what I'm reading it looks like he has some, perhaps several, ideas that aren't exactly democratic. He's also got a failed school in Boston, that appears to have fallen in much the same manner that one iteration of Black Lives Matter did - money mismanagement at best, and fraud or embezzlement at worst.
Are people pushing back wholesale again, at yet another Black American scholar, because they said a few things in not quite the exact perfect way? Or is there something more here? My main curiosity is that most, if not all of the grift accusations I've seen leveled at Dr. Kendi are from legitimate grifters like Ben Shapiro.
I mean, I can't say it's not possible, but it's hard to distill the truth from all the noise.
If you open the link in Firefox, there's a little button to the right of the url (looks like a lined sheet of paper) that'll reload the page and clear out the noise, including the "subscribe to read" pop-up. Idk if chrome or any other browsers have this, but I haven't had it not work in Firefox yet.
For me it gets rid of the crap but it doesn't restore the missing content. This link does, however
https://archive.ph/0dfZU
I did not like How to be an anti-racist. The university I worked at gave a free copy to anyone who asked for it, as did I. So many asians (who historically have been the victims of murderous violence and still are) reacted negatively to the book that the university had to give them a voice to rebut it.
They were numerous things I disagreed with in the introduction (establishment of a black/white dialectic, anti-black racism being unique in character, …) but the one that bothered me most was the call for me as a white person to develop a plan to stamp out racism.
It bugs me because when I first came to town I teamed up with a friend to unite all the left wing activist groups on campus and we went at it with a vanguardist perspective because that was what we knew. We were going to meetings of all the activist groups on campus and writing a newsletter.
The leaders of the black program house chewed me out for going at it that way (believing we could get everyone to follow our lead) and they were right. I don’t know if they were the only ones who felt that way but they certainly told us. Black people want to be in charge of their own destiny and insofar as they have a problem they “own that problem” in that they decide if a solution is acceptable or not. As a white person I might have a desire to help, a duty to help and all of that, but the movement to make things better for black people has to be led by black people, not by white people, particularly because they read some book that tells them they have to do so.
Wait… at the risk of sounding totally out of the loop, what actually happened?
I read the whole article, which seemed to mention some kind of financial mismanagement and talks about why he maybe wasn’t the anti-racist superstar the world needed, but what did he actually do that made him “fall”?
Right so the fund mis-management is all it is? Usually for a public figure to have something described as a “fall” they have some kind of scandal, like it turns out they were friends with Harvey Weinstein or something, but it seems like this guy is just not a great manager…
It's as much a structural failure as an individual one honestly. There's normally a fuckton of oversight with grant funding, but I think the level of ferment around BLM after George Floyd led to a lot of money getting thrown at people and organizations with no meaningful experience managing anything at that scale. On top of that they fostered a culture that discouraged scrutiny and oversight which allowed rampant mismanagement, borderline fraud, and general waste and abuse to run riot.
BLM itself got hit this way. They just took a ton of money they had no idea what to do with, and a lot of it just ended up in various peoples' pockets. Many corporate DEI functions have had such a reckoning as well, where they've soaked vast amounts of funding and produced little more than some reports and powerpoints to show for it. Where it does translate into concrete things it has often ended up being vaguely disturbing and dystopian.
I'd chalk a lot of this up to growing pains. A lot of committees of mostly White people had to think about how to function in a genuinely pluralistic way for the first time and had no Earthly idea how to do so. They outsourced all their judgement on the matter to whoever said the right woke shibboleths at TED talks or on LinkedIn because that's the only framework they ever got to think about these things, even if it's a very specific and not particularly nuanced view of things. They didn't have any real sense for how to maintain a diverse and pluralistic environment so, predictably, everything got overrun with grifty, social media influencer types because none of these influential people had any Black or POC friends that were vetted through the informal vetting processes. Of course, that's always been the root problem with representation in the first place . . .
Super fair. I had no idea he was mismanaging things that badly