Ibram X. Kendi’s fall is a cautionary tale — so was his rise

In Percival Everett’s novel “Erasure,” a Black English professor and writer becomes irate upon discovering that one of his novels — “an obscure reworking of a Greek tragedy” about “which the only thing ostensibly African American was [the] jacket photograph” — has been housed in the African American studies section of a chain bookstore. In response, he angrily writes a caricaturish Black satire chock-a-block with racist stereotypes. To his horror, the book is bought by Random House and later wins the National Book Award, becoming a New York Times bestseller latched onto by White literati who are searching for an “authentic” Black voice.

“‘Racist’ is not … a pejorative,” Kendi now insisted. “It is not the worst word in the English language; it is not the equivalent of a slur. It is descriptive, and the only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it.” Though conservatives tended to focus on the book’s famous catchphrase — “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination” — in my view the real damage that Kendi’s philosophy has wrought on American culture is in the way he turned words like “racism” and “white supremacy” into banal, everyday terms like any others.

As Carlos Lozada wrote in The Washington Post at the time, “Stamped” is best understood as a broadside aimed at “the racism of good intentions,” one that declares feel-good, PC liberalism to be politically insufficient and incapable of redressing racial inequality. Kendi doesn’t mince words. “Uplift, persuasion, and education have not eradicated, and will not eradicate racist ideas, let alone racist policies,” he writes. Instead, he counsels progressives to let go of the insistence that the personal is political, to recognize that policy change — not consciousness raising — is the only path toward justice.

A charitable reader might argue that the wonkish sensibilities of “Stamped” reflected the wonkish Obama years, while Kendi’s turn to a personalized politics of individual racism reflected widespread anxieties about the return of old-fashioned bigotry under Donald Trump. A less charitable reader might suggest that Kendi’s shift to an anti-racism of personal uplift was a sales tactic: After all, it is relatively easy to get elite universities, corporations and rich progressives to buy into the idea that they personally can make the world better by tweaking their vocabulary and making minor adjustments to their interpersonal etiquette. That vision offers good vibes at low cost.

I greet the Kendi affair in the same way I greeted Everett’s “Erasure” when I first read it a decade ago: It’s yet another warning. As Adolph Reed has noted, the temptation to become a racial spokesman has ensnared any number of Black intellectuals, lured by White prestige and the money that comes with it. In my own small way, I’ve experienced this temptation firsthand.

In June, I wrote an article in the Boston Globe titled “I am the wrong kind of Black professor,” which criticized the default assumption that Black academics should be interested in Black subjects. Afterward, I found myself inundated by a small flood of requests to write and talk about race in America. Ironically, saying that I’m sick of talking about being Black invited a rush of opportunities to do just that. I’ve happily accepted some of these offers and turned down others. In some cases, saying “no thanks” wasn’t easy.