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Woke Icon Seems to Refute His ‘Entire Life’s Work’ With One Tweet

Leading “antiracism” scholar Ibram X. Kendi has been trying to cope after tweeting data that appeared to contradict his arguments that America is a “white male supremacist” country.

SO WHAT

The wokes don’t always handle reality well.

WHAT HAPPENED

Kendi — a Boston University history professor, best-selling author and journalist — on Twitter Saturday highlighted a recent survey that found many white college students lie about being racial minorities on their applications.

According to the Intelligent.com poll, which Kendi shared via The Hill, 34% of U.S. college and university applicants admit to misrepresenting their race in hopes of boosting their chances of being accepted or receiving financial aide.

  • More than 3/4 of applicants say the scam paid off, with the school they lied to accepting them, per the survey.

THE REACTION

The “racists”: Conservative Twitter commentators, like Alex Griswold, mocked Kendi as having refuted his own celebrated work — according to which U.S. racism has “spread to nearly every part of the body politic” and caused all manner of evil, from climate change to racial inequality.

  • One popular media critic said Kendi’s now-deleted tweet “undermines his whole worldview that the US is an incredibly racist country where the system is rigged exclusively for White people.”
  • “Either [Kendi] knows what this means and he’s a con artist, or he doesn’t know what this means and he’s a fool,” said Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro
  • Dissident academic James Lindsay, echoing fellow liberal critics of wokeness, said, “Kendi admits it’s not actually a privilege to be White in America?”
  • Other users resurfaced previous instances of Kendi seeming to contradict himself or highlighted his lucrative success in spite of any “systemic racism.”

The “antiracist”: Kendi responded to the online ridicule with an outburst of ad hominem tweets of his own  — accusing his critics of lying and racism and suggesting the Intelligence.com poll confirmed his claims of American “white male supremacy.”

While Kendi has advocated authoritarian measures to eradicate U.S. racial inequities, the African American studies Ph.D. has rejected educational attainment as a potential equalizer.

  • In “How to Be an Antiracist,” his 2019 New York Times bestseller, Kendi argued the idea of an educational “achievement gap” is itself racist and designed to “degrade” and “exclude” black students.

SAME ENERGY

Reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones and The New York Times have repeatedly walked back the claims of their Pulitzer Prize-winning project to “reframe” American history around slavery — without admitting their mistakes.

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