The Kendi bubble bursts

But how long will it take to repair the damage?

The difficulties experienced at Ibram X. Kendi’s Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University have had the predictable consequence of eliciting a great deal of schadenfreude, but also the more interesting effect of giving a number of commentators permission to state publicly what most have long believed privately, which is that Kendi’s major ideas are completely indefensible. Hopefully this will bring to an end one of the most extraordinary episodes of preference falsification that I have experienced in my lifetime.

I take the term preference falsification from Timur Kuran, who wrote a nifty and provocative book (Private Truths, Public Lies) about the dynamics of expressed public opinion in circumstances where individuals are deterred from stating their true beliefs. Obviously, many people will lie when they fear that they will be punished for speaking the truth. What makes the dynamics of expressed opinion more interesting and unstable is that the expected severity of punishment is often a function of how many other people are lying. As a result, shifting perceptions about what others believe, or are willing to state publicly, can result in dramatic swings in expressed opinion.

Suppose, for example, that there are two opinions, x and y, where those who state x are subject to mild sanction from everyone who holds the view that y. This can lead to a state of affairs in which a bunch of people publicly assert y, even though they privately believe x, which in turn causes more people to state y, because the growing affirmation of y increases the expected punishment for stating x. It can end up in an equilibrium in which everyone who is sensitive to the opinion of others affirms y, despite practically no one believing it.^* This can collapse when some event occurs that changes people’s perceptions of the likely cost of stating their true opinion, at which point it becomes clear to everyone that the previous consensus was largely false.

Something along these lines has been going on with Kendi’s work over the past five years. I spend a lot of time talking to left-wing political theorists, critical theorists, and even some self-identified critical race theorists, and I have yet to meet a single one who was prepared to defend Kendi’s views. Most have not read his work, but among those who have, the response is invariably somewhere between eyeball-rolling and “OMG it’s a train wreck.” And yet the number of progressives who have been willing to criticize it publicly, or make any effort to slow the Kendi juggernaut has been vanishingly small.

The situation at Boston University now appears to have reversed this, in a way that is best explained by a Kuran-style model. The fact that Kendi did a bad job administering a research center has very little to do with the quality of his written work. Negative press about the research center, however, served as a signal that it had become socially acceptable to criticize Kendi, and so a lot of people said, “while we’re on the subject of Kendi, I should mention that his ideas are terrible.”

I personally have been alarmed by the Kendi phenomenon for some time (and criticized him here), starting when I first read his work and was astonished by how wrong-headed and counterproductive his essential claims were, and second, when I heard from a friend who works at a large American corporation that they were all being obliged to read How to Be an Antiracist as part of an internal DEI initiative. I found it very troubling how few academics I know (many of whom have dedicated a great deal of time to working out defensible views on these questions) were troubled by the fact that millions were being taught indefensible ones.

Summarizing briefly, here are the most problematic claims that Kendi makes:

1. Efforts to achieve equality through integration are racist. The boldest move that Kendi makes in his first book, Stamped from the Beginning, is to categorically condemn what he refers to as “assimilationism.” The normative basis for this claim is never laid out clearly, but a central structuring feature of the work is the suggestion that the entire stream of thinking about racial integration (and multiculturalism more generally) that people associate with Martin Luther King Jr. simply reinforces racial hierarchy, and so should be condemned. As a result, the only permissible antiracist view is a nationalist one, in which Black Americans maintain complete independence from mainstream society, and yet also (presumably) enjoy equality.

2. Racial disparities are unjust as such. The most pernicious simplification asserted by Kendi is that racial disparities are unjust eo ipso, which is to say, regardless of what causes them. In How to Be an Antiracist he uses the example of differences in home-ownership rates between white and Black Americans as his paradigmatic example of racial injustice, without taking into account the need to control for any factors that are unrelated to racial injustice, such as the fact that the median white American is significantly older than the median black American. (For an explanation of the distinction between racial disparity and unjust discrimination I recommend listening to this recent interview with Roland Fryer, starting at 7:15. Fryer is clear and correct in all the ways that Kendi is not.) This has given rise to what many people refer to as “disparityism” among antiracism activists, who think that one can convict various social institutions of an objectionable form of “structural” or “systemic” racism merely by pointing to disparities in their outputs, without considering the inputs.

3. All racial disparities are due to discrimination. Kendi ups the rhetorical ante by claiming that anyone who attempts to explain any racial disparity by pointing to any factor internal to the adversely affected group, including differences of culture or preference, is criticizing that group, and is therefore racist. This is obviously in tension with the traditional multiculturalist idea that groups should be able to preserve meaningful differences in culture (given that this would naturally lead to differences in outcome). Furthermore, it condemns as racist the work of practically every serious social scientist working on issues of racial inequality, since most consider it obvious that racial inequalities may be due to a combination of endogenous and exogenous factors, and that either way it is an empirical question, not one that can be settled by appeal to political ideology.

Part of the reason that Kendi’s work generates an eyeball-rolling response among so many of my colleagues is that these claims simply cannot be taken seriously by anyone willing to think through their consequences even one or two steps. There are more or less interesting ways to be wrong, and thinking about views that are wrong can still be an useful exercise, but Kendi’s claims are just self-evidently wrong, and therefore subject to obvious objections. (For example, even if one eliminated all differences between racial groups with respect to average outcomes this would offer individuals no assurance that they will not wind up unequal solely because of their race.)

And yet somehow, these indefensible – and, it is worth noting, extremist – views became the flavour of the month. Millions of books, seminars, and presentations later (not to mention a graphic novel, a children’s book, and several television shows) it’s difficult to know how much damage has been done to the cause of racial justice. The most troubling consequences, I believe, involve not the immediate effect of a set of inflammatory and moral indefensible claims gaining widespread currency, but rather the fact that millions of American liberals discredited themselves by participating in the promotion and propagation of ideas that they did not actually believe in, or were in any case not prepared to defend.

During the Trump administration there was a lot of discussion about how authoritarian political movements use the willingness to lie publicly as a sort of litmus test, through which true believers can show their loyalty to the cause. Lying, particularly if it involves some discomfort or humiliation for the speaker, is essentially a form of costly signalling. It was easy to find instances of Republican behaviour that fit this mould, but I think very few liberals realized the degree to which the Kendi mania exhibited the same quality (and was perceived this way by conservatives). An appalling number of liberals stood up and said things that they didn’t really believe, because they knew it was required in order remain in good standing with their tribe. (For example, how many American Democrats actually believe that Barack Obama is a racist? And yet this is an obvious consequence of Kendi’s view.)

Apart from the sheer number of copies of his book sold, hundreds of thousands of Americans were exposed to Kendi’s thought in diversity seminars, many in the workplace, where there was often a real threat of punishment for any expressed disagreement. It pains me to think how many people sat quietly through such sessions, keeping their objections to themselves, knowing that others were probably doing the same. So what if it makes no sense? After all, if one agrees with the general sentiment, then there is no point sticking one’s neck out, and certainly no reason to put one’s job on the line. And so they sat there, listening to the true believers, perhaps with a mixture of incredulity and abhorrence, before getting back to work. I worry a great deal about the level of cynicism this has given rise to, and how long it will take to work its way out of the body politic.

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* I find situations like this particularly distressing, because I believe that the ease with which they can arise provides the major justification for the institution of tenure in universities. As someone with tenure, this unfortunately gives me a special obligation to say what I actually think.