Boston University’s Ibram X. Kendi, Harvard’s Claudine Gay, and others reveal their inherent racism and ignorance with almost every single nonsensical statement they make. Would you rather be a Jewish white person in Palestine or a Muslim brown person in my majority white, decidedly middle class hometown of Hazlet, NJ?
“Whiteness prevents white people from connecting to humanity,” claimed Boston University Professor and millionaire activist Ibram X. Kendi at a recent event fresh after the discovery that he squandered some $20 million for an anti-racist research center. All the same, this was his stunning conclusion after rambling incoherently about how white people’s “personal identities are shaped by constructions of whiteness and how much that construction of whiteness prevents white people from connecting to humanity. In other words, recognizing that when you recognize that you are part and parcel of humanity, in other words you’re not over humanity, right, it allows you to really be able to connect to people who don’t look like you, who have kinky hair and who’ve dark skin and to see yourself in them and it’s whiteness that prevents that, right, and when you are not able to see yourself in other human beings that creates all sorts of problems and not just societal problems, personal problems, that I think hopefully this film and this work will liberate this work from. It’s liberating all the way around.” It’s almost impossible to believe that a single statement from a supposedly intelligent individual, one who is lauded in academic circles and celebrated in the media, could contain such obscene racism, nonsensical reasoning, and flat out ignorance of both world history and the current state of world affairs, much less a statement of the kind that ended with the audience clapping like trained seals eager for a fish, incapable of applying any critical analysis to the equivalent of a modern day snake oil salesman or rainmaker if you prefer. The racism we will cover in a moment because it has become endemic in the academic community and appears to be a defining feature of what passes for intellectualism in the 21st century. In the meantime, simply imagine what the reaction would be if “blackness” were substituted for “whiteness.”
The nonsensical reasoning should be almost as readily apparent: What precisely is a “construction of whiteness?” Ultimately, Mr. Kendi’s entire argument, such as it is, hinges on a term that lacks any meaningful definition and indeed cannot have a meaningful definition because it doesn’t exist in the first place. The closest anyone has come is a list of disparate traits ranging from a preference for punctuality and a desire for excellence, among other completely unrelated, unconnected attributes that are not equally present in white people and are equally present in many non-white cultures. Instead, we are just supposed to assume that “whiteness” exists somehow, somewhere, as some legitimate, measurable, quantifiable thing, and that it is irredeemably evil, voracious, corrupting, oppressive, exclusionary, and more, somehow above and beyond what is present in human nature generally. The closest we might come to an analogue outside of antiracist theory is the religious concept of “original sin,” that is the idea that white people somehow inherit the sins of their ancestors who fell from grace at some point in the distant past. Original sin, of course, is usually meant to apply to all of us generally, meaning that humans as a whole are fallible, fallen creatures, capable of evil as much as they are capable of good. According to Christian religious doctrine, the savior was born to offer us the opportunity to redeem this sin by accepting him into our hearts and repenting. We can be forgiven if we accept this savior and confess. Here, the idea is repackaged in modern, secular form to apply only to white people. It is we who must accept the ideology of Mr. Kendi as the path to redemption and it is we who must repent, confessing to the sins that some white people we might or might not be related to did at some point. Implicit in this construction is that repentance is the only path to salvation. Much like religious scripture, critical race theory and anti-racism brook no argument. You cannot respond to these claims with the obvious historical truth that slavery, racism, and oppression were not unique to white people, were not supported equally by all white people or all any people for that matter, and that throughout history many white people – and other people for that matter – recognized racist institutions as evil and fought against them, at times giving their lives to protect others of a different race, creed, or color. Your ancestors could’ve died smuggling slaves out of the Confederacy or marching for Civil Rights and it does not matter. Your ancestors could’ve been slaves themselves at the hands of the Barbary Pirates in North Africa and it doesn’t matter. All of it is irrelevant. The only thing relevant is that today you are white – according to their definition – and therefore you must debase yourself before Mr. Kendi, to his satisfaction, and he will decide if you can be saved.
They say ignorance is bliss and if nothing else, it is a requirement to hold this position. No one can objectively look at the world around them right now and conclude that majority white countries somehow fail to connect with humanity above and beyond all others. Indeed, it is precisely the opposite. Pick a region, almost any region, that has not been influenced by Western culture and you will almost undoubtedly find it is defined primarily by the very lack of connection Mr. Kendi attributes to white people exclusively. The murderous, rampaging, rapists of Hamas who slaughtered and mutilated 1,200 to 1,400 people on October 7 were people of color completely unable to connect with anyone outside their oppressive, warped religious beliefs. The Taliban, who subjugate their own populace and kill anyone who stands in their way, are people of color, suffering from much the same fanaticism. Hezbollah, ISIS, and other terrorist groups in the Middle East are all people of color as well and eerily similar in their hatred for anyone not of their kind. The despots of Iran and Syria, where Bashar al-Assad used poison gas on his own people, are all people of color, with a goal of spreading their twisted caliphate beliefs to anyone not like them. The barbarians who comprise Boko Haram, enslaving people, murdering people, and terrorizing communities in North Africa are people of color. The Chinese, who run concentration camps and enslave millions of Uighurs, are people of color. The drug lords in Mexico who operate paramilitary forces and kill hundreds of the thousand with their poison are people of color. The dictators in South America who force their people to live in such squalor million travel thousands of miles in search of a better life in America are people of color. Conversely, such things are practically unheard of in any majority white country – or even close to majority white – of Western European descent. Instead, people of all ethnicities in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Australia, and more generally live in freedom and at peace, side by side with neighbors of every variety of ancestry. If not in perfect harmony, in something immeasurably more like it than anything the great majority of the world enjoys.
From this, an objective observer might conclude that it is white people of Western European descent that are more connected to people of other races than anyone else, unless connection takes the form of murder, rape, and oppression of anyone who doesn’t look like you or believe the things you do. Putting this another way from an individual perspective, would you rather be a Jewish white person in Palestine or a Muslim brown person in my majority white, decidedly middle class hometown of Hazlet, NJ? Putting this another way from the perspective of humanity as a whole, if an alien species were to arrive on Earth right now, what would they say when they look at my current neighborhood of mixed white and Asian, primarily Indian descent, compared to Tehran, Iran? Would they conclude that white people have the connectivity problem or non-white people?
Mr. Kendi, of course, would blame the current state of affairs on white colonialism, that is these people of color in other countries hate white people and other people of color not specifically like them because of white people. Alas, this is an argument equal parts circular and ignorant, a common theme with Mr. Kendi in general. Circular because it sets up yet another endless cycle from which there can be no escape except to submit to the demands of Mr. Kendi himself: White people did something somewhere to paraphrase another person of color and defender of terrorists, House Member Ilhan Omar, in some cases hundreds of years ago, and the current populations are forever corrupted as a result, no matter how many generations pass or opportunities to improve their lot. They have no agency, no ability to help themselves, all of it was robbed by white people at some point. Thus, they are doomed, without any hope at all until Mr. Kendi decides white people have done what he wants to address the sins of the past, however distant that past might be. Ignorant because, contrary to popular opinion, white people are far from the only people that built empires and engaged in colonialism. The Aztecs and the Incas in Central and South America commanded large empires long before the arrival of the Europeans. The Aztecs controlled almost all of Mexico, oppressing and enslaving anyone who defied them. The Incas were even larger, ruling the equivalent of modern day Peru, western Ecuador, western and south central Bolivia, northwestern Argentina, a slice of Columbia, and the majority of modern day Chile. Anthropologist Gordon McEwan called it “one of the greatest imperial states in human history,” conquering through war, treaty, and assimilation, the same as their white counterparts in Europe. The Chinese once controlled a massive empire as well under the Qing Dynasty, which reached all the way to India and Inner Asia. In 1790, it was the fourth largest Empire in world history and before its downfall in 1912, it counted as the most populous country at the time with 419,264,000 citizens under the emperor’s thrall. Likewise, the Middle East was home to the Ottoman Empire, which commanded North Africa, all of the Middle East, and much of Southeastern Europe. Japan had designs on an empire the same, invading China and the South Pacific in the lead up to World War II. Europeans have certainly committed their share of atrocities and caused many unnecessary tragedies, but so has almost everyone else and any reading of history that defies that fact is inescapably flawed. At the risk of repeating myself, if an alien species were to replay human history from the dawn of civilization, they would not find white people unique in their desire to build empires or oppress those different from them.
These hypothetical aliens are, however, likely to find something unique about white people descended from Western Europe: The centuries-long desire, beginning as early as the 15th century, to excise the darker parts of human nature and build a better world based on the concepts of individual freedoms and equal rights. This process was not always even or fair, nor did it fulfill all of its promises the world over, but it did offer a promise practically unheard of anywhere else then and – in many cases – right now. The promise was relatively simple. All people, from an emperor to a peasant, have certain rights that are natural or inalienable. One of these rights is the ability to worship freely and another is the ability to participate in your own government. These ideas are not uniquely American, but they reached their apex in the founding of the United States, from the Declaration of Independence to the Constitution and ultimately the Bill of Rights. Never before in human history had a country been based on the idea that all are equal under the law, the government has only limited powers granted to it by the people, and everyone has a right to their own religion. The combination of the three laid the foundation for the world’s first truly multiethnic democracy, leading directly to the diverse, vibrant country we have today. Mr. Kendi and others would be all-too quick to point out that these freedoms and rights were not extended to black people and women for over a century, as though no one at the time was astute enough to be aware there was a certain hypocrisy underlying these sentiments. This, however, intentionally refuses to acknowledge the reality that the existence of freedoms and rights enshrined in government at all were nothing short of a miracle thousands died for, essentially an experiment where no one knew the outcome and many thought would fail catastrophically. Almost ninety years later, in the depths of the Civil War when it seemed that failure would come to fruition, the outcome of the experiment still remained unclear when President Abraham Lincoln famously remarked, “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” The experiment didn’t fail, however. The values America, and ultimately Western Europe and most of the free world were founded on, were strong enough to overcome any adversity, at least so far.
This is why Civil Rights leaders far more intelligent, articulate, and successful than Mr. Kendi, from Frederick Douglass to Booker T. Washington to Martin Luther King, Jr. have always believed that the means to achieve equality were right in front of us all along, present in the founding documents themselves. The question was how to extend that promise to more and more people, how to fulfill it rather than destroy it. Today, Mr. Kendi denies this reality, preferring to push his own falsehoods and specious reasoning to advance outright racism and authoritarian political goals. Sadly, he is not alone. If modern academia has one overarching goal, it is to spread racism under the guise of anti-racism to advance those authoritarian designs. How else do you explain the testimony of Harvard President Claudine Gay before Congress earlier this week, when she refused to unequivocally state that calls for genocide against Jewish people violate the University’s code of conduct? As even progressive friendly NBC News described it, “Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., the chairwoman of the House GOP Conference, asked Gay, Magill and Kornbluth [other Ivy League university presidents at the hearing] whether a student’s calling for the genocide of Jews would violate student codes of conduct at their schools, but they repeatedly deflected the question.” Ms. Gay insisted that “depends on the context.” “Antisemitic rhetoric, when it crosses into conduct, it amounts to bullying, harassment, intimidation. That is actionable conduct, and we do take action,” she added. Ms. Magill of the University of Pennsylvania said much the same, “If the speech becomes conduct, it can be harassment. It is a context-dependent decision,” she said. At the risk of repeating myself once again, just imagine if a member of the Ku Klux Klan called for black people to be put back into slavery. Does anyone honestly believe that would not violate every code of conduct imaginable? Would there be a debate about context or would there by calls to jail whoever said it? Why then is it “context sensitive” for a person of color to call for a genocide against white people? The positions of these university presidents were so vile and extreme that even the White House was forced to condemn them. “It’s unbelievable that this needs to be said: calls for genocide are monstrous and antithetical to everything we represent as a country. Any statements that advocate for the systematic murder of Jews are dangerous and revolting — and we should all stand firmly against them, on the side of human dignity and the most basic values that unite us as Americans,” spokesperson Andrew Bates said in a statement Wednesday. The university presidents quickly backpedaled, but nothing can hide how they actually feel. They are racist to the core, corrupt, and irredeemable, and ignorant in the extreme. Every single federal dollar for every single program should be rescinded immediately and every single fair minded parent should refuse to pay tuition. There is no other answer to combatting this kind of hate.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 