Ibram X. Kendi (Ibram Henry Rodgers) has made a good living off of being a nasty racist.

Currently, he is the chief greenback arsonist at the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University and achieved that exalted rank by insulting White people to their great delight. Kendi’s path to wealth and power has been to treat White people as scum, and a certain class of Whites seem to enjoy being humiliated and insulted.

That’s not quite right. These White people enjoy seeing other Whites humiliated and insulted, believing themselves to be uniquely virtuous and above the sins that they see in their fellows. Kendi plays to their sense of superiority, inviting them into his circle with a wink and a nod; provided you praise Kendi as a genius with deep insight into Western culture, he will deign to allow you to flatter yourself.

Imagine the response if someone said “blackness prevents black people from connecting to humanity.”

So sick of this racist garbage.

— Jason Jones (@jonesville) December 5, 2023

It’s something of a miracle that Kendi has been so successful since he isn’t all that impressive a thinker. There are plenty of people with vile or hateful ideologies who I am forced to admit are smart and from whom I learn. Having studied some thinkers who engage in “critical theory,” I have to admit to having learned something; Kendi, though, is like Marx. He just isn’t that impressive a thinker. His appeal is emotional, not intellectual.

Kendi recently popped up in the news for the financial disaster at his Center for Antiracist Research. He managed to blow through about $20 million without producing anything of value to anybody, all while alienating his employees before having to lay them off.

This elicited more than a little schadenfreude, as it should have, because it exposed the extent to which all this antiracist nonsense is a grift on the same model as BLM and Race2Dinner. Kendi and his fellows are entrepreneurs more than activists, selling equal measures of absolution and humiliation to a willing market of the wokerati.

What is striking about Kendi is his relationship with his market, the midwits who desperately want to see themselves as smarter and better than the general run of people in America. BLM’s market pitch was easy to understand: we lead a mob, and you should pay up or suffer the consequences. Race2Dinner’s market was bored White women who wanted to impress each other with their wealth and virtue.

Kendi’s pitch, though, is to intellectuals who claimed to want a theoretical basis for their loathing of the West. And Kendi doesn’t have the intellectual chops to provide it. He can’t even define the core concept of his argument. A sophomore at a decent college could do better than he.

When @DrIbram Ibram X. Kendi aka Henry Rogers who has made his living off of #racism can't even define the word #racism only shows that YOU ARE A FRAUD. #IbramXKendiIsAFraud pic.twitter.com/pkkQLrLtwZ

— Dan Adams (@DanAdamsShow) June 24, 2021

It doesn’t take a genius to see that this man is out of his depth, an academic emperor with no intellectual clothes. What he has is little more than anti-white racism dressed up in non-so-fancy words and nearly incoherent arguments.

So what is the attraction?

As far as I can tell, it is the fact that his skin color permits him to spew racist bile in a way that few others could because social norms don’t permit it. And racist bile is in right now with all the right people. At least if it is directed at the “deplorables.”

I am pretty sure that Kendi doesn’t mean to limit his critique, if you can call it that, to the rednecks of America. He seems to sincerely believe that being White makes you a bad person. But his readers and listeners surely don’t see themselves in the same way. They think he is speaking about you and me.

I would love to see an experiment performed on college campuses: take various quotes from Kendi or other fashionable intellectuals and replace “White” with some other racial group. Then catalog the reactions. Something tells me that the collection of quotes would not be rolled up into a bestselling book and become required reading.

Instead, you would get riots. And Kendi would be brought in to explain how this proves that everybody is a racist White supremacist. And the college would cut him a big check for doing so.