Ibram X Kendi: when wokes and white supremacists agree

[Peter1469]

Ibram X Kendi: when wokes and white supremacists agree

The new demand for "anti-racism" is well, racist. But at least that makes them natural allies with white supremists.

Some of us have been warning for some time that there is something unsavoury about the new ‘anti-racism’ – sometimes referred to as critical race theory or racial identity politics. Something, well, a bit racist. It was therefore not remotely surprising that the infamous ‘white nationalist’ Richard Spencer was able to find common ground with one of America’s most celebrated anti-racist activists, Ibram X Kendi.

Kendi, born John Edwards, is the author of How To Be An Antiracist, which rocketed back up the bestseller list during the summer of Black Lives Matter. His basic thesis is that everything can be divided into two categories: racist and anti-racist. There is, he argues, no such thing as ‘not racist’, because ‘not racist’ means being neutral in the struggle against racism. It is merely, therefore, ‘a mask for racism’.


So then what should we make of Kendi’s bizarre tirade against interracial adoption at the weekend? Is it racist or anti-racist? Responding to a picture of Trump’s Supreme Court pick, Amy Coney Barrett, who has adopted two black children from Haiti, Kendi tweeted:




Some white colonizers “adopted” black children. They “civilised” these “savage” children in the “superior” ways of white people, while using them as props in their lifelong pictures of denial, while cutting the biological parents of these children out of the picture of humanity.



The language he employs sounds anti-racist – condemning a real historical ill. But the conclusion one surely has to draw from his reasoning is racist. How could anyone support this continued ‘colonisation’ of black children?

Read the rest of the article at the link.

[Calypso Jones]

[Calypso Jones]

This guy has been in the news a lot lately...are they grooming him for the next more aggressive Sharpton/Jackson.

[Chris]

The combination can only be surprising to those who think blindly that Spencer is on the right.

Ibram X Kendi: when wokes and white supremacists agree

Some of us have been warning for some time that there is something unsavoury about the new ‘anti-racism’ – sometimes referred to as critical race theory or racial identity politics. Something, well, a bit racist. It was therefore not remotely surprising that the infamous ‘white nationalist’ Richard Spencer was able to find common ground with one of America’s most celebrated anti-racist activists, Ibram X Kendi.

...what should we make of Kendi’s bizarre tirade against interracial adoption at the weekend? Is it racist or anti-racist? Responding to a picture of Trump’s Supreme Court pick, Amy Coney Barrett, who has adopted two black children from Haiti, Kendi tweeted:

Some white colonizers “adopted” black children. They “civilised” these “savage” children in the “superior” ways of white people, while using them as props in their lifelong pictures of denial, while cutting the biological parents of these children out of the picture of humanity.

The language he employs sounds anti-racist – condemning a real historical ill. But the conclusion one surely has to draw from his reasoning is racist....

It turns out that white supremacists share a similar disgust with interracial adoption. ‘Not wrong’, concurred Richard Spencer. Yes, that is the same Richard Spencer who calls for the ethnic cleansing of America and the reconstitution of the European Union as a white racial empire.

Of course, Kendi is wrong. Barrett is not a coloniser but an adoptive parent in 21st-century America. Mixed-raced families are now so common as to be mundane. Yet Kendi’s rage is illustrative of how even something so innocent is now viewed by those who claim to be ‘anti-racist’ with suspicion and hostility....

...What racists and today’s ‘anti-racists’ have in common above all is a belief in the significance of race. They see race as a defining feature of one’s character, one’s values and one’s place in the world. And that is why both sets of ideas produce outcomes, attitudes and policies which are so obviously racist. We need to reject racial thinking in all its forms and instead aim to transcend race entirely.