After Senator Tim Scott expertly dismantled the View's progressive victimization tactics, I was simultaneously exhilarated by another black conservative's courageous willingness to speak truth to power, and at the same time extraordinarily disgusted that men like Scott continue being consistently drown out by grifting agitators.
Here's what I mean.
I have a great deal of respect and appreciation for the efforts of investigative journalist and activist Christopher Rufo who has dedicated his life to undoing the progressive indoctrination of young people through the country's education system. Granted, the system itself is becoming largely ineffective and impotent, but it seems its death throes are set to include a complete abandonment of any semblance of academic curiosity and full embrace of a malignant socio-political revolution. That Rufo and like-minded governmental leaders are standing against such misuse of our schools is admirable.
Still, as much as I would like to agree with Rufo on his recent victory lap regarding pseudo-intellectual Ibram X. Kendi, I just can't. When it became news last week that the racially divisive Kendi had surreptitiously deleted one of the more provocative claims in his seminal book, "How to be an Anti-Racist," Rufo celebrated:
To be clear, the quotation in question tells us all we need to know about Kendi's ideology and methodology. It may be surprising that the pseudo-scholar outwardly admitted it, but reverse racism has been the obvious objective of progressive race activists for decades now. But to suggest that Kendi's deletion somehow "admits defeat" seems a bit more hopeful and taunting than it does a serious assessment of reality. Look at what Kendi himself said about his decision:
These three sentences – and almost always these three sentences – have been heavily quoted by the conservators of racism to attack me and this book. They strip these sentences of the context and meaning I establish in the paragraphs before and after them.
Context is important, but Kendi is gaslighting if he wants anyone to believe that what we all read with our own eyes wasn't real, intentional, and exactly what it appeared to be. Besides, to a dispassionate observer, even one committed to being overly generous, Kendi hasn't exactly carved out a reputation as a master of nuance. His ham-fisted definition of racism still causes serious scholars to convulse. Serious scholars like linguist John McWhorter:
Make sure to catch McWhorter's point. To treat Kendi with kid gloves, to pretend that what he is peddling is somehow scholarly or worthy of serious consideration, is, in itself, a form of racism. It's giving Kendi a status he has not demonstrated and an intellectual respect he has not earned. Don't do that simply because the man is black because it's insulting to blacks.
This is the precise point made by esteemed and accomplished economist Glenn Loury. You can and should watch the full clip here:
Allow me to draw attention to the significant portion of his short remarks where he addressed the Kendi cause:
Finally, I want to say, equity is not equality. Equity, and I could name them but I won't, the writers in the US who are so prominent now. Ibram X Kendi comes to mind in promoting a certain ideology, assert, "I see a disparity, I want equity." And by equity, they mean an equal representation. This is not equality.
If you use a different standard of assessment in order to achieve equity, you've just patronized me. You've just communicated tacitly that you don't think I'm capable of performing according to the objective criteria of assessment as well as anybody else. I am now your client, I am now your ward. I go or come by your leave. This argument that we blacks must be made equal and you have to open up the doors and let us in, nevermind that our test scores are not as great. It's pathetic. It's a surrender of dignity. You will not be equal at the end of that argument, even if you get what you asked for. There's no substitute for earning the respect of your peers. If they grant it to you out of guilt or pity, they have just reduced you, not elevated you.
How I wish that every American that has been plunged unwittingly into the cauldron of racial discord, who truly has the best of intentions without the experience, wisdom, or grounding to make sense out of the various perspectives and fine sounding arguments that surround them … how I wish we could all learn from those words of Mr. Loury.
But sadly, our culture craves victimhood and worships the identitarians. So even in apparent "defeat," like deleting revealing lines from your own magnum opus, men like Kendi will leverage the move for more attention, more adulation, more accusation, and more money. All while the ones who labor for our collective delivery from this nightmare get a fraction of the press.
