Ibram X. Kendi, one of the premier philosopher-kings of 2020’s “racial reckoning,” is now facing a reckoning of his own. Or at least, that’s the title of today’s lengthy New York Times magazine profile of Kendi’s fall from grace (“Ibram X. Kendi Faces a Reckoning of His Own”). In reality, Kendi’s faux-intellectual hustle has been mired by controversies, snags, and setbacks for years; if papers like the Times only appear to have noticed now, it’s because raising certain nuanced, moderate “concerns” about the vast constellation of post-Black Lives Matter dogmas has suddenly been greenlit by the priesthood of acceptable opinion. The Times piece runs through a long recitation of Kendi’s struggles: After becoming a “household name” with the publication of his bestselling book How to Be an Antiracist in 2019 — and founding his lavishly funded “Center for Antiracist Research” at Boston University amid the 2020 protests — Kendi is facing a “backlash.” The Times reports: Books of his have been banned from schools in some districts, and his name is a kind of profanity among conservatives who believe racism is mostly a problem of the past. Though legions of readers continue to celebrate Kendi as a courageous and groundbreaking thinker, for many others he has become a symbol of everything that’s wrong in racial discourse today. Even many allies in the fight for racial justice dismiss his brand of antiracism as unworkable, wrongheaded or counterproductive. In September, Kendi was forced to make the “painful decision” to lay off half the staff at the Center for Antiracist Research. The public fallout was mired in allegations of corruption, misuse of funds, and numerous reports from employees of the center — hardly right-wingers themselves — that Kendi’s leadership style was controlling and abusive. While these revelations and the implosion of the center institutionalized the collapse of Kendi’s public brand, his actual ideas had discredited themselves long before — at least, to anyone with the capacity for basic critical thought. Even by the standards of left-wing “anti-racism” theory, his clumsy ideological justifications for the doctrine he became best known for — that any and all disparities are ipso facto proof of discrimination, and thus, effectively everything is racist — were pathetic, at times even seemingly half-hearted. (One got the sense, from reading Kendi, that he begins at the most convenient conclusions and reasons backward to find his arguments from there). Kendi’s conclusions were the same conclusions that every political theory, tract, and program offered by the DEI regime arrives at: That black people — “people of color” more broadly, but particularly black people — simply can’t be held accountable for anything they do wrong, that their problems are entirely society’s fault, and that society must therefore reallocate near-infinite resources (preferably lifted directly from the pockets of white people) to lavish blacks with new privileges, programs, and set-asides, above and beyond the already absurd trillions of dollars that America (and particularly white America) has redirected towards its black minority already over the past 50 years. Never mind the fact that, as David Horowitz noted back in 2001, “Reparations to blacks [] have already been paid”: Since the passage of the Civil Rights Acts and the advent of the Great Society in 1965, trillions of dollars in transfer payments have been made to African-Americans in the form of welfare benefits and racial preferences (in contracts, job placements and educational admissions) — all under the rationale of redressing historic racial grievances. That continues to this day via the welfare system, which is, in its practical effect, a massive ongoing racial redistribution machine, in which blacks get out far more than they pay in, and whites pay in far more than they get out — a sort of perpetual form of reparations. None of that, of course, is enough for people like Kendi, because people like Kendi’s paychecks — and in a more fundamental sense, their ethnic interest — depend on extracting ever-greater concessions, handouts, and goodies from the seemingly bottomless fountain of white guilt. What readers must understand about ethno-narcissists like Kendi is that all ideologies and doctrines are but a means to an end. In the view of Kendi and his peers, what is good for blacks is good, and what is bad for blacks is bad. This is, fundamentally, the singular lens by which they evaluate all public policy. We owe Kendi a debt of gratitude for his unusually candid expression of this view, as well for the broader incompetence that led to the very public collapse of his brief-but-substantial empire. If nothing else, it reveals what all this “diversity, equity, and inclusion” business was always about. Lurking beneath the hastily constructed rhetorical window dressing, layered under the talk of “justice” and “atoning for past wrongs,” is the base, raw pursuit of a specific group interest — even if those interests come at the expense of society writ large. The post Death of a Race Hustler appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.