In November of 2016, just eight days after Donald J. Trump won the U.S. Presidency, a relatively unknown Black historian, Ibram X. Kendi, received the National Book Award for a nearly six-hundred-page tome titled “Stamped from the Beginning,” a book claiming to trace the history of racist ideas in the U.S. In that moment, Kendi’s book seemed to offer some explanation for the shock of Trump’s victory: centuries of American racism and decades of toxic backlash politics. Kendi’s follow-up book, “How to Be an Antiracist,” sold more than a million copies as the country grappled with the horrors of the COVID-19 pandemic and the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd. By the end of Trump’s term, Kendi had become a household name.

In the tumult of 2020, Time magazine declared Kendi to be one of the most influential people in the world. But he quickly became an object of derision from the right as the conservative campaign against Black Lives Matter gained momentum. Kendi’s stark provocation that one is either a racist or an anti-racist epitomized the morality play that the right has come to describe as the essence of woke politics. Even more pointedly, “Stamped from the Beginning” argued, like the 1619 Project, that racism was a part of America’s DNA. Kendi began to publish books for children and young adults—which fit with the right’s claim that woke progressives were trying to indoctrinate young people. Conservative activists have tried to ban Kendi’s young-adult book, “Stamped: Racism, Anti-Racism, and You,” co-authored with Jason Reynolds, in school districts across the country.

Days after riots and protests broke out in 2020, Boston University announced that it had hired Kendi as a professor and appointed him as the founding director of its new Center for Antiracist Research. B.U.’s then president, Robert A. Brown, celebrated Kendi’s recruitment with the statement that “his leadership will create a critical emphasis on research and policy to help eliminate racism in our country.” In many ways, the moment was a reprieve for Brown, who in 2014 was subpoenaed to participate in a Boston City Council discussion of B.U.’s low numbers of Black students and faculty. More recently, a conservative student group had brought the right-wing provocateur Ben Shapiro onto campus, where he taunted, “Are teens in Chicago today killing each other at rapid rates because of slavery?” Kendi’s hire seemed to put B.U. on a new and different footing. His center, which eventually raised fifty-five million dollars and hired forty-five people, described itself as working “toward building an antiracist society that ensures equity and justice for all.” It was a grand vision, and one that proved to be short-lived.

In September, three years into the university’s venture, Kendi and B.U. confirmed that more than half the staff of the center had been laid off and announced that the center would be scaled back to the tried-and-true stasis of residential fellowships. Soon after the layoffs were announced, B.U. said that it would investigate “the center’s culture and its grant management practices.” Predictably, the right howled with delight, accusing Kendi of “wasting” millions of dollars. This forced Kendi and B.U. to clarify that the money had not been spent; in fact, the center is sitting on more than forty million dollars, though thirty million is in a restricted endowment.

This has left the pretty substantial question of what happened. When I spoke with Kendi recently, he said that he decided to change course to preserve the center’s existence “ten or twenty years down the line.” But others who worked there described years of chaos and uncertainty over the center’s objectives. Rachael DeCruz was the associate director of advocacy from March, 2021, until she was laid off in September. She complained of a “severe lack of transparency and communication,” offering, as one example, that she was told to manage the budget of the advocacy office but wasn’t immediately supplied with the necessary information, and eventually realized she hadn’t been given full control. Another former staffer explained, “We were handed projects to execute that were just big ideas with no scaffolding around them, and with an irrational idea around how fast that should happen.” Yanique Redwood, who served as the executive director of the center in 2022, wrote, in the Boston Globe, “When I arrived to begin my role, I observed that Kendi and the center were failing. . . . Bodies of work were stalled, funders were antsy about productivity, and many on staff seemed relieved that I had arrived. When I completed my one-on-one conversations with each staff and faculty member, I sensed their anxiety, stress, anger, and fear.” (Kendi did not respond to these specific allegations on the record, citing B.U.’s ongoing inquiry.) Redwood left after less than a year because, she wrote, of “the leadership model,” which placed all authority with Kendi.

When we spoke, Kendi denied that he was the sole decision-maker. Instead, he described the difficulty of melding different perspectives in the organization, building a work culture from scratch, and doing it all remotely, during a pandemic. In a public statement, he also suggested that the attention the reorganization was receiving was unfair, writing, “Leaders of color and women leaders are often held to different standards and routinely have their authority undermined or questioned.” But what did this mean? Some of the most vocal critics of Kendi have been Black women who worked at the center, such as Redwood and Saida Grundy, a sociologist and feminist scholar at B.U. Moreover, there is more at stake than the challenges Kendi faced as the director of a research center. The center had donations from more than ten thousand individuals, many of them presumably ordinary people who wanted to pitch in for the fight against racism. Kendi’s decision to simply sit on much of his funding, as what seems like a kind of anti-racist rainy-day fund, deserves more explanation than a murky idea that academic fellowships can contribute to the effort to combat racial injustice. As his then associate director of narrative, Monica Wang, put it, in a report compiled for donors in 2021, “We feel we have a civic duty and responsibility to translate our findings and solutions in as many ways as possible, so that other audiences, other sectors, can also become engaged.” To whom much is given, much is expected.

Kendi’s shift from promises to end racism to a more scholastic endeavor may speak to a larger and different issue. Though his infamous claim that everyone is racist or anti-racist was polarizing, its tension could be undone by embarking on a journey toward anti-racism. In a podcast where Brené Brown—known for her explorations of vulnerability, shame, and empathy—interviewed Kendi, she read aloud a passage that may be the core message of “How to Be an Antiracist.” Indeed, it may be the core of Kendi’s understanding of racism. Brown quoted, “The good news is that racist and anti-racist are not fixed identities. We can be a racist one minute and an anti-racist the next. What we say about race, what we do about race, in each moment, determines what—not who—we are.” Kendi added, “The heartbeat of anti-racism is confession, is admission, is acknowledgment, is the willingness to be vulnerable.”

Kendi is espousing an almost evangelical anti-racism, which holds the promise of releasing the racist from the bondage of their reactionary ideas. In 2020, this neat, liberal narrative arc, from ignorance to enlightenment, stood in contrast to rising calls to break the system. On the left were organizers, long into this iteration of struggle, who found that arguments for a radical reconsideration of how society was organized could gain a wider hearing. Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Angela Davis found mainstream audiences for their demands to “change everything,” including the abolition of prisons and police. Mariame Kaba, one of the best-known abolitionist organizers in the country, saw her book “We Do This ’Til We Free Us,” crashing the Times’ best-seller list. Kaba penned a Times Op-Ed titled, “Yes, We Mean Literally Abolish the Police.”

Kendi’s focus on personal awakening and transformation puts him outside an anti-racist tradition that includes W. E. B. DuBois; James Baldwin; Martin Luther King, Jr.; and Angela Davis. These architects of anti-racist thought understood racism as a manifestation of capitalism, and they believed that reality necessitated a mass movement. As King wrote for The Nation in 1966, “It is easy to conceive of a plan to raise the minimum wage and thus in a single stroke extract millions of people from poverty. But between the conception and the realization there lies a formidable wall. Someone has been profiting from the low wages of Negros.”

Kendi, in his books, argues that the history of racism is entwined with the history of capitalism, but it’s unclear how his theory maps onto his practice. His critiques of capitalism have not prevented him from partnering with corporate entities looking to add anti-racism to their brand appeal. In 2020, the Vertex Foundation—a charitable arm of Vertex Pharmaceuticals—pledged one and a half million dollars to the center, in part to support an annual public symposium on an issue related to anti-racism. This fall, the symposium will explore “how communities, advocates, scholars, and policymakers are working at the intersection of abolition and public health to create an antiracist future.” It is unlikely that Vertex, which has been subject to withering criticism for failing to make its powerful and expensive drug treatment for cystic fibrosis available to patients across the Global South, would be a part of any abolitionist project.

Moreover, Kendi, despite his public gestures of support for the Black Lives Matter movement, has a top-down view of change. Indeed, in “Stamped,” he dismisses the role of broad social movements, writing, “The popular and glorious version of history saying that abolitionists and civil rights activists have steadily educated and persuaded away American racist ideas and policies sounds great. But it has never been the complete story, or even the main story.” In Kendi’s world, “protesting against racist policies can never be a long-term solution to eradicating racial discrimination . . . in America.” Instead, he recommends “seizing power.” But, if protest is mostly useless, that seems to mean voting for anti-racists: “An anti-racist America can only be guaranteed if principled antiracists are in power, and then antiracist policies become the law of the land, and then antiracist ideas become the common sense of the people, and then the antiracist common sense of the people holds those antiracist leaders and policies accountable.” Whatever you think about the plausibility of this formula, “the people” have been rendered as the passive recipients of the common sense of the powerful.

This is a theory of change that was bound to clash with the staff that Kendi was aggressively recruiting to his center. When I spoke to DeCruz and others from the center, they described their work as abolitionist. In a letter that laid-off staff members have composed but not yet published, they write, “We came for the mission, not the starpower. We hoped we could move differently as an academic center, embracing antiracist principles not only in our products, but in our process. And we did. . . . We aimed to show up for our partners and stand alongside them in their work. And we committed to not replicate the harms so common in academia: extraction, tourism, abandonment.” Many on the staff viewed the center as contributing to “movement work.”

Kendi told me that he saw the center as part of the Black Studies tradition: as “a place where we, through our work, are contributing to structural change.” But though Kendi evokes the aspirations of some of his staff to be involved in movement work, the Center for Antiracist Research was not a movement organization. His staff was enacting the ethos of the Black student movement of the sixties in breaking down boundaries between the community and the university, but, Kendi told me, it was his decision to save millions, which curtailed the original ambitious agenda of the center. This cold dash of reality debunks any assumptions that an academic-research unit at a private university, especially one that has struggled to recruit Black students and faculty, could ever be the site of an effort to abolish racism.

In this light, Kendi’s center is another example of missed opportunity from the protest movement of 2020. It’s also more evidence that the stalled progress from that movement may be a consequence of trying to weave a strategy for radical social transformation through nonprofit organizations. Workplace dynamics and management hierarchy tend to overwhelm the democratic norms and accountability that are essential to building social movements from below. ♦