The purpose of African-American Studies departments is officially to explore blackness. However, too often, the reality is less exploration than mission: to identify the operations of racism, as I expanded upon here a while ago. This mission is compact. It isn’t exactly hard to find and describe racism in the past when it was overt and unquestioned. Plus, under the popular idea that any disparity between whites and blacks today is because of “racism” (termed systemic or institutional), it’s easy to find it in the present as well.

This means that someone trained under these auspices is never faced with real challenges. No advisor, faculty member or fellow grad student will ask them “Is that really racism?”

Someone trained in this context never encounters actual challenge to their points. You defend no theorem. You present no interpretation subject to alternate approaches – at least, any that a polite person would dare present to you.

This kind of training is why Kendi’s response to criticism is irritation. “How can anybody not agree with my scholarship?”, he all but says straight out.