Last September, Ibram Kendi's Center for Antiracist Research laid off the majority of its staff. There were subsequent reports that the problems at the center mostly revolved around Kendi's leadership. Yanique Redwood was the center's executive director for almost a year and from the time she was hired she said she could tell the center was dying.

For nine months in 2022, I served as the executive director of Kendi’s research center. When I arrived to begin my role, I observed that Kendi and the center were failing. What data did I have to support this assessment? There was significant staff turnover that preceded my arrival. There was the email from a disgruntled professor after I interviewed for the job warning me about an unsafe work environment. I reached out to an outgoing senior-level Black woman at the center, who curtly refused my request to talk. I wondered, what happened to her? What has happened here? 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.

Yesterday the NY Times Magazine published a lengthy piece trying to make sense of Kendi, his theories about race and the failure of his center despite the mountain of donations it received in 2020. Read the whole thing if you have time. I would describe it as a partial success. It portrays Kendi as a kind of conflicted character. He is someone who dresses in eye-catching suits but who also seems perpetually afraid of the attention he gets from critics.

Along with Robin DiAngelo, Kendi became a leading guru of a new kind of self-help approach to racism. And like all self-help gurus, there was always a sense that a big part of this was the desire to market his insights to as many people as possible.

Kendi and DiAngelo’s talk of confession — antiracism as a kind of conversion experience — inspired many people and disturbed others. By focusing so much on personal growth, critics said, they made it easy for self-help to take the place of organizing, for a conflict over the policing of Black communities, and by extension their material conditions, to become a fight not over policy but over etiquette — which words to use, whether to say “Black Lives Matter” or “All Lives Matter.” Many allies felt that Kendi and DiAngelo were merely helping white people alleviate their guilt.

They also questioned Kendi’s willingness to turn his philosophy into a brand. Following the success of “How to Be an Antiracist,” he released a deck of “antiracist” conversation-starter cards, an “antiracist” journal with prompts for self-reflection and a children’s book, “Antiracist Baby.” Christine Platt, an author and advocate who worked with Kendi at American University, recently co-wrote a novel that features a Kendi-like figure — a “soft-spoken” author named Dr. Braxton Walsh Jr., whose book “Woke Yet?” becomes a viral phenomenon. “White folks post about it on social media all the time,” rants De’Andrea, one of the main characters. “Wake up and get your copy today! Only nineteen ninety-nine plus shipping and handling.”

The author of this piece doesn't allow much actual criticism of Kendi's ideas to enter. She frames much of the criticsm as coming from the right which allows her to pass it on as inherently invalid. After all, if Tucker Carlson is against something, how can it possibly be wrong?

On Fox News, Tucker Carlson denounced “How to Be an Antiracist” as “poisonous,” plucking out Kendi’s summary of the case for race-conscious policymaking, which sounded particularly maladroit when taken out of context: “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination,” Carlson read in mock disbelief. “In other words, his book against racism promotes racism.”

But you don't have to be Tucker Carlson to see the problem with Kendi's framework. Last year, Pamela Paul made the same point in one of her columns for the NY Times.

“The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination,” Kendi wrote, in words that would be softened in a future edition after they became the subject of criticism. “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” In other words, two wrongs do make a right. As practiced, that meant curriculums that favor works by Black people over white people are one way to achieve that goal; hiring quotas are another...

Contra Kendi, there are conscientious people who advocate racial neutrality over racial discrimination. It isn’t necessarily naïve or wrong to believe that most Americans aren’t racist. To believe that white supremacists exist in this country but that white supremacy is not the dominant characteristic of America in 2023 is also an acceptable position.

And while a cartoon version of colorblindness isn’t desirable or even possible, it is possible to recognize skin color but not form judgments on that basis. A person can worry that an emphasis on racial group identity can misleadingly homogenize diverse groups of people, at once underestimating intraracial differences and overemphasizing interracial ones.

What comes across to a reader who does have some distance from Kendi's views is that his Anti-Racist Center had staff and money but ultimately no real plan what to do with it. His employees wanted him to narrow his focus to a few projects but he wasn't interested in doing that.

Kendi pushed back at staff members who argued that the center should constrain its focus. There were plenty of academic centers and researchers that tracked data on racial disparities in one policy area or another, he said; he wanted to convene that pre-existing data, bringing it together in one place for easy access by the public. In a 2022 meeting, when the team tried to get a better sense of his vision, Kendi told them that he wanted a guy at a barbershop or a bar to be able to “pull up the numbers.” To many employees with data or policy backgrounds, what Kendi wanted didn’t seem feasible; at worst, they thought, it risked simply replicating others’ work or creating a mess of sloppily merged data, connected to too many policies for their small team to track rigorously. In the midst of the pandemic, the center struggled to hire a director of research who might have been able to mediate the dispute.

In November, a confidential complaint was filed with the university administration raising concerns about Kendi’s leadership. The anonymous employee told a university compliance officer that Kendi ran the center with “hypercontrol” and created an environment of “silence and secrecy” that was causing low morale and high turnover, claiming that “when Dr. Kendi is questioned, the narrative becomes that the employee must be the one with the ‘problem.’” The employee warned the university that the situation “is potentially going to blow up.”

As we know now, it did blow up. Or maybe it's more accurate to say Kendi blew it up when he realized he would run out of money long before he completed the programs he had started on.

The most interesting part of the story is that Kendi sees himself as a victim of woke employees. In the summer of 2022, Ryan Grim at the Intercept wrote about a pattern he'd seen play out at multiple progressive advocacy groups. They were being eaten alive from within by young, leftist employees who seemed more interested in bringing social justice to their own workplace than focusing on the stated goals of the organization. The result was a kind of internal paralysis. The groups struggled to get anything done because they spent so much time on internal conflict.

According to Kendi, that's exactly what happened at his research center. The employees complained he was a control freak but from his perspective some employees just didn't like being told what to do because they knew better. There was one particular moment at a staff retreat when Kendi presented a paper describing his outlook on what his Center's values should be. One staff member named Saida Grundy tore into it unsparingly in front of everyone, leaving people in tears.

Her voice raised, Grundy laid out an indictment of the document Kendi wrote. “This is a mile wide and an inch deep,” she said. She argued that the center needed to be more specific about its goals; “fighting racism” was such a broad mission that it felt cynically strategic, allowing the center to take in money for all sorts of projects. “If there is a grant for antiracism on Jupiter, great,” she said. “We do extraterrestrial antiracism.” Grundy, unlike most of the staff, thought the center should become a resource for university faculty members and students; her parents were Black student activists in the 1970s, and she believed that real change starts where you are. “If you lined up 99 Black students at B.U.,” she said, “99 will tell you the center’s made no difference to their experience.”

When she finished speaking, the room was silent. Several people were crying. Dawna Johnson, the center’s financial director at the time, called it an “explosion.” “People didn’t know what to say after that,” she said. “It just left you so unhappy and uptight.” Kendi, his face inscrutable behind a Covid mask, said nothing, and the facilitator wrapped up the session.

Kendi doesn't quite call his problem employees woke, he calls them "performative radicals." In context it's clearly the same thing.

Many progressive advocacy groups, Kendi pointed out, have been torn apart by internal clashes in recent years, conflicts that he said were driven by employees who “care more about performing their radicalism” than working to “improve the lives of everyday people.” “Former employees constantly deauthorized me as the director of the center — not because they were against hierarchy — but to assume authority for themselves,” he wrote...

He once again dismissed the critics at the retreat as “performative radicals” of the sort that have been “causing all kinds of havoc in Black-led social justice organizations for years, claiming that they are against hierarchy when they really are against being directed by a Black person.”

What to make of this? Well, Kendi is right. There really is a strain of performative radicalism which has undermined progressive groups of all kinds over the past decade. The farther left the organization the more likely it is to experience this problem.

But in this case, some acknowledgement needs to be made of the fact that Kendi himself is one of the primary drivers of these uncompromising views on race in American culture. The fact that he now sees himself as a victim of people who reject hierarchy and try to assume unearned authority is pretty remarkable. It's as if the campus radicals who've read his books and pitched tents and made demands and silenced their opponents in the name of equity finally reached his own door and he decided they were a bunch of self-righteous jerks.

There's only one thing I can say to that and I truly hope Kendi reads it one day: Welcome to the party, pal!