The “Antiracism” Expert Props up DEI while Denying the Lived Experiences of Plaintiffs
By Stanley K. Ridgley, PhD
August 11, 2024
Ibram Kendi continues to showcase the big DEI lie, because it seems even the Washington Post is onto it. In a recent tweet, Kendi doubles down with his lie, which his own allies refute with their writings, with their “seminars,” and their corporate “trainings.”
Here, as he does so often, he offers his opinion on an issue he knows absolutely nothing about. He comments on the litigation against DEI programs because of what they teach and how they teach it. His ignorance does not stop him. Kendi responds to a Washington Post story with the above tweet.
Kendi was so exercised by the story that he elected to lecture us why it was wrong on the fundamentals. He tells us that “it is spurious to think that all people within any racial group is racist.” That is, in fact, true.
But . . .
But that is exactly what DEI “trainings” and “workshops” do. I suspect that Kendi knows this and is choosing to dissemble.
It is, indeed, standard protocol for DEI “difficult dialogues” to teach that “all White people are racist” and “White people are inherently racist.” This is the central point in the critical racialist worldview.
In their “courageous conversations,” these workshop facilitators explicitly move students along a conveyer belt of conversion (the metaphor is Janet Helms’s, Beverly Daniel Tatum’s, and Derald Wing Sue’s) to aid them in their “identity development” of realization that they are either oppressor or oppressed, which demands a confession from some and the acquiescence of all. I write at length about this conversion process, which is hardly secret.
In these DEI sessions, white persons are indeed told that they are inherently racist. I say “told,” but it is actually an accusation, usually by a modestly educated but thoroughly ideologized “DEI expert” or “consultant.” This is the entire point of the viciously racialist exercise. It’s not about relieving so-called “unconscious bias” or “implicit bias,” although this is certainly integral to racialist training as you already know who carries this “bias.”
The point is that the broad and deep literature on critical racialism that informs “diversity training” is permeated with primitive racialist ideology and is delivered, often, in a coercive and highly stylized format that has been tweaked for decades and disallows dissonant information to interfere with the process.
The high fraud of DEI “trainings” has been underway for far too long and has harmed the careers of too many and has duped even more into behaving towards each other as if inflicted with a psychopathology. The enterprise, at its core, was characterized by a phrase popularized by the late philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt. Look here for Frankfurt’s sage appraisal. My own extended take on toxic DEI appears here.
As for Kendi, it’s unclear what “scholarship on antiracism” he refers to, but let’s be glad that he has supposedly recanted (likely under pressure). In BRUTAL MINDS I quote and cite the work of leading critical racialist faculty, such as Cheryl Matias, Sherry K. Watt, and George Yancy, who propound these noxious views on the campus. Worse, their epigone DEI “consultants” train others in education schools to become missionaries for the creed.
Have a look at BRUTAL MINDS for a laundry list of racialists, where they are, and their primitive, toxic views that are pushed onto faculty, staff, and students on the college campuses.