This is a polemical article, in a partisan publication that, in nearly all cases, produces work antithetical to my own political leanings.

Yet this article neatly captures my own concerns with Kendi's version of anti-racism. Feedback/rebuttals welcome: https://americanmind.org/memo/anti-racist-education-is-neither/

I have laid out my own concerns with Kendi's reasoning on Twitter—and, subsequently, had him insinuate that criticizing his work is tantamount to believing in racial superiority: https://twitter.com/DrIbram/status/1328044956578091011

The article is dissatisfying in many ways. For instance: It utterly fails to engage with the many coherent versions of anti-racist policy and activism. That is, it caricatures anti-racism by cherry-picking lousy examples.

It suggests that professors like myself live in terror of tweeting criticism precisely like the one you are reading. This is, I believe, a self-fulfilling prophecy that they savor—the more they can caricature the "liberal academy" as an Orwellian nightmare, the better.

And worst of all, I believe it also caricatures Kendi's work, again cherry-picking the most incendiary and least coherent of his arguments without giving due credit to the better parts of his book.

Nevertheless: As we seek to redress the long-term ills of systemic racism—which, contra to the beliefs of the authors of this article, still exists—it is essential that we can critique those features of it that are problematic.

It may be that I'm not fully understanding the specific anti-racist arguments that come in for criticism here. If so, I'd like to know what the article and I are getting wrong about them. /x

(I'd add that the piece is almost certainly an example of what goes as "concern trolling"—are the authors actually exercised about helping "black and brown" students, or does that only concern them when painting anti-racism as "Maoist cultural revolution"? Methinks the latter.)