John McWhorter is a nice guy whose writing I have been reading for years. It takes a lot to make him mad, but accusing him of inciting violence for criticizing plainly absurd K-12 policy seems to be the ticket. https://johnmcwhorter.substack.com/p/more-on-what-modern-antiracism-does

I don't mean him any ill will nor do I mean the people who read him any ill will, but it's obvious the folks who are taking Kendi seriously are not giving him the dignity of actually...taking his ideas seriously and analyzing them logically or rationally.

If you simply read someone's ideas and nod along and don't think critically about them, I don't think you are taking them very seriously. It's like listening to someone in conversation, getting lost in thought, then saying, "Oh yeah, totally." It's not even respectful to Kendi.

If you do read Kendi's life story and his ideas rationally, you might come to the conclusion that he is approaching the world from a paranoid, sectarian worldview. He writes in his book that he once believed white people were aliens from outer space without a conscience.

This is not me exaggerating, that's literally what he writes in his book. Now, he explains that he grew out of the belief, but do you think that someone his epistemology evolved to a much more sophisticated place from the aliens are coming to get me phase? I don't see it.

The Aliens theory and the left-of-center-John McWhorter-is-actually-inciting-white-supremacist-violence-by-criticizing-a-private-school's-CRT theory are about the same level, intellectually.

The Aliens theory and Amy Coney Barrett adopted Haitian children but she might still be just like a colonizer of African people theory are on the same level, intellectually.

Now I don't really care if there are people with sort of looney tunes ideas out there. I'm not one of the pro-censorship utopians that wants the Internet to be scrubbed clean of wrongthink. But when Netflix gives looney tunes ideas 3 specials, it's worth interrogating those ideas

Kendi has created a binary: you're either racist or anti-racist. Conveniently he has declared his ideas anti-racist. Therefore, if you disagree with him, well. And especially white left-of-center people are terrified of being called racist. He's trying to eliminate conversation.

So McWhorter has chosen not to be intimidated by this tactic, and that's important because Kendi is becoming an influential thinker, but he doesn't do very much thinking.