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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   34886 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 17, 2025

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Kendi has a different race in mind:

I don’t hate white folk because I’m a Christian. How can you hate a group of people for being who they are? Similarly, how can you hate a turtle because it won’t keep up? That would be like parents hating their children because they are different. All of our children aren’t the same. Europeans are completely different from Asians who are completely different from Hispanics and so on and so forth. Europeans are simply a different breed of human. They are socialized to be aggressive people. They are taught to live by the credo, “survival of the fittest.” They are raised to be racist.

Caucasians make up only 10 percent of the world’s population and that small percentage of people have recessive genes. Therefore they’re facing extinction. Whites have tried to level the playing field with the AIDS virus and cloning, but they know these deterrents will only get them so far. This is where the murder, psychological brainwashing and deception comes into play. -- Ibram Kendi [as Ibram Rogers]: The Famuan. Sept 9, 2003

The similarity is quite remarkable. Whites for Kendi, like Jews for Hitler, are a race of (1) genetically disposed (2) deceivers and (3) capitalist (4) exploiters. They just can't help it.

It must be pointed out that Kendi's statements here are beyond the pale even for most woke pundits, and few of them would follow as far in Hitler's ideological footsteps as Kendi does. It must also be pointed out, however, that Kendi's comments were well known for years, and he was seldom if ever denounced for them by the woke left -- so, while unusual, these statements were not particularly unwelcome.

Well, there is at least one book by the woke left denouncing those statements - "How to Be an Antiracist" by Ibram X. Kendi, where Kendi spends an entire chapter self-flagellating about these statements and his other similar youthful views and uses it as an example on how, in the course of being an antiracist, one should not be an anti-white racist, either.

I read Ch 10 of How to be an Antiracist and did not find what I expected, from this post, to find there. I don't see him walk back the contents of his 2003 Famua article; he says you shouldn't hate white people for being white, but he was already expressing that position in 2003. Can you quote him on retracting and/or apologizing for the 2003 article I quoted?

BY THE FALL of 2003, Clarence had graduated and I decided to share my ideas with the world. I began my public writing career on race with a column in FAMU’s student newspaper, The Famuan. On September 9, 2003, I wrote a piece counseling Black people to stop hating Whites for being themselves. Really, I was counseling myself. “I certainly understand blacks who have been wrapped up in a tornado of hate because they could not escape the encircling winds of truth about the destructive hand of the white man.” Wrapped in this tornado, I could not escape the fallacious idea that “Europeans are simply a different breed of human,” as I wrote, drawing on ideas in The Isis Papers. White people “make up only 10 percent of the world’s population” and they “have recessive genes. Therefore they’re facing extinction.” That’s why they are trying to “destroy my people,” I concluded. “Europeans are trying to survive and I can’t hate them for that.”

He calls it a "fallacious idea" right there.

More to the point, though, it's best read within the context of the entire book which, as said, is Kendi using examples of his own life as examples of fallacious ideas in general in the process of confession and self-contrition.

Kendi clearly retracts “Europeans are simply a different breed of human,”, but this is in the context discussing the crazy idea that white people are literally aliens from another planet. In the book, he recounts his friend Clarence pushing back against that:

“Answer me this: If Whites are aliens, why is it that Whites and Blacks can reproduce? Humans can’t reproduce with animals on this planet, but Black people can reproduce with alien from another planet? Come on, man, let’s get real.

and then, in the next paragraph, says he was wrong to think whites are a "different breed of humans". Ok, Kendi believes white people are homo sapiens; that's a relief. The rest of the paragraph could be read as backtracking substantial parts of the 2003 article, but it doesn't do that explicitly. Maybe he retracts it more strongly somewhere else, but if this is all there is, my guess is that he doesn't really want to distance himself from it, but has realized he was talking like a Nazi and wants to manufacture plausible deniability. If I had once said what he said, and wanted to retract it, I'd be pretty clear about it. Is this quote the best there is, to your knowledge?

This really sounds like nitpicking and goalpost moving, setting up specific standards on the spot that he apparently should have passed for it to be a real retraction.

Kendi's clear message in this chapter is that his youthful views are bad and it's bad to hold views like this. He could have very well chosen not to include a chapter on the book on why anti-white racism is bad, and yet he chose to include this. Furthermore, to my knowledge, it was only after this book that people even started to pay attention to what he said in 2003, so he was almost certainly the one doing the most to even publicize the fact that he had held these views in the first place - why would you manufacture plausible deniability to something you are promoting yourself?

So, to be clear, this is the strongest retraction of the 2003 article he makes, to your knowledge?

You wrote:

setting up specific standards on the spot that he apparently should have passed for it to be a real retraction.

My standards came from the expectations I had based your description:

Kendi spends an entire chapter self-flagellating about these statements and his other similar youthful views.

Yes, especially within the context of the book, the chapter is indeed an act of self-flagellation over having held views of the described sort in his youth. I'm not sure what sort of a further retraction than what was described you're looking for here.

Imagine someone who had published an analogous article about blacks to what Kendi said about whites, that was part of a searchable public record. Now imagine they apologized by saying,

When I was in college, I hated black people -- and because of that, I fallaciously believed that they were a different breed of human, and that they were trying to destroy my people to save themselves from would-be extinction caused by their recessive genes.

Now imagine that was their apology and they left it at that. Would that be OK with you?

I mean this is pretty much word-for-word the apology offered by Richard Hanania in regards to his past writing for white nationalist publications under the pen name Richard Hoste, and the apology appears to have been broadly accepted. His substack is popular and, as I understand it, widely read among very powerful people in America, and his book (about the need to dismantle and repeal the Civil Rights Act, no less!) doesn’t appear to have suffered any decline in sales as a result of the revelation of his past views. I think an apology seen as sincere because it’s backed up by an observable alteration in behavior is easy for most people to accept in good faith.

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