A decade ago, a man in his 30s by the name of Henry Rogers was one of 32,000 faculty members working in the state university system of New York. Henry was an assistant professor, making a modest salary as he taught history classes to undergraduates. He wasn’t exactly lighting the academic world on fire, but he was doing pretty well, all things considered. Henry had graduated from high school with a GPA below 3.0, and SAT scores hovering around 1,000. With numbers like that, many students decide to pass on college entirely and for good reason. But here was Henry Rogers, *teaching* college students. He wasn’t simply going to college; he was educating the next generation. So he was something of an unexpected success story.
Nevertheless, despite the many blessings that were bestowed on him by affirmative action, Henry Rogers dreamed bigger. He didn’t want to be stuck at SUNY forever. He knew that if he wanted to make a lot of money and advance in academia, he needed a rebrand. You can only go so far with a white-sounding name like Henry Rogers in the American university system, especially in a state like New York. So in 2013, Henry Rogers changed his name.
Overnight, he became Ibram Xolani Kendi, or Ibram X. Kendi for short. From that point forward, anyone looking at the C.V. of this assistant professor at a middling state school wouldn’t immediately think of someone boring and generic and pasty. Instead, they’d think of black revolutionaries like Malcolm X.
Looking back, Henry Rogers’ name change may go down as the single most effective rebrand in the history of this country. His timing could not have been better. At the moment Henry Rogers transitioned into Ibram X. Kendi, corporate media in the United States was looking for something to cover besides wealth inequality and Occupy Wall Street. They decided, apparently in concert, to craft a narrative that innocent young black people were being hunted by deranged white supremacists. To advance that narrative, the media lied about the deaths of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and George Floyd, and so on. And during this period, they needed talking heads with names like Ibram X. Kendi to tell Americans that their real problem wasn’t Citibank or JP Morgan — it was white people.
One thing led to another, and before you knew it, Henry Rogers was on the move. He was hired by American University in Washington, D.C., in 2017, which at the time, was struggling with the news that bananas had been spotted hanging from trees on campus. This was presumed to be a racist incident, and Henry Rogers was going to fix things. Specifically, Rogers promised to develop a “racial reporting guidebook” and to conduct a symposium on “racial reporting.”
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None of that ever materialized, even though Rogers received tens of thousands of dollars in grant money — from places like the Ford Foundation — to make it happen. But Rogers was not completely idle during this period. After two years at American University, Henry produced a now-famous book called “How to Be an Antiracist,” which offered a novel theory. Henry argued that the solution to racism is more racism. “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”
If your IQ is higher than Henry Rogers’ — and unless you’re a house cat, it almost certainly is — then that might seem counterintuitive. In fact it might seem like the single dumbest idea ever committed to paper. But in 2019, this theory — this explicit endorsement of racism — lit the academic world on fire. That same year, Henry Rogers was invited to speak at the “Aspen Ideas Festival,” where he had the opportunity to expound on his ingenious thesis before an audience of adoring, mostly white sycophants. And yet, despite the friendly audience, things didn’t go well. Not to oversell it, but this is maybe the single most amusing clip to come out of the entire DEI/anti-racism craze. In case you missed it at the time, you’re in for a treat. Here is Henry Rogers, AKA Ibram X. Kendi, explaining his definition of racism:
It’s an amazing clip for so many reasons. For one thing, even in the moment — with everyone in the room on Henry Rogers’ side — there’s still nervous laughter when he tries to articulate the definition of the central concept animating his entire life’s work. Even by the standards of woke academics, this was bad, and they all knew it. “Racism is when you’re racist.” Okay, thanks Henry. Everyone just smiles and nods awkwardly, because that’s what academia is now. It’s a grift. There’s no integrity or dialogue at all. There are no ideas at the “Aspen Ideas Festival.” There’s … whatever this is.
This moment was not the end of Henry Rogers’ academic career, of course. Criticizing Henry Rogers, or denying him promotions, is white supremacy. So the promotions kept coming. Henry went on to spend a year as a fellow at Harvard after this. Then he received yet another prestigious offer. Just weeks after George Floyd’s overdose, Rogers was hired to lead Boston University’s “Center for Antiracist Research.” Within weeks, massive donations were flowing in. Jack Dorsey, the weird-beard founder of Twitter, donated $10 million to Rogers’ new center. Random companies, like Vertex Pharmaceuticals, contributed millions of dollars as well. In total the center raised well over $40 million.
Where was all of this money going? According to Boston University, it was going to fund some really path-breaking, original research in the field of anti-racism. In December of 2020, for example, B.U. published an article on its website, promising that Kendi would be “bringing antiracist investigators together with data scientists to tackle racial inequities,” and to “establish Boston University as the nation’s leading academic institution for data-driven antiracist research.”
What came of this unprecedented collaboration between Rogers’ anti-racist experts and B.U.’s data scientists? Were racial inequities “tackled?” Not quite. The Washington Free Beacon looked into this. They found that Kendi’s anti-racist center established something called the Racial Data Lab, which is now completely defunct: “As of September, the Racial Data Lab only compiled information on COVID-19 infections and deaths. That COVID-19 tracker stopped collecting information in March 2021. The center has since removed the names of anyone who worked on that project from its website.”
So they compiled information from a bunch of other sources about COVID deaths. And then they stopped after about a year. That’s it. We reached out to Boston University to see if there was something we were missing, but they didn’t reply. So it’s clear that the sum total of B.U.’s big anti-racism data initiative — the one they touted with articles and a lot of marketing materials — was this little COVID tracker. That’s it.
To be fair, in its three years of existence, Roger’s anti-racist center also managed to take other steps towards anti-racism. For example, scholars at the center managed to produce not one, but two published papers. In three years. One of these papers looked at Google street view images, and concluded that neighborhoods with mostly black residents had more “dilapidated buildings” than neighborhoods with mostly white residents. It’s really groundbreaking stuff.
For his part, Kendi had some bright ideas that he occasionally shared with media outlets in this country. For example, he told Politico: “To fix the original sin of racism, Americans should pass an anti-racist amendment to the U.S. Constitution. … The amendment would make unconstitutional racial inequity over a certain threshold, as well as racist ideas by public officials. … It would establish and permanently fund the Department of Anti-racism (DOA) comprised of formally trained experts on racism and no political appointees. The DOA would be responsible for preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won’t yield racial inequity.”
Imagine spending millions of dollars investing in a “research center” written by someone who sincerely believes something like that. It’s so unbelievably degrading, so stupid that it defies analysis, really. What would you tell your shareholders? What would you tell yourself when you look at yourself in the mirror? Is there literally anyone on the planet who thinks a Department of Anti-Racism — literally the acronym is “DOA,” dead on arrival — would be a good idea?
Maybe if you were one of Roger’s investors, you’d hold out hope that, sooner or later, the scholars in this prestigious anti-racism center are eventually going to buckle down and get to work and produce something that’s actually useful. But if you thought that, you’d be wrong. That’s now very clear. This week, we learned that Kendi’s anti-racist center has just fired more than half of its staff. They’ve apparently burned through much of the $40 million they’ve raised. To be clear, this is an operation that does not involve particle colliders or expensive equipment. This is a bunch of “anti-racist experts” telling white people they’re terrible. They managed to blow through $40 million in three years. And now, at long last, Boston University says it’s opened an inquiry into where all of this money went exactly. If we’re being honest, federal prosecutors should probably be doing the same thing at this point. But of course, we know they won’t, because Henry Rogers is doing their bidding.
At this point it would be easy to gloat over the aftermath of the complete and total implosion of this whole project. There’s the fact that one of Roger’s former staffers called these layoffs an example of “employment violence” and systemic racism, for example. Many observers have made the point that the woke inevitably eat their own, and that’s true for the most part. Get a bunch of professional whiners in one room, give them $40 million, and pretty soon they’ll be out of money, and still complaining. In case that’s not obvious, Henry Rogers just proved that point.
So what’s going on here? Why did his anti-racist center really collapse? Was it just mismanagement? Is this an isolated incident confined to Boston University? That’s possible, but if you look at broader trends, it seems like something else is afoot. It seems like, all over the country, major institutions are ditching DEI scammers. It’s not just happening in Boston. According to one recent analysis, job postings for DEI positions fell by roughly 20% last year. The average tenure of senior DEI executives that Fortune 500 companies hired since 2018 has been less than two years, according to a consulting firm that specializes in this area. BLM is in the red as of the last fiscal year. They’re bleeding cash, much of which they wasted on mansions in California.
Seeing all this, it’s tempting to say that the whole anti-racism scam is collapsing. But as welcome a development as that would be, I think we have to resist the temptation to come to that conclusion. I don’t think that’s exactly what’s happening here. As we’ve all learned over the past ten years, the race hustle is far too useful and profitable to the people in power. And multiple generations of Americans have been too thoroughly indoctrinated into it. Millions of black Americans really do believe that they are victims, while millions of whites really do see themselves as guilty of imaginary racial sins. Just because Henry Rogers and a lot of his imitators have been exposed doesn’t mean that the underlying ideology has been defeated. These charlatans are low-hanging fruit. They’re grunts that are easily replaceable.
Think of how quickly these grifters took control of every major cultural and political institution. We went from “Don’t judge people based on their skin color” to “discrimination is anti-racist” in a very short period of time. It feels like it happened overnight. The Protestant Reformation took longer to get going, if only because people were communicating by horse or ship-borne letters. The woke social credit/equity/bio-surveillance state can take hold much faster. They can elevate con artists like Henry Rogers so quickly that we don’t know it’s happening until they’ve got $40 million and control of major universities. They can scam the most sophisticated investors on the planet, from tech executives to Big Pharma.
Henry Rogers and his team haven’t done much in their tenure as highly paid anti-racist activists. But they have demonstrated one thing, albeit inadvertently. And that’s the fact that there isn’t any substance to so-called anti-racist ideology. It’s just mega corporations looking to give big payouts to the first guy they find with an exotic name. If it’s not fraud, it’s something very close to it. If the Right can finally admit that, instead of playing along with these charlatans and funding the universities that promote this garbage, then things can change very quickly. But if we can’t take those steps, then nothing will change. If we continue to tolerate this, then no matter what happens to Henry Rogers, we can look forward to many more Ibram X. Kendis down the line.