Fifteen years ago, when I started this blog, I secretly wanted to become one of the popular bloggers. The cool kids. The bloggers with name-brand recognition, book deals, and all the perks—including making consistent revenue. I started this space initially to talk about raising Black kids and living while Black in one of America’s whitest states, which frankly wasn’t exactly enticing fare for advertisers and sponsors. Recognizing that I was never destined to become one of the cool-kid bloggers, I decided to pivot to writing about race from my personal perspective but also bringing in my background in African American studies. Definitely not a recipe for coolness and hitting it big, but it aligned with my values.
As a result, this blog has never been commercially successful, and I still struggle to keep the bills paid, but it is rewarding and our readers tend to value what is presented here. I accepted my lack of popularity but then anti-racism work became popular as a thing. Between the active years of the Black Lives Matter movement, the killing of George Floyd, and the Great Racial Awakening of 2020, suddenly my field of work was a thing. Like a thing.
Anti-racism work became so popular that almost any Black or brown person could brand themselves as an anti-racist or diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) expert and rarely were they questioned. After all, surely one’s marginalized identity was more than enough to hang up a shingle and become a consultant or get a large book deal. Of course, there were also the white folks who got in on the deal as well. In many ways, after toiling away in this work both as a blogger and later as the executive director of Community Change Inc., it was actually kind of wild to see.
Suddenly, the right was talking about anti-racism work and not favorably—as a result they started to push back and what we are seeing now is the result of their labor. A number of states pushed through legislation banning DEI initiatives to the point that most people in the DEI/anti-racism/racial justice arena have seen their work dry up. Personally, I have worked with institutions that can no longer bring me back to continue the work. The rapid rise and fall of anti-racism and its adjacent field of DEI work has been dizzying.
Until a few days ago—while the field has shifted in the last year as states actively fight against progress and the average person’s attention wanes because this is a long game—there were still a few superstars in the field who remained perched high above it all. Ibram X Kendi had been the breakthrough celebrity darling of the anti-racism world with his highly successful book How to be an Anti-Racist, which even led to the creation of cringeworthy children’s books such as Goodnight Racism.
In 2020, Kendi was at the height of his popularity as his book became a mainstream success in the season of racial awakening and he left the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University to launch the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University. There he was warmly welcomed to Boston by then-mayor Marty Walsh, who apparently didn’t know there were already some folks working hard in Boston against racism and had been for decades.
As the executive director of Community Change Inc. (CCI), which has been located in Boston since 1968, I was admittedly intrigued by Kendi’s arrival to the local scene, and what it would mean for smaller groups—if anything. Initially, it meant a lot of people in my professional orbit hoping that Kendi and I might connect, which wasn’t outside of the realm of possibility given that a colleague of his from D.C. with ties to Maine had told him about me, Black Girl in Maine and, more importantly, CCI. Long story short, a direct connection was never made. Although earlier this year one of Kendi’s staff members did reach out to me to learn more about our work at CCI, and it was a good meeting. My team and I were later invited to a dinner where Kendi was present. My staff attended, I did not.
While I was initially excited about his book after an initial skimming of it, it was upon a more thorough reading that I realized there were some serious issues with Kendi’s racial analysis, especially when I read that he felt Black people could be racist too. Say what? Bigoted, yes, but Black people don’t have the financial, political, or institutional power to oppress other races. Not like white folks do—how they have since this country was founded and still do today. Even average white people with little if any wealth or power can mostly screw around with Black people and pay no price for it—that’s rarely the case with Black people.
Anyway, regular readers may have noticed that I stopped recommending his book because I felt it was more harmful than helpful and I started to question why he didn’t stick to being a historian.
Which is why I wasn’t surprised when the news broke the other day about happenings at his center. Kendi recently laid off about half of his staff, in an attempt to change direction and conserve resources given the changing funding landscape. After all, he “only” received $43 million dollars to start the center in 2020, including a $10-million dollar gift from Twitter founder Jack Dorsey. The same Jack Dorsey to whom I applied to for a paltry $450,000 grant in 2021 for CCI after receiving a personal invitation to apply from someone in Jack’s personal philanthropic circle—only to be told in 2022 that Jack was pivoting from supporting racial justice efforts. Which was a harbinger of things to come in anti-racism work.
Kendi laying off half of his staff may have stayed under the radar if it wasn’t for Boston University launching an inquiry into complaints about workplace culture and financial management. By all accounts, the center sounded like one big stew of dysfunction, which, as someone who holds a master’s in management, isn’t actually surprising. I am sure Kendi is a nice guy but he picked up and moved to a new state and city to start a research center with what amounts to not a lot of preparation. He was given a lot of funding, funding that organizations like mine could only dream of. Even at our highest peak, we were operating with a roughly $500,000 yearly budget.
No, Kendi was elevated because he wrote easily digestible material that excelled at not making people feel bad. Ultimately, that doesn’t advance the work in concrete ways. I am not opposed to academics and scholars but, as a practitioner, I will say there is a large gap in how a lot of academics approach things and how people who’ve been on the ground dealing with anti-racism efforts do. Because we were in a wave of madness, a lot of people received a lot of funding and opportunities in this work because of the momentary popularity of anti-racism work, which was really just a perfect storm.
COVID had most of us not nearly as busy as we usually would be, because in the first year of the pandemic, we were still scared about this novel virus. Throw in the tragic killing of George Floyd and suddenly people who assumed racism ended with the election of Barack Obama were all eager to be helpful. Sprinkle the energy of the larger Black Lives Matter movement and it was truly a perfect storm.
The thing is, popular things can easily become unpopular things, much like the Instapot craze of 2020. As we found ourselves stuck at home, suddenly forced to cook most of our own meals, kitchen aids became popular and suddenly everyone wanted an Instapot and an air fryer. I know, because I received both of them as holiday gifts that year. Turns out the Instapot just wasn’t as comfortable to cook in as my beloved crockpot and, well, the novelty of the air fryer wore off fast—though it is still great for heating up fried foods.
Lest you think I am just talking out of the side of my neck, the parent company of Instapot, Instant Brands, filed bankruptcy earlier this year. Reason cited: While sales of Instant Pots and its other electronic multi cookers hit $758 million in 2020, that plummeted by 50% to $344 million last year … As a result, Instant Brands has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, citing a combination of factors including lower sales, supply chain issues, higher interest rates, and “global macroeconomic and geopolitical challenges” that have affected the company.
Much like Instapots and Peletons, anti-racism work is no longer popular, and you know what? It’s okay. We don’t need cool kids, nor do we need folks earning $25,000-plus per speech when there are activists and others on the ground risking their lives in service to the movement while barely having the financial resources to survive. Or organizations such as mine that have historically survived due to great personal sacrifice on the part of the actual employees.
How can we say we are anti-racists, when we perpetuate inequity within our own community? How can we be anti-racists if we allow white-bodied people to prosper above the Black and brown people—especially women—who are often the foot soldiers in this work? What does it say about our commitment to anti-racism when a historian is given unfettered access to funds to create a center that in three years has produced little in the way of deliverables? Why do we still value the anti-racists who produce books over those who use social media platforms when we know that valuing the “officially published” word is very much a trait of white supremacy culture.
As someone who has supplemented my meager executive director salary by moonlighting as a speaker/trainer/writer, this anti-racism death spiral is real and directly impacts me. However, I did not enter this work when it was popular. I have been in it for decades and will continue to be in it, even if I have to close and become a cashier at Walmart. As I write this, my patron count decreases, and my organization’s annual fundraiser was an absolute bust. I fear for the future of both CCI and myself as we ride this wave of unpopularity. But also, knowing it is a long game, I think anti-racism work becoming popular was more harmful than helpful. As the founder of CCI, Horace Seldon, used to say, he strived to be like the dung beetle. I think we need more of us committed to living like dung beetles in service to the movement and fewer super stars.
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