This past Tuesday [Feb.6], Matt Walsh of The Daily Wire responded to a statement by Ibram X. Kendi which he found absurd. Kendi is a Black “anti-racist” whose central theme is the cancer of White Supremacism and the pernicious effect it has always had on people of color. In a recent post on X he stated: “Slavery is white history. How we survived it is black history.” But this is a lie, a brazen misrepresentation of the historical facts to which Walsh responded: “Slavery is world history. White people did not invent it and were not the first to practice it, but were the first to abolish it. The last place in the world to still have legal slavery was Africa. It wasn’t fully abolished on the continent ’til 1981.”
Kendi is a Humanities professor at Boston U. where he established The Center for Antiracist Research. He has published several books which have won awards, the best known of which is 2020’s “How to be an Antiracist.” However he has also been accused of promulgating a grossly simplistic if not utterly dishonest version of History, one which appears to be the product of his own brazenly anti-White racism. The unequivocal truth of the facts cited by Walsh would seem to support this hypothesis.
As I have pointed out in previous blogs, it was primarily Black Africans who sold their own people into servitude, including those who ended up in the U.S.. Slavery was still tolerated throughout the rest of the world when England banned it from its Empire early in the 19th C.. A few decades later, the U.S. was plunged into a devastating Civil War as its enlightened government sought to eradicate it from its Southern States. Yet so poisoned is our culture with the neo-Marxist, anti-Western propaganda of the Left, the very narrative that allows “intellectuals” such as Kendi to spew their lies, that I was recently informed by a “liberal” acquaintance that the U.S. didn’t really fight the Civil War to put an end to Slavery, but to simply keep the country together.
My Canadian friend’s disdain for the country to the south of us was in no way mitigated by my rational rebuttal. Had Lincoln’s government, I said, been primarily motivated by a concern for national unity, it would simply have allowed the exploitation of slavery to continue in its southern states. It was unequivocally its moral convictions that led it to launch a war that would ultimately result in the deaths of approximately 700,000 soldiers as well an indeterminate number of civilians. The notion that the Civil War was not a result of the true progressivism of America’s post-Enlightenment leaders is but another example of the anti-Western, anti-White dementia that has come to dominate our culture. That Ibram Kendi is an honored academic at Boston U. is absurd. That his books have won awards, equally so. His “anti-racism” is in fact racist to its very core, its perspective on Western cultural values such as Reason, Science, the Work Ethic, the Nuclear Family, etc., determined not by their capacity to enrich the human experience, but by the skin color of their proponents.
Yes, we live in a world where those who would celebrate the philosophical speculations of the Ancient Greeks as a cultural heritage far more valuable than anything produced by the Indigenous of Africa or the Americas, are deemed to be ignorant White Supremacists. It is a world which simplistically conflates Cultural Values with the Evil of those who may have sought to exploit them to their own advantage. No one is suggesting Western colonialists did not abuse the powers granted them by the achievements of their civilization. Human Evil transcends the categories of Race and Gender. But the contemporary Left, in its neo-Marxist dementia, eliminates honest, intelligent discussion of those values which might enhance the quality of each and every one of our lives and indeed of society as a whole, by simply demonizing White people who have studied and worked hard all of their lives to achieve their goals, as “privileged” and “oppressive.”
Such is the gospel according to Ibram X. Kendi. Such is the misinformation that is being taught in our universities. Such is the basis of my reverence for the courage of Black “conservatives” such as Candace Owens, Larry Elder, Thomas Sowell, etc., who view the world not as people of Color, but as rational, intelligent Human Beings.