Ibram X. Kendi is among the names that white conservatives have homed in on in their yearslong crusade against Black educators and authors who address systemic inequality.
His book “Antiracist Baby” has reached the upper echelon of racist, angst-ridden politics, with its frequent citations by right-wing lawmakers perturbed that Kendi has the audacity to advise parents on how to avoid raising bigots.
But Kendi doesn’t merely address the racist indoctrination of America’s children. His work strips down the mythology built around the United States’ Founding Fathers to reveal injurious self-interested men, and he nails down why it is that adults are so motivated to invest in this mythology.
That’s why, for today’s installment of “Black History, Uncensored,” our series celebrating Black authors targeted by right-wing bans, I wanted to highlight another work of Kendi’s that speaks to the ethos underlying his writing. In his 2019 piece “What to an American Is the Fourth of July?,” we’re treated to all the things conservatives fear in the author.
Kendi begins the piece framing the Founding Fathers’ ambitions of creating a republic as inherently exclusionary. He notes that President John Adams’ use of “our Struggle” in letters with his wife, Abigail, suggested that the white guys who fought against British imperialism weren’t concerned with many freedoms aside from their own as white men. In doing this, Kendi immediately contradicts efforts to portray these men as framers of true democracy.
He wrote: “As we know all too well today, wealthy white American men did not stop rebelling when they won the American Revolution, when they gained the power to protect their declared independence. They continued to rebel to keep their power. They, ‘the Patriots.’ The rest of us have continued our rebellions because we have yet to gain the power to be free. The resisting rest of us, ‘the unpatriotic.’”
And whereas many people —…
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