One Lie Leads to Another Until We Tell the Truth
Ibram X. Kendi, a keynote speaker at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute conference entitled Telling the Truth About All This: Reckoning with Slavery and Its Legacies at Harvard and Beyond, “said that higher education was complicit in manufacturing and promulgating lies that enabled slavery and that the residual effects can be seen today in falsehoods about voter suppression, textbooks, gun control, and climate change.” The event was held around the release of the Report on Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery.
“‘We are living in times when some people are constantly calling what is obviously harmful positively good,’ he said. ‘They are lying and saying fossil fuels are positively good for the environment. They are lying and saying banning books is positively good for young readers. They are lying and saying police and prisons are positively good for Black, brown, and Indigenous communities…. And they are lying and saying that ignoring the legacy of slavery at Harvard is positively good for Harvard. They are lying and saying that ignoring the legacy of slavery in the United States is positively good for the United States.’”
Kendi is well known for his book, How to Be an Antiracist in which he argues, “The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” He also does not believe in race-neutral ideas or policies, or colorblindness: “There is no such thing as a not-racist idea, only racist ideas and antiracist ideas” and that “to truly be antiracist, you also have to truly be anti-capitalist." Kendi has advocated for an anti-racist constitutional amendment that establishes an unelected Federal Department of Anti-Racism.
