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ANALYSIS: Kendi’s center has significantly scaled back following massing spending with little results. He will now create something similar
By: Matt Lamb
Published: Jan 31, 2025
ANALYSIS: Kendi’s center has significantly scaled back following massing spending with little results. He will now create something similar at Howard University
Professor Ibram Kendi and Boston University will shut down the Center for Antiracist Research on June 30 as the “antiracism” proponent moves to Howard University.
Kendi will start a similar center at the Washington, D.C. historically black university, focused on “advancing research of importance to the global African Diaspora, including inquiry into race, technology, racism, climate change, and disparities.”
The “Institute for Advanced Study” will be “[b]uilt on the highest standards of intellectual inquiry,” according to a news release from Howard.
However, Kendi’s Boston U. center failed to deliver on many promises. The university and center ignored at least twenty requests for comment from The College Fix about productivity during that time. A 2024 analysis from The Fix found the center had been largely quiet in the past year. The scaled back version, following overspending by Kendi, produced little. The university investigated the center and cleared Kendi of any wrongdoing.
The center started off with strong fundraising, including $10 million from former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. It also had the benefit of being started in summer 2020, as Black Lives Matter grew in prominence and corporations and governments focused on “antiracism” and “diversity, equity, and inclusion” principles. Kendi himself did quite well during that time, hauling in $35,000 for 60-minute speeches. A 2021 analysis estimated Kendi had made around $300,000 from speaking gigs, an amount that has likely eclipsed half a million dollars by now.
Following layoffs of about half the staff, which disproportionately harmed racial minorities and thus violated the principles of “antiracism,” Kendi moved to focusing on fellowships.
But The Fix spoke to one “research affiliate” who did not even know she had been accepted for a position until being contacted for comment on what the role entailed.
Boston U. heralded some of Kendi’s work, including the “COVID Racial Data Tracker.” But Kendi and his team did little on that project – rather a team of volunteers from The Atlantic did the work and the publication shut down new data collection in March 2021.
His center existed at Boston U. for five years, after he left a similar project at American University. For the last two years, representing 40 percent of his time there, the center did practically nothing, while Kendi wrote zero academic papers at least during the first three years he was there.
As The Fix reported in Sep. 2024:
The latest post on the Antiracist Tech Initiative blog was from August 2023, as was the most recent update from the Racial Data Lab. On a page titled “What We’re Working On,” nothing is listed from this year. No policy reports or convenings have been published since 2022, and no amicus briefs have been submitted by the center since 2023. The Model Legislation Project also has not been updated this year. The Antiracist Legal Education Project advertises an event from September 2023 as “upcoming,” while the annual Antiracist Book Festival was not held in 2023 or 2024. A Vertex Symposium, which is also described as an annual event, has not occurred since 2022.
Kendi was quick to accuse his critics of racism when questions were raised about his leadership, even though some of them were racial minorities, such as scholar Saida Grundy.
“I have been disappointed in journalists who report criticisms of a Black leader without asking for evidence to substantiate those allegations,” he told The Daily Free Press. “Racist ideas about a corrupt Black leader running a dysfunctional or toxic organization are so ingrained that reporters don’t feel the need for evidence.”
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Of course he did. He has no other cards to play because he's a full-blown fraud.
"If you hold me responsible for all the things I did, you're a racist." This is how liars and ideologues like him deflect.
But it would be racist not to hold him accountable, as we do other leaders and managers. There's nothing more racist than saying, well, since you're black we should hold you to a lower standard because we just can't expect that much from you.
What I will say is that Howard University deserves everything it's going to get.
First Degree Murder Charges for Race Grifting Con Man Who Already Banked $500,000 Reward for Committing Murder
Karmelo Anthony, the Texas teenager who allegedly fatally stabbed another high school boy at a track meet, was charged with first degree mur
They keep changing their minds about whether or not their Über-popular psychological test can actually predict racist behavior.
By: Jesse Singal
Published: Dec 5, 2017
At the moment, you may have heard, the field of psychology is grappling with a so-called “replication crisis.” That is, certain findings that everyone had assumed to be true can’t be replicated in follow-up experiments, suggesting the original findings were the result not of actual psychological phenomena, but of various flawed methodologies and biases that have crept into the scientific process.
One of the major contributing factors to the replication crisis, which is centered mostly on social psychology, is human nature. Humans, being humans, do not like hearing that ideas they’ve worked on for a long time might have to get tossed in the bin, or at the very least revised significantly. That’s why some researchers — though by no means all of them — have responded to good-faith critiques of their work by attempting to derail the conversation, calling their critics crazy or mean or attributing to them dark ulterior motives. The researchers who attempt such derailings tend to be established, well-respected ones who have benefited from the old regime — the regime that led the field into its current, precarious situation, and which is now threatened by a growing reform movement.
The implicit association test, co-created by Harvard University psychology chair Mahzarin Banaji and University of Washington researcher Anthony Greenwald, is an excellent example. Banaji and Greenwald claim that the IAT, a brief exercise in which one sits down at a computer and responds to various stimuli, measures unconscious bias and therefore real-world behavior. If you score highly on a so-called black-white IAT, for example, that suggests you will act in a more biased manner toward a black person than a white person. Many social psychologists view the IAT, which you can take on Harvard University’s website, as a revolutionary achievement, and in the 20 years since its introduction it has become both the focal point of an entire subfield of research and a mainstay of diversity trainings all over the country. That’s partly because Banaji, Greenwald, and the test’s other proponents have made a series of outsize claims about its importance for fighting racism and inequality.
The problem, as I showed in a lengthy rundown of the many, many problems with the test published this past January, is that there’s very little evidence to support that claim that the IAT meaningfully predicts anything. In fact, the test is riddled with statistical problems — problems severe enough that it’s fair to ask whether it is effectively “misdiagnosing” the millions of people who have taken it, the vast majority of whom are likely unaware of its very serious shortcomings. There’s now solid research published in a top journal strongly suggesting the test cannot even meaningfully predict individual behavior. And if the test can’t predict individual behavior, it’s unclear exactly what it does do or why it should be the center of so many conversations and programs geared at fighting racism.
One striking thing about the process of reporting that article was the extent to which Banaji tried to smear her critics, suggesting to me in an email she believed that critiques of the test could be explained by the fact that the IAT “scares people who say things like ‘Look, the water fountains are desegregated, what’s your problem.’” She also accused the test’s critics of having a “pathological focus” on black-white race relations and the black-white IAT for reasons that “will need to be dealt with by them in the presence of their psychotherapists or church leaders.”
This is the definition of a derailing tactic — shift the focus from critiques of the IAT itself, some of which in this case appeared in a flagship social-psych journal, to the ostensible moral and psychological failings of the critiquers.
A couple days ago, Quartz published its own article on the IAT, by Olivia Goldhill. The article covers similar ground and comes to similar conclusions as mine, and adds some new insights and analysis: The headline, “The world is relying on a flawed psychological test to fight racism,” captures things pithily. Goldhill’s piece clearly shows that Banaji and Greenwald are still trying to deflect and derail rather than fully engage with the process of evaluating their test:
It’s highly plausible that the scientists who created the IAT, and now ardently defend it, believe their work will change the world for the better. Banaji sent me an email from a former student that compared her to Ta-Nehisi Coates, Bryan Stevenson, and Michelle Alexander “in elucidating the corrosive and terrifying vestiges of white supremacy in America.” || Greenwald explicitly discouraged me from writing this article. “Debates about scientific interpretation belong in scientific journals, not popular press,” he wrote. Banaji, Greenwald, and Nosek all declined to talk on the phone about their work, but answered most of my questions by email.
The idea that journalists shouldn’t write about scientific controversies would have been highly questionable even before the replication crisis exploded onto the scene, but it’s hard to fathom why anyone would take this argument seriously in 2017. After all, the replication crisis was spurred in part by opaque research and peer-review processes, by people not sharing data, by social and professional structures that sometimes had the effect of short-circuiting real debate about the merits of ideas — particularly popular ones of the sort that often get glowing write-ups in, well, the “popular press” (Greenwald, of course, doesn’t appear to have any problems with positive coverage of the IAT). Journalism, when it’s done well, can serve as a useful check on all these tendencies. To be fair, Greenwald isn’t the only one who thinks that science should only be critiqued by those very close to a given controversy — this is an idea that seems to sometimes pop up among defenders of the old, deeply flawed social-psychological ways — but that isn’t how things should work.
Even more surprising, though, is an email Greenwald wrote to Goldhill which read, “The IAT can be used to select people who would be less likely than others to engage in discriminatory behavior.” This might come across as a fairly banal defense of his research project, but it isn’t: It’s the continuation of a very slippery pattern I identified in my article.
As I noted, in their 2013 best seller Blindspot, which helped the IAT carve out an even bigger place in the public imagination than it had already achieved, Banaji and Greenwald wrote that the test “predicts discriminatory behavior even among research participants who earnestly (and, we believe, honestly) espouse egalitarian beliefs,” and “has been shown, reliably and repeatedly” to do so. In fact, this is a “clearly … established” “empirical truth.” But then, just two years later, they argued in an academic paper unlikely to be read by the general public that due to the test’s methodological weaknesses, it is “problematic to use [it] to classify persons as likely to engage in discrimination,” and “attempts to diagnostically use such measures for individuals risk undesirably high rates of erroneous classifications.”
I referred to this as a “Schrödinger’s test” situation in which the test both does and doesn’t predict behavior at the same time. When the test’s creators are addressing lay audiences unfamiliar with its problems, it does predict behavior; when they’re addressing academic audiences familiar with what is now a years-long controversy, they acknowledge that it doesn’t. Greenwald’s quote to Goldhill just marks the latest example.
In other words:
Banaji and Greenwald in 2013, to the public: Our test has been shown, reliably and repeatedly, to predict behavior.
Banaji and Greenwald in 2015, to academics: Our test doesn’t predict behavior.
Greenwald in 2017, to the public: Our test predicts behavior.
So, once more: I disagree with Greenwald. Society desperately needs more open scrutiny of scientific claims, not less, whether in scientific journals, the media, or anywhere else. Especially when it comes to claims that seem to change every two years.
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“tHe IaT iS bAsEd On ScIeNcE!!1!”
No, it’s based on ideology, and perpetuated by a multi-billion dollar church of DEI through faith by priests whose careers don’t exist without it.
https://www.thecut.com/2017/01/psychologys-racism-measuring-tool-isnt-up-to-the-job.html
https://qz.com/1144504/the-world-is-relying-on-a-flawed-psychological-test-to-fight-racism/
https://musaalgharbi.com/2020/09/16/diversity-important-related-training-terrible/
https://www.vox.com/identities/2017/3/7/14637626/implicit-association-test-racism
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/rabble-rouser/202203/12-reasons-be-skeptical-common-claims-about-implicit-bias
The IAT is measuring your thetans, reading your aura, or determining your criminality by feeling the bumps on your head.
“I think I’ll wear my favorite dress today” Racist or Antiracist? “I can probably get away with one more snooze button...” Racist or Antiracist? Can-openers. Racist or Antiracist?
For wisdom like this, he charges $20,000 an hour.
Remind me again why we’re reordering society around the mental misfires of this intellectual potato?
“The defining question is whether the discrimination is creating equity or inequity. If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist. [..] 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.”
-- Ibram X. Kendi (aka Henry Rogers), “How to Be an Antiracist”
To rely upon the, ahem, “wisdom” of Kendi is to declare that you don’t take racism very seriously.
Black Man Falls Of Bike. Racism Is To Blame - IRL Meme