NYT, Mar. 21, 2021
He Redefined ‘Racist.’ Now He’s Trying to Build a Newsroom.
By Ben Smith
BOSTON — Ibram X. Kendi and Bina Venkataraman met last summer when their
big Boston institutions, Boston University and The Boston Globe, were
grappling with protests over racial justice.
Ms. Venkataraman, the editor of The Globe’s editorial page, asked Dr.
Kendi, the author of a book called “How to Be an Antiracist,” why he
decided to found the Center for Antiracist Research in a city known for
the backlash to busing and “where sports fans boo athletes of color,”
she recalled in an interview. They started talking about their shared
obsession with a different Boston history, 19th-century abolitionist
newspapers. Then they wondered what it would mean to found, in 2021, a
newspaper in the spirit of William Lloyd Garrison’s legendary The Liberator.
In particular, they wondered, what would it mean to bring to American
racism the sense of urgency with which Garrison, in 1831, started the
newspaper, abandoning a more gradualist approach to slavery. “On this
subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write with moderation. No!
no!” he famously began, saying that would be like telling “a man whose
house is on fire, to give a moderate alarm.”
Now, with the backing of their institutions and a seven-figure budget,
they plan later this year to start an online publication that blends
reportage, opinion and academic research, some of which will appear in
The Globe. They hope to revive the tradition of a generation of media
that predates the formal division of news and opinion in 20th-century
American journalism. And they want to channel the energy that has
produced a year of newsroom conversations and arguments about racism.“If
you don’t have people agitating for urgent change, it becomes easy to
just turn to other problems,” Ms. Venkataraman said in an interview.
“And I think that’s sort of an inspiring framework for thinking about
why you need a publication or platform like this now, because you need
to keep it on people’s minds past the news cycle.”
This is not, of course, a simple project. The politics of the two
venerable institutions means that the new publication will be hiring two
editors in chief, one with a more academic bent and one more
journalistic, amid a national scramble for editorial talent. The
founders said they’d had preliminary conversations with CBS’s Wesley
Lowery and Errin Haines of The 19th, a new nonprofit group focused on
gender and politics that is serving as a model for The Emancipator. The
project has backing from the university and the newspaper but also is
seeking to raise money from foundations and individuals.
And then there’s the matter of the name. A Christian nonprofit
organization best known for fighting against marriage equality, Liberty
Counsel, has trademarked “The Liberator” for its newsletter. So Dr.
Kendi and Ms. Venkataraman had to dig into somewhat more obscure corners
of the past for an available historical publication: The Emancipator,
which for a time during the 19th century was the newspaper of the
American Anti-Slavery Society.
But perhaps the most interesting challenge will be defining what it
means to start fresh after a year of internal debate in American
newsrooms over, among other things, when to use the word “racism,” and
what it even means. Should it be reserved for Nazis and Klansmen, and
used with extreme caution because it carries such power? Or should it be
applied, as a new generation of writers have argued, to daily features
of American injustice? Dr. Kendi has played a central role in the debate
with his 2019 book.
“If there was ever a body of people who should be arguing out the
definition of a term, particularly a seemingly politically charged term
like ‘racism,’ why would it not be journalists?” Dr. Kendi said in an
interview on Thursday. “They should define the term based on evidence.”
Dr. Kendi’s book, a memoirish argument that Americans of all races must
confront their roles in a racist system, has drawn attention, and
controversy, for pulling the word “racist” away from its current usage
as a hypercharged word reserved for the clearest cases. He thinks the
word should be attached to actions, not people, and used to describe
supporting policies — like standardized testing — that produce a
racially unequal outcome. The focus on outcomes helped put Dr. Kendi at
the center of the long-running argument about the roots of inequality.
But when he published his book, he said, he was bracing for criticism
from the left. It had become an axiom in some circles that Black
Americans can’t be racist by definition. But the people committing
racist acts in his book include President Barack Obama and Dr. Kendi
himself.
And so Dr. Kendi’s work has influenced a growing newsroom debate over
using the word descriptively, as an assertion about policy, rather than
as a hazy, charged personal epithet. The 2019 book, and the intense
focus on racism after the killing of George Floyd the next year, also
transformed Dr. Kendi from a well-regarded but low-key academic
networker into a mainstream, best-selling author whose book is sold at
Logan Airport. He’s become what one of his friends called “Captain Black
America” — a Black academic or journalist who becomes a lightning rod
for the right and the object of white liberal adulation, as Ta-Nehisi
Coates did after his 2014 Atlantic article making the case for reparations.
“If he didn’t exist, his critics would need to invent him, because he’s
a person they can target,” said the New Yorker writer Jelani Cobb.
Self-promotion doesn’t come naturally to Dr. Kendi. But on his way home
to put his daughter to bed Thursday, he gamely submitted to a short
interview in the lobby of a Boston University building, double masked
and wearing three layers of wool against the cold rain. While I waited,
I read on Twitter about Alexi McCammond, a young Black woman forced to
resign as the new editor of Teen Vogue after a controversy regarding
racist tweets about Asians she sent as a teenager. I asked him about how
his view that “racist” isn’t a permanent label for an individual squares
with an unforgiving social media culture and a growing corporate culture
that has translated his work into formalized training sessions — the
subject of a recent critical opinion piece in The Globe.
Dr. Kendi said he would not “police” how people use his work. “People
should be held accountable when they’re being racist, but I think people
should be able to repair the damage,” he said. “I don’t view ‘racist’ as
a fixed category.” He added that he did not believe that “if someone
said something racist 20 years ago or even two days ago that right now,
in this moment, they’re also racist.”
That’s not how most Americans, or most reporters, use the word. But it
has a clarity and flexibility that make it valuable whether you buy into
Dr. Kendi’s broader worldview, which includes sweeping criticism of
American capitalism. And The Emancipator is interesting in part because
it’s an opportunity to put his ideas into journalistic practice.
But The Emancipator’s biggest opportunity — and challenge — may simply
be to find and grip an audience. That’s not easy: It’s noisy and
competitive out there, and translating academic ideas for popular
consumption can be harder than it sounds.
The Emancipator has one of the great advantages in American journalism,
though: It’s starting from scratch. As mainstream newsrooms wring their
hands over what it means to be neutral, The Emancipator can — in theory
— offer the growing number of journalists who seem to be asking for it a
chance to erase the 20th-century divide between news and opinion, and
blend reportage, data and argument about how to change society now. As a
model, Ms. Venkataraman cited a recent Washington Post project on
rethinking public safety by going beyond police reform.
“For some of this stuff, trying something new is a more efficient way to
address some of the frustrations people have,” said Ms. Haines, who said
she’d be staying at The 19th. (Mr. Lowery declined to comment on an
inquiry about the project.) “Turning the ship around at a legacy
institution — that is hard.”
Image
And Dr. Kendi and Ms. Venkataraman said they were not expecting to hew
to a party line, or to take Dr. Kendi’s work as orthodoxy. I asked him,
for instance, about criticism that his calling standardized tests racist
could give easy cover to bad instruction for Black students.
“You both have people who consider themselves civil rights activists who
are supportive, and there are people who consider themselves civil
rights activists who oppose it,” he said. “It would be great to see them
debate that out in the pages of The Emancipator.”
One thing that won’t be debated, Ms. Venkataraman said, is “that racism
exists and is in many ways ingrained in American society.” She compared
it to coverage of global warming.
“When you stop debating whether climate change or systemic racism is
real and whether it’s a problem, you can then debate the more salient
question what to do about it,” she said. “To me that is reality-based
journalism, not advocacy journalism.”
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