A particular style of Christmas card has been in vogue for the past 20 years, in which the traditional Holy Family is displaced by the sender’s family looking, if not quite holy, then certainly very good. Clean and shiny parents and children are pictured happily together in an attractive setting, such as a verdant backyard. Whatever one thinks of this transmutation, there is no doubting that such photographs capture a widely shared ideal. They are redolent of love, unity, a somewhat saccharine self-satisfaction, and great, good spirits.
A picture in this genre, of Amy Coney Barrett’s family, has circulated since President Trump nominated the mother of seven to fill the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Supreme Court seat. What’s additionally pleasing and impressive in the photo is that two of the children are black, as far removed racially as they are obviously close emotionally to the other seven, white family members. They are Vivian and John Peter, adopted Haitian orphans who bring the Barrett family to a robust nine souls.
Open-minded and good-natured people rejoice at the sight of two healthy and happy young people wholly integrated into a comfortable family after their rescue from misery. But that was not the reaction of Ibram Kendi, a Boston University professor and author of How to Be an Antiracist, who shot to prominence in the racially soured months after the death of George Floyd in police custody.
His poisonous Twitter response to the happy Barrett family was: “Some White colonizers ‘adopted’ Black children. They ‘civilized’ these ‘savage’ children in the ‘superior’ ways of White people, while using them as props in their lifelong pictures of denial, while cutting the biological parents of these children out of the picture of humanity.” (Never mind that Vivian’s and John Peter’s biological parents had been cut out by death.)
Kendi said his was a general observation not specifically about the Barretts. And, sure, it’s possible to imagine that very rarely a black child might be the adopted son or daughter of a white racist. But it’s highly unlikely if one weighs words and deeds without prejudice and does not accept a definition of racism that can be detected in good people only by the superior divination of experts such as Kendi. He and his ilk, with appeasing help from corporate America, are spreading their limitless definition of racism and the nation’s supposed moral turpitude through every institution, public and private, with the explicit intention of fundamentally changing the country.
Kendi’s unreasonable and inhumane idea of racism is based on who you are, not on what you do. He argues that the only people who aren’t racists are anti-racists. He denies that there is any demilitarized zone between the activists on his side and a racist enemy on the other. This is, as I’ve noted in other contexts, a Marxist idea that all of life is about politics, so that no matter where you are, you are in a political position, in one camp or another, a partisan, friend or foe. It is a way of saying that if you are not with us, you’re the enemy and will be attacked.
Kendi, who received a $10 million no-strings grant from Twitter’s founder, Jack Dorsey — that should help him continue his “studies”— proposes passage of an anti-racist constitutional amendment to enshrine the falsehood that inequality is ipso facto the result of racism. Any policy that fails to prevent unequal racial outcomes would be unconstitutional. It would establish a federal Department of Anti-Racism to police this intolerance, and officials would have the power to punish “racist ideas.” See how this works? A fringe theory that sensible people know is false is set into the nation’s foundational document, then bureaucrats trained by expert ideologues force the rest of us, and our representatives in Congress, to toe their line.
I return to this determinedly divisive ideology because, as Karol Markowicz noted in the Washington Examiner magazine last week, it forms the menacing bulk of a cultural iceberg beneath the surface of our politics, and it has the potential to wreck America far more decisively than, for example, does the decision of voters about who will occupy the White House next year.
Interlocking left-wing ideologies being taught in our schools and increasingly corroding government and the world of work reject the best of America. They are determined to trash what ordinary people know to be honest and just, good and true.
