Ibram X. Kendi

Kendi's dissertation was titled "The Black Campus Movement: An Afrocentric Narrative History of the Struggle to Diversify Higher Education, 1965-1972."

Ibram Xolani Kendi (born Ibram Henry Rogers; August 13, 1982) is an American author, professor, anti-racist activist, and historian of race and discriminatory policy in America.

In 1997, then age 15, Kendi moved with his family to Manassas, Virginia, after having attended John Bowne High School as a freshman.

He attended Stonewall Jackson High School for his final three years of high school and graduated in 2000.

In 2005, Kendi received dual B.S. degrees in African American Studies and magazine production from Florida A&M University.

At Florida A&M he wrote a weekly column for the student newspaper The Famuan and also interned with the Tallahassee Democrat.

His Famuan column was discontinued at the request of the Democrat after he wrote an article claiming European people had invented HIV/AIDS to fight off the "extinction" of their race.

Kendi continued his studies at Temple University where he was advised by Ama Mazama, earning an M.A. in 2007 and a Ph.D. in 2010, both in African American Studies.

From 2008 to 2012, Kendi was an assistant professor of history in the department of Africana and Latino Studies within the department of history at State University of New York at Oneonta.

From 2012 to 2015, Kendi was an assistant professor of Africana Studies in the department of Africana Studies as well as the department of history at University at Albany, SUNY.

During this time, from 2013 to 2014, Kendi was a visiting scholar in the department of Africana Studies at Brown University, where he taught courses as a visiting assistant professor in the fall of 2014.

From 2015 to 2017, Kendi was an assistant professor at the University of Florida history department's African American Studies program.

In 2016, Kendi won the National Book Award for Nonfiction for Stamped from the Beginning, which was published by Nation Books.

In 2017, Kendi became a professor of history and international relations at the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) and School of International Service (SIS) at American University in Washington, D.C. In September 2017, Kendi founded the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University, serving as its executive director.

In July 2020, he founded the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University where he as director.

Kendi was included in Time's 100 Most Influential People of 2020.

Kendi has attracted criticism for his alleged financial mismanagement of the Center for Antiracist Research.

Kendi was born in the Jamaica neighborhood of the New York City borough of Queens, as Ibram Henry Rogers, to middle-class parents, Carol Rogers, a former business analyst for a health-care organization, and Larry Rogers, a tax accountant and then hospital chaplain.

Both of his parents are now retired and work as Methodist ministers.

He has an older brother, Akil.

From third to eighth grade, Kendi attended private Christian schools in Queens.

In June 2020, it was announced that Kendi would join Boston University as a professor of history.

Upon accepting the position, Kendi agreed to move the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University to Boston University, as founding director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research.

During the 2020–2021 academic year, Kendi served as the Frances B. Cashin Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

Kendi is the founding director of Boston University's Center for Antiracist Research, which was launched in 2020.

In August 2020, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey donated $10 million to the center; the center received $43 million in grants and gifts over the next 3 years.

The center's Racial Data Lab produced the COVID Racial Data Tracker from April 2020 to March 2021, highlighting that Black Americans died at 1.4 times the rate of White Americans during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In 2021, inspired by 19th-century abolitionist newspaper The Emancipator, the center launched a news website also called The Emancipator in partnership with Bina Venkataraman of The Boston Globe.

In June 2022, the center published essays from 35 Anti-bigotry Fellows, which provided legal and statistical analysis on various forms of discrimination.

In September 2023, Kendi announced mass layoffs of the center's staff.

Boston University then announced that they had opened an inquiry "focused on the center's culture and its grant management practices" and are "expanding our inquiry to include the Center's management culture and the faculty and staff's experience with it."

On September 24, 2023, Stephanie Saul of The New York Times wrote:

"The center's struggles come amid deeper concerns about its management and focus, and questions about whether Dr. Kendi—whose fame has brought him new projects from an ESPN series to children's books about racist ideas in America—was providing the leadership the newly created institute needed. Until the university established the center, the 41-year-old Dr. Kendi had never run an organization anywhere near its size … several former staff and faculty members, expressing anger and bitterness, said the cause of the center's problems were unrealistic expectations fueled by the rapid infusion of money, initial excitement, and pressure to produce too much, too fast, even as there were hiring delays due to the pandemic. Others blamed Dr. Kendi, himself, for what they described as an imperious leadership style. And they questioned both the center's stewardship of grants and its productivity. 'Commensurate to the amount of cash and donations taken in, the outputs were minuscule,' said Saida U. Grundy, a Boston University sociology professor and feminist scholar who was once affiliated with the center."

In the course of the investigation, other professors at Boston University who worked at the center have attested to the center's issues, with one alleging that the center "was being mismanaged" and another commenting, "I don't know where the money is."

Steph Solis of Axios noted that the scandal "cast a shadow" over the center, while Tyler Austin Harper, writing for The Washington Post, characterized Kendi's work at the center as "grift."

In November 2023, Boston University announced that its audit had "found no issues with how CAR’s finances were handled, showing that its expenditures were appropriately charged to their respective grant and gift accounts."

In the same announcement, the university stated that it had hired the management consulting firm Korn Ferry to conduct an audit on the center's workplace culture and Kendi's leadership.

Kendi has published essays in both books and academic journals, including The Journal of African American History, Journal of Social History, Journal of Black Studies, Journal of African American Studies, and The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture.

Kendi is also a contributing writer at The Atlantic.

He is the author of six books: