One assertion of Kendi is particularly troubling, because even a skeptical reader will need to pause over the author’s point. This is Kendi’s dismissal of assimilation — the belief that blacks can “join” American society on equal terms — as racist. “While segregationist ideas suggest a racial group is permanently inferior,” Kendi writes, “assimilationist ideas suggest a racial group is temporarily inferior.” To an American raised in the civil-rights era, or in the shadow of it, this sounds obtuse. Temporary inferiority is not the same as permanent inferiority. Inferiority, in fact, is the wrong word for it. But for those, like Kendi, who came of age in this century, the whole question looks different than what older Americans, both black and white, are apt to acknowledge.

It is a measure of how deeply our culture is fragmented that some of the best-read people in the country have never heard of Ibram X. Kendi. Most Wall Street Journal readers would probably have to Google him. But Kendi now has four books at or near the top of the best-seller lists, including Stamped from the Beginning, which is a history of American racism that won the National Book Award in 2016, and two books on racism for younger readers. Racism is Kendi’s thing. His newest, How to Be an Antiracist, reappeared at the top of the New York Times nonfiction best-seller list this summer after having spent several months on the list last fall and winter. For many of the protesters who poured onto America’s streets in June in the wake of the videotaped killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, the book has been a conceptual road map. As the first fires were being lit in Minnesota, Boston University announced it would offer Kendi, 38, the most prestigious tenured chair at its disposal, making him only the second holder of the Andrew W. Mellon Professorship in the Humanities. The chair has been vacant since the death of the novelist and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel four years ago. BU will also host the Center for Antiracist Research, which Kendi founded at American University.

The “antiracism” of which Kendi is the most trusted exponent is not just a new name for an old precept. It is the political doctrine behind the street demonstrations, “cancelings,” Twitter attacks, boycotts, statue topplings, and self-denunciations that have come together in a national movement. Anti-racists assume that the American system of politics, economics, and policing has been corrupted by racial prejudice, that such prejudice explains the entire difference in socioeconomic status between blacks and others, that the status quo must be fought and beaten, and that anyone not actively engaged in this system-changing work is a collaborator with racism, and therefore himself a legitimate target for attack.

Under anti-racism, the private sphere becomes a battlefront. In Denver, ACLU organizers push people to “raise kids who ‘see color.’” The English department at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette has instituted quotas to increase its BIPOC (black, indigenous, and people of color) hiring until all its senior positions are 15 percent minority. In California, a member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors introduced a Caution against Racially Exploitative Non-emergencies (CAREN) Act that would make it easier to prosecute those whose calls to 911 appear motivated by racial prejudice.

The anti-racism movement may sometimes be misguided: While the Floyd killing was affecting, for instance, there is still no evidence that it was an instance of racism. And the movement may be smaller than it looks, drawing primarily on those within the universe of activist foundations (such as the ACLU), the Bernie Sanders campaign (whose members fill the ranks of Showing Up for Racial Justice, or SURJ), and university ethnic-studies departments. Still, social media have broadened the networks from which each of these groups can recruit, and the anti-racism movement has grown to the point where Ibram X. Kendi can be said, for better or for worse, to be changing the country.

How to Be an Antiracist is a manifesto in the form of an autobiography. Kendi is not the first author confident that his intimate conflicts and private challenges provide sufficient raw material for a project to reorder American race relations. Ta-Nehisi Coates did something similar in Between the World and Me, his polemic against police violence. For that matter, Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father (1995) sketched out themes he would use to campaign for the Senate (“in no other country on earth is my story even possible”) a decade later. It is called “identity politics” for a reason.

Kendi’s devout parents were drawn through their churches into political activism in the 1970s and wound up worshiping at Reverend (later Representative) Floyd Flake’s Allen African Methodist Episcopal Church, in Jamaica, Queens. They fired their son’s imagination with biographies in the Junior Black Americans of Achievement series. Kendi saw a bit of urban violence on the school bus. He was drawn to basketball, rap, and fashion. His parents moved to Manassas, Va., where he attended Stonewall Jackson High School. He won an oratory contest for a Bill Cosby–style exhortation calling on blacks to pull themselves up by the bootstraps, a performance that (on one hand) he remembers with shame but that (on the other) he begins the book with. Kendi has done a bit of everything. He is an ideological everyman of race consciousness, his life a Bunyanesque pilgrimage from the Valley of Assimilation to the Mountains of Intersectionality.

There is a moment in this life story that serves as the postmodern equivalent of George Washington’s chopping down the cherry tree with his little hatchet — a foreshadowing of the author’s most important adult virtues and commitments. It comes with a “microaggression” that Kendi witnessed in his third-grade classroom at the age of eight. A teacher, whose name Kendi forgets, called on an eager white student at the front of the class rather than a shy black girl sitting in the back. Later, in chapel, Kendi defied the teacher and refused to leave. The principal was called. His parents were sent for. The incident doesn’t sound like much, not even in Kendi’s purple description, but to remember it brings rage: “What other people call racial microaggressions I call racist abuse,” he writes. “And I call the zero-tolerance policies preventing and punishing these abusers what they are: antiracist.”

Decisive and unflinching though Kendi is when it comes to retribution against people such as his third-grade teacher, the autobiographical parts of this book show him to be tentative, even anguished, about identity. He grew up with the surname Rogers; he changed it to “Kendi” on his wedding day a few years ago. His parents gave him the middle name “Henry,” although he dropped it, he says, when he discovered the role of Henry the Navigator in the slave trade, eventually replacing it with “Xolani.” In college he was both fascinated by whiteness (wearing eye-lightening “honey” contact lenses) and repelled by it (writing in a college newspaper column that “Europeans are simply a different breed of human”). He is tormented by what he calls a “dueling consciousness” and believes many other blacks are too: “I felt the burden my whole Black life to be perfect before both White people and the Black people judging whether I am representing the race well.” It is, mutatis mutandis, a worry common to people of many ethnicities. In his classic memoir of assimilation, Making It, Norman Podhoretz calls it “the brutal bargain.”

In African-American studies, first at Florida A&M and then at Temple, Kendi began to resolve some of these questions. His mentor in Philadelphia was Molefi Kete Asante, notorious at the dawn of political correctness a generation ago as the author of Afrocentricity (1980), which stressed that, long before the high point of Greek culture, Egyptians, who lived in Africa, were building the Pyramids. This is perhaps not an insight it required the founding of a whole new academic discipline to impart, but Asante’s goals were polemical as much as scholarly. “The rejection of European particularism as universal is the first stage of our coming intellectual struggle,” he taught Kendi, who quotes these words midway through How to Be an Antiracist.

As a prose stylist, Kendi is clear, direct, and even witty. But the academic discipline he practices is built from bundles of esoteric “intersectional” concepts, such as “race-class” and “gender racism” and “space antiracism.” Kendi’s arguments are often disjointed: “An ethnic racist asks, Why are Black immigrants doing better than African Americans? An ethnic antiracist asks, Why are Black immigrants not doing as well as other immigrant groups?” Actually, both sound like perfectly legitimate avenues of speculation for a sociologist — or, for that matter, some guy sitting on a barstool. Why drag racism into it? To figure that out, we must understand what Kendi means by “racism” in the first place.

Kendi’s definition of racism is short but far from simple: “Racism is a marriage of racist policies and racist ideas that produces and normalizes racial inequities.” Certain reviewers, including Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy, have faulted the definition for the way it uses the concept of racism to define the concept of racism. It will seem less strange, and more powerful, when examined through the lens of academic race theory.

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