A Boston University professor had more than a few choice words about President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Amy Coney Barrett. Now the professor is facing calls for his termination.
Ibram X. Kendi, author of the New York Times bestseller “How to Be an Antiracist,” is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and the founding director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research.
In 2020, Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
Kendi recently tweeted that “white colonizers” use their adopted Haitian children as “props.”
He was responding to a since-deleted tweet and a photo of a woman later identified as Barrett’s sister, Carrie, holding two children, according to the Daily Mail.
“With 2 adopted children from Haiti, it is going to be interesting to watch the Democrats try to smear Amy Coney Barrett as racist,” said the tweet, posted by Tea Party Patriots co-founder Jenny Beth Martin.
Kendi responded, “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.”
Barrett has seven children, two of whom were adopted from Haiti, The New York Post reported. However, it was later reported that the two children Barrett’s sister was holding in the Twitter post had not been adopted by the judge.
Kendi tweeted, “whether this is Barrett or not is not the point.”
“It is a belief too many white people have: if they have or adopt a child of color, then they can’t be racist,” he wrote.
There were calls on Twitter for Kendi’s termination.
“Antiracist?” Twitter user Jon Ramos wrote. “How ironic! Ibram Kendi is brainwashing young people w/vile falsehoods & anti-white sentiment. Boston University should fire [Kendi] but they won’t. Black privilege, perhaps? If he were white, [he’d] be gone immediately for such racist vitriol.”
“#IbramKendi paints whites with a broad racist brush, even when there are no facts to support his claim,” Holly Mathis posted. “#BostonUniversty supports a virulent Black racist professor. #EnoughIsEnough.”
“Boston University professor should be dismissed for calling Amy Coney Barrett a ‘white colonizer’ who is using her two adopted Haitian children as ‘props,’” Breach of Trust tweeted. “The ones who claim to be oppressed are proving to be the most oppressive, hate-filled humans.”
Jack Langworthy @NINAYOcom tweeted, “I’ve lived in Tanzania for a decade. Those heroes w the benefits of western culture (prosperity, education) who adopt parentless children from overflowing and underfunded orphanages here are the cream of humanity’s crop. You’re a selfish fool making their adoption look racist.”
Others on Twitter supported Kendi.
“I agree with this 100% cause I have experienced it,” Shirley-Sweet1 @Sweet1Shirley tweeted. “I was adopted from Haiti by white people here in the US. It makes it hard cause parents don’t realize the racism they display which hurts the kids.”
In a tweet that has since been made private according to the Daily Mail, NextGen America’s John Lee Brougher tweeted, “As an adoptee, I need to know more about the circumstances of how Amy Coney Barrett came to adopt her children, and the treatment of them since. Transracial adoption is fraught with trauma and potential for harm, and everything I see here is deeply concerning,”
“Hello I am one of those Black kids adopted by White people! ‘MY PARENTS ARE RACIST!!! Try asking those of us who are living it!,” another person wrote.
Kendi himself added, “I’m challenging the idea that White parents of kids of color are inherently ‘not racist’ and the bots completely change what I’m saying to, ‘White parents of kids of color are inherently racist,’” he wrote. “These live and fake bots are good at their propaganda. Let’s not argue with them.”
Kendi, who is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and a CBS News correspondent, has written three New York Times bestsellers and other books including, “The Black Campus Movement,” which won the W.E.B. Du Bois Book Prize, and “Stamped From The Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas In America,” which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2016. At 34 years old, Kendi was the youngest-ever winner of the NBA for Nonfiction, according to his website.
Kendi has been visiting professor at Brown University, a 2013 National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow, and postdoctoral fellow at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis.
His next book, “Be Antiracist: A Guided Journal For Awareness, Reflection, And Action,” was scheduled to be published today, Oct. 6.
