The War on the West

by Douglas Murray

As it happens, Antiracist Baby is a children’s version of a slightly more grown-up book by Ibram X. Kendi. The author’s story is one of quite amazing success—a success that has mirrored that of another black American writer of the same generation—Ta-Nehisi Coates. Like Coates, Kendi appears to believe that his personal story, or a mix of his personal story plus extrapolation of its political meaning, should be a sufficient base from which to reframe race relations in America. Like Coates, he is full of anger. Yet, like Coates, his career has been not just golden but magnificently well oiled at every turn. Like Coates, he has had a youthful book of memoir published to near-unanimous acclaim and turned into a best seller. Like Coates, he has won a National Book Award. Like Coates, he was awarded a MacArthur “Genius Grant.” Unlike Coates, Kendi was (at the age of just thirty-eight) awarded the most prestigious tenured chair at Boston University. The only previous holder of the Andrew W. Mellon Professorship in the Humanities was the Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize–winning author Elie Wiesel.