American writer on race, one of the left's most prominent thinkers on the subject in the early 2020s. He has written five number-one bestsellers and won the National Book Award. His best-known title is "How to Be an Antiracist" (2019), which argues there is no such thing as "not racist": at every moment, a person is either being racist or antiracist.
In 2020 Boston University hired him to head a well-funded "Centre for Antiracist Research". In 2023 the centre sacked half its staff; Kendi denied financial mismanagement. He now teaches at Howard University.
Kendi has proposed a "Department of Antiracism comprised of formally trained experts" that could block any law and punish any public official deemed racist. He has written that "The only remedy for past discrimination is present discrimination."
His 2026 book "Chain of Ideas" explores the origins of the "great replacement theory", first promulgated in 2011 by Renaud Camus, a French writer. Google Trends suggests Kendi attracted less than one-tenth the attention in 2026 as in 2020.
"I used to think that *I* was stupid, and then I met philosophers."