Racism

Twenty-five years ago I published an essay titled “Dogfish.” It was not about the little sharks that skim along the bottom of the Atlantic and Pacific coasts and only rarely end up on the American dinner table. It was rather a fanciful way to draw attention to the brevity of the average tenure of the college president. Back then the average president served 6.7 years. The spotted dogfish, by contrast, was believed to live almost three times as long. A lot has changed in the intervening quarter century. For one thing, it is now believed that the natural lifespan of the dogfish is thirty-five to forty years, though some say eighty.  Meanwhile the average term of a college president has shrunk to 5.9 years.

It would have happened on a Thursday, as it does every Thursday. Crowds of young men and teen boys would have lined up outside stores around the globe, in hopes of buying the latest drop from Supreme — the pugnacious streetwear brand which rose from New York skater shop to global multibillion-dollar fashion colossus and sold to fashion conglomerate VF Corporation for $2.1 billion in December 2020. Even if you don’t care about skating or streetwear, you would instantly recognize a white T-shirt slapped with their logo; a red box, with “Supreme” in Futura Heavy Oblique font inside. Celebrities love Supreme, the stylish (Hailey Bieber, A$AP Rocky, Kanye West) and the stylish-wannabes (Justin Bieber, Travis Scott, Jaden Smith).

Ibram X. Kendi has done as he promised. In 2020, freshly anointed as the director of Boston University’s new Center for Antiracist Research (CAR), Kendi announced his intention to “transform how racial research is done.” Previously, “research” had been understood to involve collecting data, analyzing trends and gathering new insights through the careful application of sustained thought. But these expectations were hallmarks of white supremacy. This week, as allegations of wanton mismanagement emerge from Kendi’s staff, it appears that what it means to do “racial research” has indeed been transformed: it now entails taking vast sums of other people’s money, then using it to produce almost nothing. And in this, Kendi is an expert.

With all the focus on Russell Brand, it’s easy to forget that another comedian made headlines — for all the wrong reasons — last week. Two days before the world came crashing down on Brand, the New Yorker’s Clare Malone wrote a devastating piece on Hasan Minhaj.  Minhaj, according to the brilliant expose, has a history of fabricating narratives. What’s particularly disturbing is that his tall tales all appear to have a unifying theme: race. More specifically, racism directed towards him, an Asian American and Muslim American, and his loved ones. Much of the New Yorker piece focuses on Minhaj’s 2022 Netflix standup special, The King’s Jester, which was marketed as a biographical account of his formative years.