Politicians are losing their seats. “Antiracist experts” are losing funding. Are we finally seeing the tide turn on progressive policies related to race?

From The Daily Caller. The peak propagators of America’s woke-ist revolution are dropping like flies.

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After reaching the heights of cultural status following the 2020 “Summer of Love,” racial lecturers and diversity chiefs are squarely on the back foot as America tires of their divisive rhetoric, analysts told the Daily Caller. Former Harvard President Claudine Gay, scholar Ibrahm X. Kendi and Democratic Reps. Jamaal Bowman of New York and Cori Bush of Missouri have all either been fired, lost funding or lost their Congressional races.

“We are receding from peak racial reckoning,” Wilfred Reilly, a professor of political science at Kentucky State University, told the Caller.

America’s universities were once littered with Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) departments. But after the Supreme Court ruled to block affirmative action in 2023, colleges have placed them squarely on the chopping block. …

The universities’ actions represent a broader trend of race-obsessed instigators appearing to slowly decline.

The Squad’s Dismantling

Democratic Reps. Cori Bush of Missouri and Jamaal Bowman of New York are two of the Democratic Party’s most radically left members.

As members of “The Squad,” an informal name for nine of the House Democrats’ most radical progressives, they’ve been outward proponents of positions like defunding the police and offering reparations.

“It’s Juneteenth AND reparations. It’s Juneteenth AND end police violence + the War on Drugs. It’s Juneteenth AND end housing + education apartheid. It’s Juneteenth AND teach the truth about white supremacy in our country. Black liberation in its totality must be prioritized,” Bush tweeted in 2021.

Her call for reparations is oft-repeated. In 2023 she suggested a $14 trillion price tag for such an initiative.

Bowman has also repeatedly banged the drum for the fashionable far-left salvo of defunding the police. …

In 2020 Bush even suggested defunding the Pentagon. …

Both progressives suffered primary defeats to more moderate opponents in 2024.

Bush fell in early August, losing her race to St. Louis County prosecutor Wesley Bell in Missouri’s 1st Congressional district.

Bowman lost to Westchester County Executive George Latimer in the Democratic primary for New York’s 16th Congressional district in June.

While their inflammatory brand of progressive politics earned them brownie points with the Democrat’s far-left constituency, the party at large appears to be souring on their extremism, analysts told the Daily Caller. …

George Floyd And The Racial Reckoning

When George Floyd died in 2020, in the midst of rampant social unrest spurred by inequalities exposed and exacerbated by the Covid lockdowns, his death catalyzed a movement that Reilly called a “racial reckoning.”

“Following the death of George Floyd, there were a couple of years of what I would define as pretty close to hysteria, like in that classic Dutch sense,” Reilly told the Daily Caller.

The Art Institute in Chicago fired all the docents, who Reilly describes as “nice old white ladies,” so they could hire expensive “minority grad students to talk about the same works of art from a POC leftist perspective,” Reilly explained.

Squad members like Bush and Bowman are products of that environment, Reilly said, noting that Bush is heavily associated with the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement stemming from the 2014 death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.

The backlash against candidates like Bowman and Bush is to some degree a backlash against BLM, according to Reilly. …

The Downfall Of A Cottage Industry

The sociological and political conversations that followed the nation’s racial reckoning fueled the acceleration of a cottage industry that sprang from the BLM movement.

Race-focused lecturers like Ibram X. Kendi and revisionist historians like Nikole Hannah-Jones saw mainstream Democrats elevate their statuses as their books became required reading in left-wing circles.

The phenomenon captured no area of American life more so than it did higher education.

Colleges and universities across the land poured resources into building out DEI departments. Some of the most powerful administrators of legacy institutions like Harvard and Yale wrote their seminal dissertations on the premise of ideas that Kendi and Jones popularized. One such example is Harvard’s Claudine Gay.

Gay, who worked her way up from a professor of African American studies at Harvard to the president of the school, wrote her 1997 Harvard PhD thesis on how black electoral success affects American politics at large. The problem? She might have plagiarized.

In December 2023 Gay, who was already facing a groundswell of criticism for her inability to condemn antisemitism on Harvard’s campus during a Congressional hearing, stepped down from her role as Harvard’s president. Her resignation followed an exposé from Manhattan Institute senior fellow Chris Rufo and former Daily Caller News Foundation reporter Chris Brunet. They accused her of plagiarizing in her thesis and other published works. …

This, Reilly argued, was a sign that Americans were pulling back from the woke revolution.

“Murder count is down. Attitudes are shifting. You’re also starting to see … people like Chris Rufo make real inroads against this stuff. Rufo has been holding up these social science dissertations … just putting them through turnitin.com and revealing that like a tenth of them are just straight plagiarism,” Reilly told the Caller. …

It became difficult for people to take the diversity movement seriously when figures as prominent as Gay were outed as plagiarizers, Reilly noted.

This, Reilly said, was the recession of the racial reckoning. …

Down Goes Kendi

Another casualty of the downfall of the racial reckoning is Ibram X. Kendi. Kendi became a darling in left-wing circles after he published his 2016 book “Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America.” The book spurred the creation of a Netflix documentary and a follow-up book, “How to Be an Antiracist.” 

Kendi’s emergence as the authority on antiracism prompted lucrative speaking tours. He charged public colleges like Arizona State University and the University of Virginia anywhere between $20,000 and $35,000 per gig to lecture their students on racism. …

But his celebrity academic status peaked in 2020 when he founded The Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University. The Center received over $50 million in donations. Donors included Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and corporations like Peloton and Stop & Shop.

But the entire basis of Kendi’s antiracist thesis is wrong, according to Reilly. …

Reilly went on to describe Kendi’s thesis as essentially a binary view of success, or lack thereof, for different racial groups in America.

“The only possible explanations are genetic inferiority or racism. And Kendi says this really, really openly. This is page 12 of ‘How To Be An Anti Racist.’ The options are either — the way he puts it is almost eloquent: There’s something just deeply and permanently wrong with one of the groups, or there’s racism somewhere in the system, no matter how subtle. It’s got to be one of those things,” Reilly said.

Kendi’s movement, while well-funded, has not necessarily produced success.

Despite the $50+ million funding boon, the Center for Antiracist Research laid off more than half of its 36 employees in 2023. Further allegations from former staffers laid out severe mismanagement, though Boston University investigated the center and said they did not find any issues regarding its finances. …

Kendi, Reilly argues, became popular because of the racial reckoning moment. …

Kendi’s is yet another chapter in America’s post-George Floyd racial reckoning. While the center is still active, its current public list of employees is down to just fifteen. The downfall, while likely attributable to Kendi’s and others’ mismanagement, may also signal the waning of the intensity and interest in racial politics that defined the months after the death of George Floyd. …

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(Excerpt from The Daily Caller. Photo Credit: Photo News 247, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=92900980)