Woke Programming as Terminal Rally

The postliberal progressive turn in the arts institutions is a prelude to their kicking the bucket.

At the Deathbed by Edvard Munch, 1895, Bergen Kunstmuseum (source)

In 2020, Boston University proudly announced that it had opened a Center for Antiracist Research led by self-styled “antiracism” guru Ibram X. Kendi, whose 2019 How to Be an Antiracist had become a core text of postliberal progressivism. The book said this, in its typical numbing style of protracted declamation:

When a policy exploits poor people, it is an elitist policy. When a policy exploits Black people, it is a racist policy. When a policy exploits Black poor people, the policy exploits at the intersection of elitist and racist policies—a policy intersection of class racism. When we racialize classes, support racist policies against those race-classes, and justify them by racist ideas, we are engaging in class racism. To be antiracist is to equalize the race-classes. To be antiracist is to root the economic disparities between the equal race-classes in policies, not people.

“Ibram’s appointment and his leadership will create a critical emphasis on research and policy to help eliminate racism in our country,” BU president Robert A. Brown told the school paper. Jack Dorsey gave the center $10 million. More than $3 million more poured in from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, the Rockefeller Foundation, and Vertex, a biotech company.

Three years later, the center is imploding. Inside sources are talking of fifteen to thirty layoffs of a staff of 45. The Boston Globe reported, “Current and former employees in the center who spoke with the Globe were critical of Kendi’s management and questioned how a department that has received millions of dollars in donations and grants since its launch could now be in a position where it is cutting staff.”

Saida Grundy, a BU associate professor of sociology and African American & Black Diaspora Studies, was named assistant director of narrative for the center in November 2020, but said she left less than a year later. She said the center lacked structure and she was forced to work hours beyond what was reasonable for the pay she received.

“It became very clear after I started that this was exploitative and other faculty experienced the same and worse,” she said.

Remember Kendi: “When a policy exploits Black people, it is a racist policy.” The central and non-negotiable point of How to Be an Antiracist is that evidence of such exploitation must be a product of racism, because in Kendi’s Manichean thinking the only other option is to attribute the unsatisfactory outcomes to deficiencies in the exploited people.¹

Remarkably:

Attempts to reach Kendi for comment on the layoffs and the center’s transition to a new operating model were unsuccessful. Multiple messages sent to Kendi’s chief of staff were not answered, and an email sent to his BU address bounced back.

This is striking since one of the surviving activities of the center is a partnership with the Globe. You would think that it would behoove Kendi to speak with them.

The center is also the home of The Emancipator, a racial justice media platform started in 2021 as a collaboration between the center and The Boston Globe’s opinion staff inspired by the 201-year-old antislavery newspaper. Operations moved to BU in March. [BU spokesman Colin] Riley said The Emancipator will continue and was not affected by the layoffs.

Further investigation by the Washington Free Beacon revealed that in its three years of operation, the center has produced all of two papers (one of which was wholly theoretical), a couple of policy reports, and a “Racial Data Lab” that is delivering on neither collection nor analysis. It is possible to both detest racism and view this return on a $13 million philanthropic investment as embarrassing.

[Update 2023-09-23: A subsequent Boston Globe report says that the total donations in question amount to at least $43 million. Kendi did finally speak to the Globe, claiming that the center “has had a number of accomplishments.” The Globe did not press him to list them.]

[Update 2023-09-24: Today’s print edition of the New York Times reports: “The university said Friday that the center has raised nearly $55 million and its endowment contains about $30 million, with an additional $17.5 million held in reserves.” The aforementioned Professor Grundy told the Times, “Commensurate to the amount of cash and donations taken in, the outputs were minuscule.” Also, The Emancipator is no longer associated with the Globe.]

[Update 2023-09-29: In this morning’s Wall Street Journal a brave BU professor came forward: “The debacle that is Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research is about far more than its founder, Ibram X. Kendi. It is about a university, caught up in cultural hysteria, subordinating itself to ideology.”]

We who noticed three years ago that there are distressing parallels between the philosophies of Ibram Kendi and Adolf Hitler, and that Kendi’s solution to the problems of race in America is an unelected, unaccountable executive body with power to command or countermand every human action and expression down to the local and private level, are not surprised to learn that—I’ll go ahead and say it—he’s a slave driver at the office. Nor is it astonishing that a man who would presume to submit America to an “antiracist” dictatorship cannot successfully manage even his own sinecure.

Nevertheless I have questions. What kind of abominable work situation both compels employees to long hours and accomplishes practically nothing? How exaggerated is administrative bloat at the colleges that Kendi has, or had, a chief of staff? What did the center’s Director of Narrative do that required an Assistant Director of Narrative? Did the two of them oversee a team of narrators?

I leave aside those queries, and bypass the easy point that academic wokeness² is turning out not to be a winning project, to make another, less obvious one: downstream of the collapse of the Center for Antiracist Research is a harsh correction of the fortunes of Boston University. Moreover, this is a pattern we’re going to be seeing more broadly, including at the arts institutions, in the years to come: woke programming as a prelude to institutional contraction.

Since the 19th century, doctors have noted that terminally ill patients sometimes exhibit an episode of increased lucidity or vitality shortly before expiring. This phenomenon, known as “terminal rally,” is not yet explained by medicine, but is widely known to occur. My contention is that woke programming in the arts is the terminal rally for the socioeconomic forces connected to its institutional hosts. It resembles a return to health, which is why it’s so widely embraced, but it is in fact the last actions of a dying enterprise.

I wrote in June of 2020, paraphrasing Clement Greenberg, “Bureaucratic Woke Aesthetics prompts a dozen, then a thousand artists to maul the same sentiments, in more or less the same ranges of themes, and with the same ‘gestures,’ into the same kind of art.” And then:

If the institutional art world was a car, it looks suspiciously like Whitey is handing the keys over to people of color right at the moment when the needle on the gas gauge has started touching the E. There is nowhere to refuel in sight. In fact, the people of color are the fuel, in a vampiric sense. They’re going to have to get out and push, obliged as they are to recapitulate patently European aesthetic maneuvers and their American derivations, for their own identitarian purposes, because the formal possibilities have been explored to death. The money from the foundations and the attention from the museums thus become both the highest honors in the field and a spent series of consolation prizes. They are, like much else done in the name of fighting racism, racist.

A few weeks ago, a cultural and political commentator named RazörFist the Rageaholic invoked a similar sentiment. In a video he reformulated a now-old saw, Get Woke, Go Broke, to Go Broke, Get Woke, Ultimately Croak (language extremely NSFW). The subject was Volition Entertainment, a three-decade-old video game maker that had already lurched through a Chapter 11 reorganization when it issued a reboot of one of its older titles featuring an “inclusive” cast and environmentalist messaging. Reviews were disappointing and Volition’s parent company dissolved the business. RazörFist drew an analogy to deeply indebted WB, which he claims issued the Barbie movie to score enough ESG points to make itself attractive for acquisition. WB’s problem is a lack of potential buyers, and even with the success of Barbie it does not have the luxury of dropping subsequent bombs like Blue Beetle.

Then earlier this week, David Cole wrote about his platonic porn actress roommate.

Porn stars are a bird you cannot cage. Eventually, you have to open the door and let them fly… and then watch as they brain themselves on a window because they don’t understand the concept of glass.

Cole may be a Holocaust revisionist, but that line is a masterpiece.³ I bring it up because my tolerance for offense is higher than most people’s, and you may just want to bail out of this Dissident Muse Journal post now (or go re-read The Yarvin Heuristic) before you read the following:

With my porn girl, I knew there’d be no happy ending for her. Daddy issues, drug use, etc. I also know there’ll be no happy ending for the actors who are on strike. AI, Twitch, OnlyFans have changed the game; actors (other than the chosen few who can carry a Marvel film) aren’t as needed anymore. And there’ll be no happy ending for the streaming networks. Yes, they lose money by running a successive string of “noble black attorney Ungamabunga fights racists” shows, but frankly, they’d also lose money running “blonde bikini babes vs. dinosaurs” films, because that market’s dead.

Which is to say, the extant financial models for movies were already sputtering to a stop before the studios put out woke programming, which finally isn’t going to rescue them from terminal decline. I wouldn’t have stated it like that, which is why I don’t write for Takimag, but the basic observation is sound and corroborated.⁴

I don’t know of any bad financial news particular to Boston University, but as I commented elsewhere about Brandeis’s cancellation of its musicology PhD, nothing looks good for the colleges right now: demographics, economics, politics, technological trends, social trends, you name it. It’s a world of misallocation and bad incentives, and New England is ground zero for the correction. I’ve already discussed some of these issues regarding the Rhode Island School of Design, whose new president is a Kendi associate, and whom I likewise expect to wipe out because what university experience she has is not really germane to running an art school.

So it goes for the museums. The fiscal conflagrations of 2020 may not be indicative of anything long-term, but attendance numbers should have recovered after three years, and they haven’t. And yet, heedless of how much most Latinos hate the term Latinx, tonight is Latinx Heritage Night at the MFA Boston.⁵ This makes no sense unless it’s mostly irrelevant whether anyone shows up this evening, but development staff can go to donors and wow them with reports of something called “Latinx Heritage Night” and prove themselves worthy of largess. That’s fine, at least arithmetically, so long as the philanthropic environment remains favorable.

But like they are for the schools, many of the indicators are flashing red. Admissions have climbed at major museums to $30. A stunning 76% of millennial museum workers are considering leaving the field. A $29 million investment by David Zwirner for an expanded space may have evaporated in the midst of an art market slowdown, high interest rates, and “generational shifts in taste,” the last of which tracks with Cole’s observations about the move of young audiences from decreasingly remunerative movies to increasingly lucrative video games.⁶ Perhaps worst of all, condemnation of the very concept of the encyclopedic collecting institution has migrated from fringe anti-Western academic extremism to the New York Times.

As the very first of the universal museums, the British Museum built its collection over several hundred years of colonial boondoggles and the result is a treasure house of epic proportions: The collection contains some eight million objects (nobody knows for sure), of which only about 4.5 million have been fully documented online. A mere 1 percent are on display. But the museum is largely prohibited by law from disposing of its holdings, and it has often justified its position by invoking its ability to safeguard the world’s treasures.

That position no longer makes sense. The universal museum, a relic of the Enlightenment, was never truly universal: Virtually all universal museums reside in Western cities, far beyond the reach of many of the communities from which their objects were taken. And there is nothing enlightened about hoarding the world’s culture in storage, unseen by many and often, apparently, unsafe.

The institutions as they’re currently configured could survive a lot of adverse circumstances, but not widespread adoption of the idea that the Enlightenment on net was deleterious.⁷

I don’t see the museums or universities disappearing utterly. But it’s not difficult to imagine their playing a much smaller role in culture and the life of the mind compared with only a few decades ago. It’s also easy to see how that could happen: the money runs out. Along the way, we will have a lot more woke programming ahead of us, until suddenly we don’t.

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We are in the midst of an Asynchronous Studio Book Club reading of Totality: Abstraction and Meaning in the Art of Barnett Newman by Michael Schreyach. Obtain your copy soon.

An exhibition of my work is up at the Fuller Public Library in southern New Hampshire through September 30, with a reception in the morning on September 23, this Saturday.

Preorders are available for Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art by Walter Darby Bannard. More information is available at the site for the book.

1. Kendi’s blinkered outlook has been thoroughly addressed by frequent Kendi target John McWhorter. One of the reasons that we know that Kendi is in serious trouble regarding his position at BU is that he’s not on Twitter calling his critics racists.

2. It is a shame that woke lost its original meaning, “aware of racial injustice,” awareness of which I’m in favor. But it has devolved into “idiotically self-righteous about racial injustice.” That was an own goal, kicked into the net through idiotic self-righteousness about racial injustice. Wokeness is progressive values plugged into fascist attitudes. The example of Kendi is hardly unique but ought to be sufficient.

3. It’s okay, he’s a Jewish Holocaust revisionist. He claims that four million Jews were killed in the Holocaust instead of six million. Jews hate him because he questions the official tally. Nazis hate him because most revisionists are trying to establish that the Holocaust didn’t happen at all. When I think that I’ve made some needlessly weird, self-destructive life choices, I consider David Cole and feel better about my situation.

4. Cole’s observation also bears on the fortunes of conservative voters, whom he thinks are doomed, but you’ll have to click through to find out how, and what I excerpted is nothing compared to the rest of what’s there.

5. Including a “a Latinx-inspired prix fixe menu”! Would you like some more salsa verde on your culinary bullshit?

In fact I feel bad for the chef at the MFA whose boss told him that he had to come up with a “Latinx-inspired menu” for Latinx Heritage Night. Knowing that the Spanish-speaking nations of the world have distinct cuisines, I imagine him answering, “Like what?” To which she replies (we know it’s a she), “You know, Latinx!” At which he lowers his eyes and says to himself, Coño.

6. I have to concede, with admiration, that Zwirner’s sangfroid about his setbacks is most impressive.

7. You know what else is a relic of the Enlightenment? Newspapers.