Ibram X. Kendi Speaks On Race Relations at ASU
Ibram X. Kendi is the featured speaker for the 2023 A. Wade Smith and Elsie Moore Memorial Lecture on Race Relations at ASU. He is a New York Times bestselling author.
Kendi teaches that history and our own personal development should be understood in terms of oppressors and the oppressed. These categories are political and economic, and he also adds that they are racial. When we look at American History, he says what we see is oppressors trying to retain their power over an oppressed class. The oppressors do this by determining how race and politics will be defined.
Racial justice, according to Kendi, requires siding with the oppressed and redistributing political power and economic resources from the oppressors to the oppressed.
He gives anecdotal evidence including from his own experience of first coming to recognize class struggle and then applying that lens to all of life and history. He reduces all truth claims to a power struggle.
Like Marx, he believes history is a class conflict and denies that there is a sovereign God who both created and rules in world history.
The Marxist structure is a way for the “liberators” who control the system to retain perpetual power. They say they want to “reverse power structures” and not eliminate them. By reversing them there will perpetually be oppressors and the oppressed. The only thing that will change is the members of each set.