MacArthur 'genius grants' go full woke
The MacArthur Foundation awarded several grants to individuals engaged in social justice and racial justice work.
Individuals such as Ibram X. Kendi were among the 2021 class of fellows.
This year, the MacArthur Foundation awarded grants to several individuals engaged in social justice and racial justice work.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, a professor in African American Studies at Princeton University, was one of this year’s 25 recipients of the $625,000 award.
Taylor has over 121,000 followers on Twitter and uses the platform to share positive views of socialism, claim “all of capitalism is built on exploitation,” and accuse Israel of apartheid.
”Sequins are not too good for the working class! Socialism is about sharing the abundance not accepting the false idea of scarcity,” Taylor tweeted in response to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, apparently criticizing the New York representative for misapplying socialist principles to her clothing consumption patterns.
Sequins are not too good for the working class! Socialism is about sharing the abundance not accepting the false idea of scarcity. https://t.co/Yd025LUrYd
— Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (@KeeangaYamahtta) February 22, 2020
She has also authored works such as Race for Profit How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership and #From Black Lives Matter to Black Liberation. She also serves as editor for How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective.
Ibram X. Kendi also received the award for his various work “[a]dvancing conversations around anti-Black racism and possibilities for repair in a variety of initiatives and platforms,” as NPR reports.
[RELATED: Princeton prof challenges university’s ‘systemic racism’ narrative]
As Campus Reform reported, Kendi once said that the U.S. Constitution needed an “anti-racist amendment.”
”The amendment would make unconstitutional racial inequity over a certain threshold, as well as racist ideas by public officials (with “racist ideas” and “public official” clearly defined),” Kendi wrote in the piece for Politico.
Another grant recipient is Hanif Abdurraqib, who received the award for his “distinctive style of cultural and artistic criticism through the lens of popular music and autobiography.”
His work includes essays which go into issues such as racial justice, particularly the Michael Brown shooting in Ferguson, Missouri, and modern-day policing.
”Many of the essays in Abdurraqib’s first collection, They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us (2017), grew out of reviews and articles he wrote while a journalist; taken together, they form a deeply personal consideration of self-identity and the continued suffering inflicted on Black bodies at the hands of police and others,” the MacArthur website states.
Alex Rivera received the award for his work in “exploring issues of migration, globalization, and technology with an activist orientation” through “a series of documentary shorts that situate immigrants’ lives within the larger system of global capitalism.”
Rivera’s 2019 film, The Infiltrators, is a “docu-thriller that tells the true story of young immigrants who get arrested by Border Patrol, and put in a shadowy for-profit detention center – on purpose,” the movie’s website states.
The MacArthur Foundation’s monetary award is a “no-strings attached” amount given to “extraordinarily talented and creative individuals as an investment in their potential.” according to the program’s
The criteria for selecting the fellows are “Exceptional creativity,” “Promise for important future advances based on a track record of significant accomplishments,” and “Potential for the Fellowship to facilitate subsequent creative work.”
