Ibram Kendi launches ANOTHER anti-racism center at BU
Ibram Kendi, founder of Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research, will launch a second racial justice center at the university.
The new “Racial Data Lab” will collect and display statistics about racial inequality.
Professor Ibram Kendi, founder of Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research, will launch a second racial justice center at the university.
Alongside data science professor Azer Bestavros, Kendi will launch a “Racial Data Lab.”
According to the university’s official news service, the venture “will marry antiracist research and data science” and “put BU at the center of the emerging field of racial data science.”
The new lab will synthesize the resources of the Center for Antiracist Research with the faculty of the school’s Computing & Data Sciences department.
“The need for racial data that reveal the impact of racist policies and inform the public on antiracist alternatives could not be more urgent,” remarked Kendi.
The Racial Data Lab’s first project is the “Racial Data Tracker,” which is “aimed at developing and maintaining the nation’s largest online collection of racial inequity data and will be accessible and available to the public.”
The tracker will “collect, visualize, and analyze racial inequities in real time across multiple sectors of society,” such as criminal justice, economics, health, and education. Users will be able to explore the data through infographics and other visuals.
Campus Reform recently reviewed Kendi’s bestselling book, How to Be an Antiracist, which asserted that “the only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.”
[RELATED: US colleges are telling students to read this book, so we found out why]
Kendi recently suggested that Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett is a “White colonizer” because her family adopted Black children from Haiti.
“Some White colonizers ‘adopted’ Black children,” tweeted Kendi. “They ‘civilized’ these ‘savage’ children in the ‘superior’ ways of White people, while using them as props in their lifelong pictures of denial, while cutting the biological parents of these children out of the picture of humanity.”
Campus Reform reached out to Boston University and Kendi for comment; this article will be updated accordingly.
Follow the author of this article on Twitter: @BenZeisloft
