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Ibram X. Kendi, who literally wrote the book on how to be anti-racist, was honored for his tireless efforts to end discrimination with a 2021 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.
No one has done more to spark the current anti-racism movement than New York Times bestselling author and Atlantic contributor Ibram X. Kendi. Since publishing his book, "How to Be an Antiracist" in 2019, Kendi has tirelessly expanded on his work to create a more equitable society. He was recently named director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research, which he also founded (he founded a similar center at American University in 2017). He's written an anti-racism children's picture book and a book on how to raise an antiracist child, not to mention fostering YA and children's editions of his bestseller, "Stamped From the Beginning" and co-editing "Four Hundred Souls," the No. 1 instant bestselling "community history of African America," in 2021. He recently launched a new podcast, "Be Antiracist," and a new development deal and production company will ensure he can continue to bring his research and insights to a wider audience. His dedication to fighting injustice and discrimination has not gone unnoticed—he was awarded a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant last month. And though he is routinely a target of the right, Kendi deftly stays above the fray, arguing that the current mania over critical race theory sweeping through the Republican Party isn't even a real debate: "The Republican operatives, who dismiss the expositions of critical race theorists and anti-racists in order to define critical race theory and anti-racism, and then attack those definitions, are effectively debating themselves," he wrote in the Atlantic. "They have conjured an imagined monster to scare the American people and project themselves as the nation's defenders from that fictional monster."