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Nobody really gets scolded for being a sellout anymore. In the three decades since its heyday, in the late eighties and early nineties, the term has grown to seem a bit old-fashioned. The people who came of age during or after the 2008 financial crisis, for example, understandably do not have much patience for Gen X-ers who wax nostalgic about bands that ignored major-record-label attention or Adbusters or whatever else. The rent is high, and the bills don’t stop. Precarity is everywhere.
So I won’t subject anybody to my memories of reading zines in a college town in 1994, or my thoughts about “underground” hip-hop. But I do wonder if one of the central questions of the selling-out age—whether true dissent could be compatible with establishment recognition and institutional financial backing—might be worth revisiting.
This past month, the scholar Ibram X. Kendi, whose books and products on the subject of anti-racism have become something of a cottage industry unto themselves, revealed that he was laying off much of his staff at the Center for Antiracist Research (CAR), at Boston University, and was significantly downsizing the organization’s operations. The decision was surprising, given the enormous amount of money Kendi had raised—some fifty-five million dollars, which included a ten-million-dollar contribution from the Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey—and the seemingly unstoppable success of the anti-racism franchise. Aside from all the books, which included the best-selling “How to Be an Antiracist,” “Antiracist Baby,” and others, Kendi had an ESPN series deal and a podcast called “Be Antiracist.” The CAR had a partnership with the Boston Globe.
Kendi had won the National Book Award for his 2016 book, “Stamped from the Beginning,” but he entered another stratum of commercial success during the George Floyd protests of 2020, when “How to Be an Antiracist” became entrenched in the best-seller lists. The appointment at Boston University that came shortly thereafter, along with the tens of millions of dollars of donations to the CAR, seemed to cement his place as one of the nation’s most prominent thinkers on race. He might have had critics, but there was no denying that large swaths of Americans had turned to his writing while going through their own racial reckonings. Kendi’s mismanagement of the CAR, and the center’s subsequent failure to make good on its initial investments, seemed to signal that his big idea had grown faster than he could keep up with.
Another identity-politics celebrity came under fire around the same time, when Clare Malone published an article about the comedian Hasan Minhaj and the many fabrications he employed in his comedy act. These included a story about receiving an envelope of white powder that spilled on his young daughter’s face and sent her to the emergency room; a childhood reverie about the time a Caucasian F.B.I. agent tried to infiltrate his mosque; and a bizarre lie about a friend from high school who rejected his prom proposal because she allegedly came from a racist family who didn’t want to see her with a brown guy. All of these considerably stretched the truth, and, although Minhaj certainly has the comedic license to make up stories in the service of being funny, his fables only seemed to bolster his own moral authority as the embattled person of color telling stories of his oppression on some of the biggest stages in the entertainment industry.
The problem wasn’t so much the untruthfulness of his act as how it felt both opportunistic and cynical. Minhaj wasn’t just a middle-class kid from a college town outside Sacramento; he cast himself as someone who grappled with intense racism and Islamophobia, which, in turn, gave him increased moral authority onstage. During the Trump Presidency, figures such as Minhaj became part of a highly visible, multicultural resistance that never quite said anything radical, but certainly clothed itself in such terminology.
What seems clear enough is that Kendi and Minhaj both believed that they could reap all the rewards of the mass market and still maintain an edge and a sense of political purpose. And, while there are certainly differences between them—I don’t agree with any of Kendi’s prescriptions or, really, the concept of anti-racism, but I still believe he’s a more sincere operator than Minhaj—they captured huge audiences filled, in large part, by well-intentioned white people who wanted a person of color to deliver the pabulum they wanted to hear. It’s a bit too harsh to speculate that they purposefully went after those types of fans, but the demographic reality for minorities in America is that you can only really get so big by talking exclusively to your people. At some point, the market proof of your ambitions speaks more loudly than whatever it is that you’re actually saying.
I am not calling Kendi or Minhaj a sellout, and I don’t think that there’s anything particularly insidious or craven about their specific political messaging, even though I disagree with it. (With Minhaj, it’s difficult to pinpoint what those politics would be outside of hectoring Republicans and the supposed racists he talks about in his comedy.) But I do wonder why we’ve largely abandoned the part of the “sellout” critique that assumes nothing truly interesting or revolutionary can ever be found on mass-market platforms. What does it mean when the revolution gets run through tech money donated to a center at a private university? Can a best-selling book—one that was probably recommended by human-resources departments across the country—do anything other than flatter the vanity of its millions of readers by scolding them in the exact way they want to be scolded?
Probably not. But these questions certainly do not stop at Kendi or Minhaj, or even the book industry or television. We are in a time of unprecedented racial diversity at the highest levels of corporate media, which is undeniably a good thing; still, it’s worth asking whether the presence of an unexpected face has obviated some of the criticisms about what, exactly, that person might be saying and how his views may very well align with the same oppressive systems he’s trying to critique. Perhaps we don’t need to label individuals as sellouts, but we should certainly approach anyone purporting to be a mass-media truthteller with a healthy dose of suspicion. ♦
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