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Dr. Ibram X. Kendi, a 2021 MacArthur Fellow, is making a tremendous impact in antiracist activism through his creative ideas. His work supports the idea that creativity is connecting concepts to form a novel idea, Sternberg's triarchic patterns of creativity, and the concept that creative success takes time and perseverance to develop.

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Creativity Theme 3: Creativity Takes Time and Perseverance

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Creativity Theme 3: Creativity Takes Time and Perseverance

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Weisberg posits that creativity takes time and perseverance in that creative individuals find novel solutions and ideas when they have already wrestled with a problem in a traditional way (Sarko, 2018, p. 63). In addition, Shekerjian (1990) suggests that creativity stems from continuously revisiting the same problem or idea: The “interrelationship of projects seems to be typical of creative activity. The exploration of an interlocking network of enterprises revolving around one specific activity allows the researcher to look at the problem from lots of different angles” (p. 9-10). In these ways, Kendi's work supports this theme:

Kendi has centered his work around the racism and anti-racism. He has looked at this work through multiple angles: the history of racism, the history of antiracism, how to solve systemic racism today, how to teach others to be antiracist.

He has attacked the problem of antiracism through a variety of methods: writing books and articles and creating a podcast to educate numerous audiences on the problem, founding CAR to research and strengthen racism, and teaching others how to engage in antiracist activism.

Kendi notes, “I think it’s easy for people to come to my work and not think that I had a tremendous amount of resistance and even struggle in order to be able to write the type of books and even talk about the type of issues that I feel are necessary to talk about...Most of my career has been rejection. It has been a career of people telling me no" (Ramsey, 2020, Being Antiracist Is Work, Even for Ibram X. Kendi - WSJ).

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Ibram X. Kendi has very little free time these days. His schedule is packed with Zoom meetings, virtual speaking engagements, photo shoots and phone interviews from his new home in Boston, where he's joining the faculty of Boston University as a professor of history and launching the new BU Center for Antiracist Research. Kendi is best-known as the author of How to Be an Antiracist, and everyone, it seems, wants instructions directly from the source. On one especially busy day last month, he worked from a 7 a.m. appearance on MSNBC's Morning Joe to an 11 p.m. appearance on The 11th Hour With Brian Williams. "It's been a lot," Kendi says.

When the 37-year-old scholar published his first book, The Black Campus Movement, in 2012, it came out to little fanfare. But his second book, Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, sold well and earned him the 2016 National Book Award for nonfiction. How to Be an Antiracist hit bestseller lists when it was released last August, but now sales of all Kendi's books (including the just-released Antiracist Baby board book and a young-adult adaptation of Kendi's Stamped titled Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, by Jason Reynolds) have surged amid weeks of unrest following the police killing of George Floyd.

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Being Antiracist Is Work, Even for Ibram X. Kendi

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Ibram X. Kendi has very little free time these days. His schedule is packed with Zoom meetings, virtual speaking engagements, photo shoots and phone interviews from his new home in Boston, where he's joining the faculty of Boston University as a professor of history and launching the new BU Center for Antiracist Research.

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Creativity Theme 2: Sternberg's Triarchic Models

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Creativity Theme 2: Sternberg's Triarchic Models

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Sternberg posits that creativity and giftedness show through multiple patterns depending on an individual's personality. These patterns can be any combination of analyst, creator, and practitioner. I posit that Kendi is an analytical practitioner. "Analytic practitioners are analytically as well as practically gifted and thus more discriminating in the ideas they propound. Good universities probably turn out Analytic Practitioners in large numbers-people who succeed in society by virtue of their high IQs and their ability to translate their IQs into a formula for success” (Sternberg, 2000, p. 233).

Kendi is an analyst in that he thrives at analyzing complex social ideas and systems; this is what makes him such a good historian. He analyzes historical concepts and themes to produce new ideas.

Kendi is a practitioner in that he is good at communicating his ideas effectively with a variety of audiences, including to academics, policy makers, the average person, and even children. This is something he is deliberate about and something he typically does through writing.

Kendi has written 10 books. Some of these are aimed at academic audiences while others are aimed at the general population. Still more were written for secondary students and some even for young children.

Kendi has also published a podcast, Be Antiracist with Ibram X. Kendi. This allows him to reach a wider range of people.

More than just explaining his ideas, Kendi inspires people to make change through his work with antiracism.

However, Sternberg posits that these types of creative people do not make lasting contributions. Kendi’s contributions, which he is still making, are too recent to fully analyze, but it seems as though his contributions to the fields of history and antiracist activism will be lasting in that they provided guidance and inspiration to a large group of people at a critical juncture in society.

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Kendi was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer while working on his book Stamped from the Beginning, a massive tome detailing the history of racism since its conception. He drew parallels between his body's fight against a tumor and society's struggle against a racist system, calling racism "metastatic" (MacArthur Foundation, video linked above).

In this way, Kendi applied and connected two unrelated concepts to create deeper meaning.

In his work, Kendi took traditional views about racism and combined them into an overarching definition as something that is institutional in nature.

Kendi is good at finding relationships between concepts, as shown through this excerpt from Stamped from the Beginning: “Ignorance/hate –> racist ideas –> [racist policies]: this causal relationship is largely ahistorical. It has actually been the inverse relationship—[racist policies] led to racist ideas which led to ignorance and hate. [Racist policies] –> racist ideas –> ignorance/hate: this is the causal relationship driving America’s history of race" (Kendi, 2016, excerpt found at Scholarship — IXK. (ibramxkendi.com)).

Kendi founded the Center for Antiracist Research (CAR) at Boston University. CAR's mission and vision is to "[represent] a collaborative research and education effort across multiple disciplines to build a world where racial equity and social justice prevail" (The Center | Center for Antiracist Research (bu.edu)).

CAR encourages creative solutions through collaboration of a variety of scholars and their different ideas.

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Ibram X. Kendi, American Historian and Writer | 2021 MacArthur Fellow (Extended)

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Creativity Theme 1: Linking Unrelated Ideas

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Creativity Theme 1: Linking Unrelated Ideas

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One of the most common themes found in the definitions of creativity revolves around an individual connecting unrelated ideas in a novel way. We see this in multiple class readings and theories:

“Many [creative] process definitions assume that a creative idea is a combination of previously unrelated ideas, or looking at it another way, a new relationship among existing ideas” (Davis, 1999, p. 44).

Gardner: “The creative individual is a person who regularly solves problems, fashions products, or defines new questions in a domain in a way that is initially considered novel but that ultimately becomes accepted in a particular cultural setting” (Davis, 1999, p. 58).

Note that a few decades ago (or even just a few years ago) Kendi’s ideas would probably not be widely culturally accepted. Today, however, society is in a place to accept the idea of institutional racism and anti-racism. This is largely due to social media making it impossible to ignore widespread structural racism.

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Kendi's biggest contributions focus on antiracism. This is the idea that it is not enough in today's society to be simply non-racist. Rather, we must be antiracist and actively challenge racist systems.

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Kendi's work posits that there is a difference between racists and racism. Racism is structural and institutional in that the systems under which we live were created with racist values and policies in place.

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Ibram X. Kendi is an American historian and writer whose work focuses on the historical and modern presence of racism in society. More specifically, his work elucidates on antiracism, a concept that is now a household term because of his influence.