Antiracism Center’s Bold Moves

Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities Ibram X. Kendi, one of the nation’s leading scholars of racism and a professor of history in the College of Arts & Sciences, last spring teamed up with the Boston Globe to publish The Emancipator, an independent antiracist multimedia platform inspired by Boston’s 19th-century antislavery broadsheets.

“[The Emancipator] is a periodical that will marry the best of scholarship and the best of journalism to really comment on, report on, analyze, and find the truth about the racial problems of our time,” Kendi says.

The move is one of many since Kendi joined the University faculty in the summer of 2020 and opened the BU Center for Antiracist Research. In December 2020, together with the Faculty of Computing & Data Sciences, he launched the Racial Data Lab, a national online database of racial inequality, and started a narrative effort to collect videos, photos, and essays from people of color about how COVID-19 has affected their lives and loved ones.

Kendi was named one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world for 2020 and is the author of the 2019 best-selling book How to Be an Antiracist and the National Book Award–winning Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. He said BU’s multidisciplinary culture, where faculty are encouraged to collaborate across schools and disciplines—social workers teaming up with artists, doctors working with engineers, educators sitting with data scientists—has served the center well.

The center has already built multidisciplinary problem-centered research teams; assisted faculty from all corners of BU with converting racial research into media pitches and books; collected, organized, and utilized data on racial inequity; and organized public events, including the National Antiracist Book Festival. Kendi says his goal is to build a premier center for researchers and practitioners to confront and solve some of the most difficult problems concerning race.

“Not only will the center seek to make that level of impact but it will also transform how racial research is done,” he says.