How To Be An Anti-Extremist

One either allows wrongthink to persevere, as an extremist, or confronts wrongthink, as an anti-extremist. There is no in-between safe space of “not extremist.” The claim of “not extremist” neutrality is a mask for extremism.

That’s a very slight paraphrase of a line from Ibram X. Kendi’s How to be an Antiracist. In Kendi’s telling—his version is about racists and antiracists and racial inequities—it’s the air-tight justification for an “anti-racist constitutional amendment” and a consequent “Department of Antiracism” (I wonder who should be in charge of that?). It is also the...