In this YouTube segment, Dennis Prager challenges Ibram X. Kendi’s recent social‑media remarks that white people who adopt Black children cannot be racist. Prager questions Kendi’s vague use of “white” and “superior ways,” argues that America is not broadly racist and that claims of pervasive racism are often hoaxes, and references his own “5 arguments that America is not racist.” He draws a historical analogy to German adoption of Jews during the Holocaust to illustrate the absurdity of equating adoption with the elimination of prejudice. Prager also notes Kendi’s call to abandon the term “not racist” in favor of a binary “racist vs. anti‑racist,” and he critiques this framing. Throughout, Prager interjects with rhetorical questions, challenges Kendi’s definitions, and brings up Amy Coney Barrett as a tangential example, while Speaker B offers brief responses.
Chapters
Kendi wrote on social media, some white colonizers quote unquote adopted black children.
This is what they always do.
They go back to the past. Well, X number of blacks were lynched. That's correct. And it's evil. What does that have to do with today? There's so little racism in America that most of the time you hear about it, it's a hoax. One of the 5 arguments I have, it's a very important piece I wrote, 5 arguments that America is not racist. Send it to your kids. He continues, they quote, civilized these savage children in the superior ways of white people. Oh, he capitalizes white. It's right. You are a member of some distinct ethnic group. Whites. What is white? What is the superior ways of white people? White people have believed in communism, fascism, Nazism, democracy, Christianity, Judaism. I don't quite know. What does it even mean? What does it mean, the white ways of white people? Do you have a definition? Which whites is he referring to? But according to him, it's white people, capital W. This is the man who teaches at Boston University, who heads a center there, while— and best-selling author, of course— while using them, that is the children, as props in their lifelong pictures of denial, while cutting the biological parents of these children out of the picture of humanity. Is he referring to Amy Barrett? If not, isn't it irrelevant? And whether this is Barrett or not is not the point. I think it is the point, isn't it? It is a belief too many white people have. If they have or adopt a child of color, then they can't be racist. Hmm.
It's an interesting question.
So can you think blacks are inferior, but I will love one as my child? Or even, I hate blacks, but I will raise one as my child? You know, as a Jew who has written a book on antisemitism and studied it my whole life, I can only say that If the Jews of Germany had been adopted by German parents when they didn't have Jewish parents to raise them, if that was the extent of German antisemitism, 6 million Jews would be alive today.
A lot more, because they would have had children. This is when you have to make up racism.
On Monday, Kendi opined more on whether someone can be free from racism. We should eliminate the term not racist from the human vocabulary, he wrote. We are either being racist or anti-racist. So you could be not racist but not anti-racist. It's an interesting thing. I'll talk about that in a moment.
