[4] In July 2020, he founded the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University where he has served[update] as director,[5] having raised an initial funding of $55 million.

[11] In 1997, then age 15, Kendi moved with his family to Manassas, Virginia, after having attended John Bowne High School as a freshman.

His Famuan column was discontinued at the request of the Democrat after he wrote an article claiming European people had invented HIV/AIDS to fight off the "extinction" of their race.

[13] Kendi's dissertation was titled "The Black Campus Movement: An Afrocentric Narrative History of the Struggle to Diversify Higher Education, 1965-1972.

[21][22] When he was hired at Boston University, Kendi was awarded its Andrew W. Mellon Professorship in the Humanities, whose only prior recipient was author, activist, and Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel.

[23] During the 2020–2021 academic year, Kendi served as the Frances B. Cashin Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.

[27] In June 2022, the center published essays from 35 Anti-Bigotry Fellows, which provided legal and statistical analysis on various forms of discrimination.

"[26][30] On September 24, 2023, Stephanie Saul of The New York Times wrote: The center's struggles come amid deeper concerns about its management and focus, and questions about whether Dr. Kendi—whose fame has brought him new projects from an ESPN series to children's books about racist ideas in America—was providing the leadership the newly created institute needed.

Until the university established the center, the 41-year-old Dr. Kendi had never run an organization anywhere near its size … several former staff and faculty members, expressing anger and bitterness, said the cause of the center's problems were unrealistic expectations fueled by the rapid infusion of money, initial excitement, and pressure to produce too much, too fast, even as there were hiring delays due to the pandemic.

"Commensurate to the amount of cash and donations taken in, the outputs were minuscule," said Saida U. Grundy, a Boston University sociology professor and feminist scholar who was once affiliated with the center.

[34] In November 2023, Boston University announced that its audit had "found no issues with how CAR's finances were handled, showing that its expenditures were appropriately charged to their respective grant and gift accounts."

In the same announcement, the university stated that it had hired the management consulting firm Korn Ferry to conduct an audit on the center's workplace culture and Kendi's leadership.

[44] In contrast, Andrew Sullivan wrote that the book's arguments were simplistic and criticized Kendi's idea of transferring government oversight to an unelected Department of Antiracism.

[14] John McWhorter criticized the book as being simplistic and challenged Kendi's claim that all racial disparities are necessarily due to racism.

"[50] When speaking in November 2020 to the Alliance for Early Success, Kendi was asked if that even means abiding racist behavior and attitudes if it leads to winning an antiracist policy.

Kendi provoked controversy when he tweeted about Amy Coney Barrett, President Donald Trump's third Supreme Court nominee, and two of her seven children, who had been adopted from an orphanage in Haiti.

[56][57][58][59] In a discussion with journalist Don Lemon, Kendi said that he was taught to fear the differences of gay and transgender people until he was "shown another way.