On 2 June, Philadelphia’s annual Pride parade came to a sudden stop at the intersection of 11^th and Locust Streets, when participants found their route blocked by a group of anti-Pride activists. A generation ago, one might have supposed these agitators were social conservatives railing against the “homosexual lifestyle.” But this being 2024, the aggrieved mob turned out to consist of fellow progressives organised under the auspices of an anti-Israel group called “Queers4Palestine.” In the viral footage that emerged from the confrontation, the group’s members can be seen shouting slogans such as “No pride in genocide” and (the decidedly less catchy) “Pride as we know it cannot be separated from our current political and economic climate.” In other words, no one is allowed to have fun—because Gaza.

Two days later, The New York Times Magazine published a lengthy investigative profile of Ibram X. Kendi, America’s most prominent anti-racist activist and academic. As Rachel Poser writes in her Times feature, Kendi’s star has dimmed considerably over the last year, following news that he laid off over half the employees at his recently inaugurated Boston University Center for Antiracist Research.

In addition to chronicling disgruntled ex-staffers’ allegations that Kendi is a controlling boss with poor managerial skills, Poser points to a fundamental contradiction embedded in the Center’s mission: On the one hand, it’s supposed to take inspiration from Kendi’s revolutionary rhetoric about abolishing police and prisons, America’s status as a bastion of “white supremacist terror,” and the supposedly intertwined nature of capitalism and racism. On the other hand, Kendi has turned himself into a hyper-profitable capitalist brand—charging $20,000 for a one-hour Zoom call, and churning out best-selling books with titles such as Antiracist Baby (the “fresh new board book that empowers parents and children to uproot racism in our society and in ourselves”). Worst of all (from his in-house critics’ perspective), he partnered his research centre with the diversity-and-equity functionaries at Deloitte, a multinational professional services network with annual revenues of $65 billion.