Ibram Xolani Kendi (born Ibram Henry Rogers; August 13, 1982) is an American author, professor, anti-racist activist, and historian of race and discriminatory policy in America. In July 2020, he founded the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University where he serves as director. Kendi was included in Time's 100 Most Influential People of 2020. Kendi has attracted criticism for his alleged financial mismanagement of the Center for Antiracist Research.
 Kendi was born in the Jamaica neighborhood of the New York City borough of Queens, as Ibram Henry Rogers, to middle-class parents, Carol Rogers, a former business analyst for a health-care organization, and Larry Rogers, a tax accountant and then hospital chaplain. Both of his parents are now retired and work as Methodist ministers. He has an older brother, Akil.
 From third to eighth grade, Kendi attended private Christian schools in Queens. In 1997, then age 15, Kendi moved with his family to Manassas, Virginia, after having attended John Bowne High School as a freshman. He attended Stonewall Jackson High School for his final three years of high school and graduated in 2000. 
 In 2005, Kendi received dual B.S. degrees in African American Studies and magazine production from Florida A&M University. Kendi continued his studies at Temple University where he was advised by Ama Mazama, earning an M.A. in 2007 and a Ph.D. in 2010, both in African American Studies. Kendi's dissertation was titled "The Black Campus Movement: An Afrocentric Narrative History of the Struggle to Diversify Higher Education, 1965-1972."
 From 2008 to 2012, Kendi was an assistant professor of history in the department of Africana and Latino Studies within the department of history at State University of New York at Oneonta. From 2012 to 2015, Kendi was an assistant professor of Africana Studies in the department of Africana Studies as well as the department of history at University at Albany, SUNY. During this time, from 2013 to 2014, Kendi was a visiting scholar in the department of Africana Studies at Brown University, where he taught courses as a visiting assistant professor in the fall of 2014.
 From 2015 to 2017, Kendi was an assistant professor at the University of Florida history department's African American Studies program.
 In 2017, Kendi became a professor of history and international relations at the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) and School of International Service (SIS) at American University in Washington, D.C. In September 2017, Kendi founded the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University, serving as its executive director. In June 2020, it was announced that Kendi would join Boston University as a professor of history. Upon accepting the position, Kendi agreed to move the Antiracist Research and Policy Center at American University to Boston University, as founding director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research.
 During the 2020–2021 academic year, Kendi served as the Frances B. Cashin Fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.
 Kendi is the founding director of Boston University's Center for Antiracist Research, which was launched in 2020. In August 2020, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey donated $10 million to the center; the center received $43 million in grants and gifts over the next 3 years.
 The center's Racial Data Lab produced the COVID Racial Data Tracker from April 2020 to March 2021, highlighting that Black Americans died at 1.4 times the rate of White Americans during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2021, inspired by 19th-century abolitionist newspaper The Emancipator, the center launched a news website also called The Emancipator in partnership with Bina Venkataraman of The Boston Globe. In June 2022, the center published essays from 35 Anti-bigotry Fellows, which provided legal and statistical analysis on various forms of discrimination.
 In September 2023, Kendi announced mass layoffs of the center's staff. Boston University then announced that they had opened an inquiry into "the Center's management culture and the faculty and staff's experience with it" due to "complaints ... about the center's culture and financial management." According to The Washington Free Beacon, the Center produced little research with its staff of 45 and multi-million dollar budget.
 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. Others blamed Dr. Kendi, himself, for what they described as an imperious leadership style. And they questioned both the center's stewardship of grants and its productivity. "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. In the course of the investigation, other professors at Boston University who worked at the center have attested to the center's issues, with one alleging that the center "was being mismanaged" and another commenting, "I don't know where the money is." Steph Solis of Axios noted that the scandal "cast a shadow" over the center, while Tyler Austin Harper, writing for The Washington Post, characterized Kendi's work at the center as "grift."
 Kendi has published essays in both books and academic journals, including The Journal of African American History, Journal of Social History, Journal of Black Studies, Journal of African American Studies, and The Sixties: A Journal of History, Politics and Culture. Kendi is also a contributing writer at The Atlantic.
 He is the author of six books:
 In 2016, Kendi won the National Book Award for Nonfiction for Stamped from the Beginning, which was published by Nation Books. He was the youngest author to ever win the prize. Titled after an 1860 speech given by Jefferson Davis at the U.S. Senate, the book builds around the stories of historical figures Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, and W.E.B. Du Bois, as well as the current figure, Angela Davis.
 A New York Times #1 Best Seller in 2020, How to Be an Antiracist is Kendi's most popular work thus far. Professor Jeffrey C. Stewart called it the "most courageous book to date on the problem of race in the Western mind". Afua Hirsch praised the book's introspection and wrote that it was relatable in the context of ongoing political events. 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. Kelefa Sanneh noted Kendi's "sacred fervor" in battling racism, but wondered if his definition of racism was so capacious and outcome-dependent as to risk losing its power. John McWhorter criticized the book as being simplistic and challenged Kendi's claim that all racial disparities are necessarily due to racism.
 Kendi argues that policy outcomes are central in measuring and effecting racial equity. He has said, "All along we've been trying to change people, when we really need to change policies." 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 answered with a definitive yes. "I want things to change for millions of people – millions of children – as opposed to trying to change one individual person."
 On May 27, 2020, Kendi appeared before the United States House Committee on Ways and Means about the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on African Americans, saying: "This is the racial pandemic within the viral pandemic".
 Kendi has been a long-time outspoken critic of police killings of black men and women. In 2020, speaking to The New York Times after How to Be an Antiracist saw renewed interest during the George Floyd protests, Kendi called the mood in the United States during the protests "a signature, significant distinct moment of people striving to be antiracist".
 Before the protests, Kendi published a proposal for a constitutional amendment in the U.S. to establish and fund the Department of Anti-Racism (DOA). This department would be responsible for "preclearing all local, state and federal public policies to ensure they won't yield racial inequity, monitor those policies, investigate and be empowered with disciplinary tools to wield over and against policymakers and public officials who do not voluntarily change their racist policy and ideas".
 
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. Kendi said:  Some White colonizers 'adopted' Black children. They 'civilized' these 'savage' children in the 'superior' ways of White people, while using them as props in their lifelong pictures of denial, while cutting the biological parents of these children out of the picture of humanity. And whether this is Barrett or not is not the point. It is a belief too many White people have: if they have or adopt a child of color, then they can't be racist.  His remarks were interpreted as criticizing interracial adoption. A substantial backlash against Kendi ensued. He later said his comments were taken out of context and that he had never said that white parents of black children are inherently racist.
 In 2013, Kendi married Sadiqa Edmonds, a pediatric emergency medicine physician, in Jamaica. Both sets of parents participated in a symbolic sand ceremony. The wedding ceremony ended with a naming ceremony of their new last name, "Kendi", which means "the loved one" in the language of the Meru people of Kenya. Kendi changed his middle name to Xolani, a Xhosa and Zulu word for "peace".
 In January 2018, a colonoscopy indicated that Kendi had cancer. A further test revealed that he had stage 4 colon cancer that had spread into his liver. After six months of chemotherapy and surgery that summer, Kendi was declared cancer free.
 Kendi has been a vegan since at least 2015.