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Home » “The worst are full of passionate intensity”: meet Columbia student leader Khymani James

“The worst are full of passionate intensity”: meet Columbia student leader Khymani James

The New Neo Posted on by

Lately there’s been a great deal of talk around the blogosphere about Khymani James, the student leader – if the movement can be said to have a leader – of Columbia’s anti-Israel, anti-Semitic, and anti-Enlightenment demonstrations and encampments.

It makes me think of this sort of thing, updated for our own more messed-up era:

If you want to get up to speed on the sort of person who’s now considered a student leader, see this as well as this. From the former:

One of the most vocal student activists leading the anti-Israel Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Columbia University, Khymani James, openly stated in an live-stream of an official university inquiry in January that “Zionists don’t deserve to live.”

James, who states in the hearing that he goes by “he/she/they” pronouns, live-streamed his meeting with Columbia’s Center for Student Success and Intervention, where he doubled down on an Instagram post that sparked the report. In the report, which he reads aloud at the start of the meeting, James warned Zionists who may want to “meet up and fight” and that he “fights to kill.”

“Do you see why that’s problematic in any way?” a Columbia employee asked James during the hearing, to which he responded: “No.”

And from the second link:

[James said] “We will always stand on business. Zionists, they don’t deserve to live comfortably, let alone, Zionists don’t deserve to live. The same way we’re very comfortable accepting that nazis don’t deserve to live, fascists don’t deserve to live, racists don’t deserve to live, Zionists, they shouldn’t live in this world. ”

That particular video then cuts to James speaking in a cult-like fashion to a group of “protesters” who then formed a human chain to block Jewish students from passing.

James wasn’t done, though. In another excerpt from his livestream, he can be heard suggesting that he has a desire to murder Jews but hasn’t acted on it yet.

As the great poet Yeats wrote over 100 years ago, “the worst are full of passionate intensity.” He also wrote that “the best lack all conviction” – but I don’t think that’s the case here. “The best” have plenty of conviction – they’re just not in charge of our institutions.

But what especially interests me about Khymani James – aside from the fact that Columbia didn’t expel him under their no-hate-speech policy after they became aware of these remarks – is his personal history. Most recent articles I’ve read about him ignore that history, but I find it quite fascinating because this guy has been in a leadership role for a long time and has gotten many kudos for it. See this:

In 2021, the Boston Globe wrote a glowing article about James and his “confrontational approach.” It said that James was a high school student at the prestigious Boston Latin Academy, and a student member of the Boston Public Schools committee before resigning because the adult members were “racist and adultist.”

Just a few months later, he called into a school committee meeting and stated, “I, too, hate white people,” while defending two members accused of anti-white racism.

So that was in 2021, about three years ago, towards the end of his high school career. No wonder he’s so full of himself. The world has rewarded him over and over for his racism and hatred. He probably considered himself immune from any negative consequences, and why not?

And here’s an excerpt from that 2021 Globe article. What a lot of heady power for a 17-year-old [emphasis mine]:

As a global pandemic raged last fall, and battles over school reopening plans turned bitter, a 17-year-old high school senior named Khymani James was sworn in as the student representative on Boston’s School Committee.

From the confines of his bedroom, where he logged into marathon School Committee meetings on Zoom and peppered Twitter with his sharp critiques and pointed questions, James became an unlikely force in Boston politics last winter as he advocated for the city’s 50,000 students.

Outspoken and relentless in his quest for answers, the teenager’s direct approach at times contrasted starkly with the more cautious, guarded takes of his School Committee elders, all of them political appointees who serve at the pleasure of the mayor. …

The passion James brought to his public service began with his own turbulent personal history, the traumatic losses he rarely mentioned, even to close friends. It also reflects a generational shift, according to experts. Across the country, younger leaders are moving toward more confrontational approaches, forged in an era of historic social upheaval and destined to clash with an older, more conservative brand of leadership.

“This generation of young people is no longer satisfied with incremental change,” said Chris Buttimer, a researcher at the MIT Teaching Systems Lab who has studied student activism. “They want to fundamentally change structures.”

More background of a personal nature:

Known for his scathing critiques of Boston’s schools, James is also a sterling example of the system’s potential: A young Black man raised by a single, immigrant mother in a South Boston housing development, nurtured by teachers who recognized his potential, accepted by one of the city’s best public high schools, and then by a prestigious Ivy League college, Columbia University.

He attributes his lack of fear to his upbringing by a Jamaican mother of uncommon strength, who taught him to reject societal “rules” put in place to oppress the powerless. But tragedy and trauma made James fearless, too: When, at 12 years old, he lost his mother and his world collapsed, it felt like he had nothing left to lose.

Until then, it had been the two of them against the world, their feisty natures so closely entwined, James thought of them as two halves of the same person.

“Colors looked different after she was gone,” he said. “The sky looked darker.”

After his mother’s sudden death at age 31, James shuttled between relatives and family friends, enduring episodes of emotional abuse and struggles with his mental health, he said. Just beginning to identify as gay, he encountered intolerance in his own family.

After a relative abruptly kicked him out of their home on Easter morning in 2016 — in part for identifying as gay, James said — he recalls walking to a nearby T stop, carrying his few belongings in a garbage bag and wondering where to go next. He was still just 12.

He admits to having mental health “struggles” – and I believe him. The enmeshment with his mother and then her death at a young age would certainly be traumatic. However, plenty of people have terrible childhoods and don’t turn into raging balls of hatred because of it. He might have been thrown out of the relatives’ house because of being gay, but note that “in part” statement. My guess is that he was a rebellious and difficult young adolescent and they’d had enough. I wonder whether the Globe independently corroborated the story, as well.

More:

His close friend Charlene Adames-Pimentel recalls rampant homophobia in their middle school, where James was a target who constantly fought back. (“How’s your GPA?” was one of his favorite comebacks.)

“He was that person that everyone wanted to break, and you can’t break him,” Adames-Pimentel said. “He was intimidating in the sense that he was always right, and always himself.”

“Always right?” Hardly. But I don’t doubt he’s actually smart in the academic sense; James got into Boston Latin when it still was an exam school. Then he had a court internship, and then the prestigious Committee appointment:

Keenly observant and unafraid of conflict, James called out hypocrisy where he saw it: in budget cuts that threatened his teachers and mentors; in school reopening plans that failed to address aging ventilation systems; in leaders who claimed to value student voices, but failed to give the School Committee’s lone student representative, elected by their peers, equal standing as a voting member.

I had wondered how he got the position and that answers the question: other students elected him. More – and note that word “passion” again:

[Superintendent] Cassellius said she admired James’s passion and tireless preparation for meetings, and believed deeply in his potential, as she wrote in a glowing recommendation to Columbia. But she said she worried that the traumas of his past, and of the pandemic, were affecting him as his tone grew harsher.

It’s a trajectory that appears to have gotten steeper while at Columbia, and grown to include Jew-hatred.

More:

James said he was fully aware of committee conventions, and ultimately made a conscious choice to reject them. “I chose not to practice respectability politics because it wasn’t getting anyone anywhere,” he said.

“Respectability politics.”

James finally resigned from the School Committee. He then continued in the same strident and verbally combative vein. The following person gets bragging “I told you so” rights for warning Columbia prior to James’ becoming a student there [emphasis mine]:

After a June 16 School Committee meeting where James used inflammatory language to defend Oliver-Davila and Rivera, the two former board members accused of antiwhite racism, one Twitter user posted a video of his comments [apparently the ones bout hating whites] and tagged Columbia, suggesting that the school reconsider James’s admission. “Is this the type of student you want at your school?” the tweet asked.

Columbia administrators may be sorry they didn’t heed that particular tweet.

By the way, the comments to that Globe article, from 2021 when it was written, are quite something. Here’s one, for example: “Racism is the exploitation of people of color by white people and our white institutions. Prejudice against whites is not racism.”

Khymani James has probably been told that for most of his life.

And guess what? Now that all of this has gone public, Columbia has finally acted a little bitty bit:

Columbia University has banned the student protest leader, who said “Zionists don’t deserve to live,” from the campus, a university spokesperson confirmed to The Hill Friday.

Is that the same as being expelled? I don’t think so. And it’s not as though Columbia has just learned any of this. They were told of warning signs before James even entered the school, but they’ve certainly been aware of his rabid Jew-hatred for many many months.

Even James himself seems to have noticed that his usual exemption from consequences seems not to be operating quite the way it used to, because – very uncharacteristically, as far as I can see – he has apologized:

James apologized for the heated language Friday, saying in a post on social media platform X that his comments were “wrong.”

I was curious to read for myself what this apology consisted of, and sure enough, it’s accompanied by a “poor me” blaming of the nasty old right and the playing of the ever-present intersectional victim card. Here it is:

James has been playing this sort of game for a long, long time, minus the surface apology. It would be nice if he stops being rewarded for it. But I have no doubt that, if he fades into the background, he’ll be easily replaced by others playing a similar game.

Comments

“The worst are full of passionate intensity”: meet Columbia student leader Khymani James — 57 Comments

  1. Ok he seems to be a psycho like tennessee coates on benzedrine and whats with the bete noire about zionism

    Also im reminded about that jibe ‘if obama hD a son’ back when they prepping up the sanford tableau

    Someone given the rare privilege of going to boston latin and this is what he does with it.

  2. He may fade into the background until he’s elected to congress in eight years.

  3. I say buy him a ticket to get to Gaza and let him join Hama§. They deserve each other.

    At least that’ll help keep him from being elected to Congress.

  4. Fade, not likely. But, with his mindset, violence is really far behind. What will happen to him WHEN he does actual violence, no one knows.
    His Ego will not let me ever believe that he is wrong, only he is right.
    By the way, what is this “adultism”? Aren’t adults suppose to act like adults?

  5. SHIREHOME:

    I’m pretty sure it refers to the fact that he wasn’t allowed, as a student member of the Committee, to vote on its measures.

  7. Golly gee another young, antisemitic, bigot. This one gay, and brown skinned, and now, the real victim. Could be worse?

    As noted by others, he hasn’t killed anyone yet. Another red flag to be ignored?

  8. He sounds like a ticking time bomb.

    Coming out as gay at 12? I suspect there was some abuse going on.

  9. It is my entirely professional psychological opinion that what this little bespecktacled piece of arrogant whale blubber requires is a good arse-kicking. Every day. Forever.

  11. Adultist! How horrible!

    That’s a new one on me. We can add it to the pantheon of all those awful ist/ism thought crimes and criminals.

  12. So this is the guy that was leading the arms locked, chanting group pushing the Jews off the lawn? I thought that was a loud female. She or he would say something and the mob would repeat it. Truly cult like. Looked like most of the following were white kids, too. I suspect a lot of white kids these days have been psychological beat down to follow black leaders – or else they feel ” racist”.

  13. People hsve their careers destroyed for much less yet they patronized this punk this is two generations after hymie town and sharptons freddies fashion mart prep

  14. I’m sorry for this young man’s childhood trauma of losing his mother. Another intelligent young black man, raised in segregation, hardly knew his mother and was raised by a great-aunt and two aunts, with whom conflicts resulted in his being on his own at age 17. He made something of himself.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Sowell

  15. What a dirtbag.

    He’ll be an angry unhappy person all his life. There’s some solace in that.

  17. Well look at jamaal bowman he rose to the rank of principal (rank being the operative word)

  18. Your mention of Yeats made me think of an even more apt poem of his, “Easter, 1916.” Not a perfect fit, as Yeats was sympathetic to the cause of the rebels, but the poem seems (to me at least) to be about the terrible transformation of the people who got caught up in the rebellion, such as these two:

    That woman’s days were spent
    In ignorant good-will,
    Her nights in argument
    Until her voice grew shrill….

    He, too, has resigned his part
    In the casual comedy;
    He, too, has been changed in his turn,
    Transformed utterly:
    A terrible beauty is born.

    Hearts with one purpose alone
    Through summer and winter seem
    Enchanted to a stone
    To trouble the living stream.

    Read the whole poem.

  19. He’s West Indian, possibly Jamaican, not a heritage African-American. Ky-Mani Marley is Bob Marley’s son. So, like KJP Khymani James, has the threefor thing going on: Black, gay, immigrant.

    James admires and wants to work for AOC. He says his ultimate destination is Congress. He’s a young man on the make, a type that’s been with us forever, but that takes new forms in this generation.

  23. Sad to say … if this kid doesn’t get himself addicted, imprisoned or shot, he’s probably got a bright future ahead.

    Angela Davis and Bill Ayers come to mind.

  24. 2024 keeps feeling like 1968, as in “The Strawberry Statement.”
    ______________________________________

    The Strawberry Statement is a non-fiction book by James Simon Kunen, written when he was 19, which chronicled his experiences at Columbia University from 1966–1968, particularly the April 1968 protests and takeover of the office of the dean of Columbia by student protesters
    ______________________________________

    “Strawberry Statement” as a moniker was based on a quote from a Columbia vice dean who dismissed sixties student activism. Perhaps one of the last high level college admins to directly oppose the radicals:
    ______________________________________

    Whether students vote ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on a given issue means as much to me as if they were to tell me they like strawberries.
    ______________________________________

    Hence, “The Strawberry Statement”. A brilliant title, winning at the time. Thereafter college authorities mostly rolled over for the radicals.

    Kunen gravitated into media, going from Newsday to People and ending up at Times-Warner for 20 years as a director of communications. He lost his job in his mid-60s and wrote a book about it — “Diary of a Company Man: Losing a Job, Finding a Life”.

    A door closes, a window opens! 🙂

  25. Banned Lizzard:

    Khymani James should get his wish and be a passenger on a HMMV being donated by the USAF into Gazza:

    Raining Humvees! Military Vehicles Fall To The Ground In Failed US Airdrop

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvJdw_s8qh4

    Actually being in a drop zone is pretty risky IIRC, the pallets of stuff, when the ‘chutes work, will smash you like a bug. Looting in the drop zone would be particularly dangerous for Hamashites.

    But then I’ve read reports that the Hamashites are targeting the mobile offshore pier the US DOD is constructing for offloading aid with mortars. What can’t the Hamashites and Westbankonians F up?

  26. Nobody pointed out his pronouns “he/she/they”—I don’t think this is meant to imply you can refer to him as anything and he’ll be fine with it. No, it’s meant to put everyone in peril of referring to him with the wrong pronouns at any given time depending if he feels like accusing the offender of bigotry. His broad spectrum of pronouns are a no win situation designed to paint him as a perpetual victim and constantly give him an “in” to lash out at assailants…or he is grammatically illiterate and doesn’t know what subjective and possessive pronouns are…or both

  29. I visit Yeats’s grave on my every trip to Ireland. Always have a nice conversation with the great man, charring under Ben Bulben’s looming presence. I studied Yeats and Irish literature, intensively, in college. It was the only really worthwhile thing I did in my university experience.

    Jimmy, I have a different interpretation of Easter 1916. Hint: He was much more than merely sympathetic to the cause of the rebels.

  31. Well he WAS head-over-heels in love with Maude Gonne…

    Literature gained a great deal when he concluded he couldn’t succumb to this infatuation…that poetry was a more heady and worthy object of his love…

    We all have benefited…

    (And so…do we have her to thank?)
    – – – – – – – – – –
    “…brutalized by a police bicycle…”
    Thanks, miguel…
    Love the part about the feral bicycle…

  32. People like James total hypocrites.
    If her/it/he/she/they/them/cat/dog/giraffe/
    gorilla/snake really believes the BS that emanates from his anal orifice, he should get himself to Gaza and fight on the side of Hamas.
    Of course, as soon as he got there, Hamas would hang him , shoot him or throw him off a tall building because he is a homosexual.

    How ironic; he supports a politco-terrorist movement that would waste no time in killing him.
    What a stupid piece of dog excrement.

  33. For a while, I thought James Simon Kunen and today’s blogger James Howard Kunstler were the same person, William Kunstler being another 60s luminary.

    Boston Latin Academy, where Khymani James went, is the former Girl’s Latin School. It’s still an exam school, but it’s not as prestigious as Boston Latin.

  38. My wager would be that his account of his upbringing is fictionalized.
    ==
    Various authorities have created a monster by not hitting this obnoxious clown with common and garden sanctions for bad behavior. While we’re at it, who fancies his school admissions did not include some large mulligans? If you do, buy my bridge.
    ==
    The educational apparat is pathological.

  39. You know I try to hold my tongue, but what jive is this turkey spouting

    Zionists, you mean the ones who saw their parents and grandparents wiped out from Central Asia to the Atlantic coast, so naturally they went to the only safe place they could see which was the former British Mandate,

    he could be obama’s son, and sharpton’s nephew, with jesse jackson as baby sitter, maybe Quannell X, a notable figure in the Panthers new edition, I know white people are supposed to grovel to people wearing the kente cloth of the Ashanti slave traders that Baden Powell actually put an end to, but who is painted as the villain rhetorical,

    re the Rising, on the one hand I do understand the need for it, on the other hand
    in the midst of the Great War, I do understand the need to suppress it, although perhaps the treatment of Roger Casement was too severe,

    the Rising came up in an episode of blue bloods that dealt with terrorism of the Islamist variety, it was handled about as well as it could

  41. Is this clown’s social media presence the sort of thing which should have been noticed prior to some mass casualty event?

  42. he resembles the parkland shooter, because of his circumstances but his attitudes are much like those known wolves in nashville and elsewhere, that seem to fly under the radar, you know right, the bureau would not raise a tiny flag carried by a hamster, while they still continue with the ‘insurrectionist’ witchhunt eleventy,

  44. His Twitter bio includes “anti-capitalist”. He’s a Marxist. That helps us understand better much of his hateful rhetoric. Don’t get me wrong. It *is* hateful. James is serious bad news. He directs hate against “white people”, “Zionists”, and so on, because they represent capitalism. Most of the campus unrest is not really about Israel or Gaza but about socialist Revolution.

  45. Poor Medea Benjamin (Code Pink) it’s so hard to maintain 15 seconds of fame nowadays.

    Medea has it on good authority that 100 “journalists” have been killed in Gaza (Hamas-stan). (sarc x 11)

    Felled by bouncing rubble Medea?

  46. rich girl, judy or jane some such, she played this jenin drum solo, what 20 years ago,

  47. I have a different interpretation of Easter 1916. Hint: He was much more than merely sympathetic to the cause of the rebels.

    Yeah, I realize I might be projecting my own views onto Yeats. But even ardently supporting the rebels’ cause doesn’t mean he didn’t have some very mixed feelings about the consequences of their strategy. See this, for what it’s worth. It’s hard for me to read this

    Was it needless death after all?
    For England may keep faith
    For all that is done and said.
    We know their dream; enough
    To know they dreamed and are dead;
    And what if excess of love
    Bewildered them till they died?

    any other way, but I’d be interested in your view, as you have studied Yeats much more than I have.

    And neo, thanks for pointing out those older posts on Yeats.

  49. Kate:

    For some jobs, the arrest on their records will be a plus. For example, they could get jobs with the Times, the WaPo, NPR, or the Squads’ campaigns.

  50. Very true, Neo. That is a fairly restrictive job pool, but it is what they are now qualified for. They’ll count on a Democrat president to forgive their student debt.

  54. And it came to pass that the Irish were totes fine with the Nazis in WWII. Almost as bad as our Hamashites today? Hate does that.

  55. “He was that person that everyone wanted to break, and you can’t break him,” Adames-Pimentel said. “He was intimidating in the sense that he was always right, and always himself.”

    Correction: “He was intimidating in the sense that he was always right, and always full of himself.”

  56. The Irish were NOT “totes fine” with the Nazis. De Valera was, but he was always a swine, as Collins well knew. {Can you tell I’m a Collins man?) Irishmen overall thought otherwise, and many served in the British army in WW2.

    Case in point was, is, the famed Irish Guards Regiment, a unit in the British Army also known as the “Fighting Micks”: “Although restrictions in Ireland’s Defence Act make it illegal to induce, procure or persuade enlistment of any citizen of Ireland [i.e., the Republic of Ireland] into the military of another state, people from the Republic do frequently enlist in the Regiment.”

    They did so in WW2, and continue to do so today.

    I have visited Ireland on several occasions, and in my extensive travels through both the Republic and the Six Counties I found that the Irish generally had unfavorable views of England and the English. The term “unfavorable views” covers a lot ground, and can extend to extremes, but I haven’t visited Ireland in 25 years and these attitudes may have, probably have changed — which is to say, ameliorated. I suspect that young Irish men and women are indifferent to the English. A number of very old men and women I met in the course of my travels, and with whom I struck up lengthy conversations (as was to often the case), had fought in the War of Independence and the Civil War and lamented that the younger Irish generations were appallingly ignorant of Irish history.

    In the event, the Irish in WW2 wanted nothing to do Hitler and the Nazis, and saw that a German victory would result for Ireland in a situation far worse than the rule of the English from which they had so frequently divested themselves.

    Interesting little-known fact: Collins’s older brother emigrated to America before the Easter Rising and settled in Chicago, where was buried. He tried very hard, in letters to his younger brother, to convince Michael to join him. Evidently Michael gave the suggestion his serious consideration, but ultimately decided to stay in Ireland and fight for the expulsion of the English and the creation of an Irish free state. It seems that the older brother knew that Michael would get himself killed if he stayed in Ireland. He was, of course, right about that.

    Just imagine how the course of Irish history would have been changed had Michael joined his brother in Chicago.

  57. This clown strikes me as someone “most likely to succeed” by opening fire on a commuter train filled with unsuspecting citizens ala his fellow paranoid schizophrenic Jamaican, Colin Ferguson in 1993.

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