cover letter etiquette 2022

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How to Write a Cover Letter in 2022 (With 6 Cover Letter Examples)

Posted by CV Nation on Dec 11, 2021

The ultimate guide to writing a cover letter to land jobs in 2022, with 6 cover letter examples and everything you need to know to impress recruiters.

When applying for jobs, you will usually be required to submit a cover letter. Recruiters use cover letters to assess your suitability for jobs and learn about your experiences, skills and achievements.

An effective cover letter can help you stand out from the crowd and make a positive impression on recruiters.

In this guide, we’ll show you how to prepare a cover letter for any job that does exactly that. We’ll also show you six great cover letter examples.

What is a Cover Letter?

Cover letters, often referred to as motivation letters, are introductory letters that usually accompany your CV when applying for jobs.

Cover letter are usually one-page in length, expressing why you’re applying for the job and highlighting your skills, experiences and achievements.

How to Structure Your Cover Letter

When writing your cover letter, follow our six-step process to ensure you cover all the key points and sell yourself as effectively as possible.

Take a look at the cover letter examples in this guide to see how we have used this formula to create engaging, effective cover letters.

Here is our six-step cover letter writing process:

1. Introduction

2. overview of knowledge and expertise, 3. unique value proposition (uvp), 4. why you want to work for the company, 5. key skills, 6. polite ending and call to action.

Let’s take a look at these steps in detail:

Start your cover letter with a concise introduction that explains who you are and why you’re applying for the job.

Provide a brief overview of your knowledge, experience and expertise. Use this paragraph to draw attention to what you bring to the table.

Your Unique Value Proposition (UVP) is what makes you unique. Demonstrating your UVP can set you apart from other candidates and convince recruiters you’re the right person for the job.

Identify your UVP by thinking about what makes you unique, then convey this in your cover letter.

Convey why you want to work for the company. This is where you can use your research to show how you are aligned with the company’s values and culture.

Showcase a few of your key skills to show what you can bring to the table.

Bring your cover letter to a close by thanking the reader for their time and including a concise call to action. This will usually be for the recruiter to get in touch with you to discuss your application in more detail.

Cover Letter Example

One of the keys to writing a great cover letter is research. By researching the company you’re applying to work for, you’ll be able to tailor your cover letter and show how you’re aligned with the company’s culture and values.

How do you conduct research into companies?

To conduct research into the company you’re applying to work for, examine the company’s website. You may want to take a look at their ‘About Us’ or ‘Careers’ pages. This will help you learn about their culture and what it’s like to work for them.

Additionally, you could view the company’s social media accounts and the job description to learn more about their culture and values.

Email Cover Letters

If you’re submitting a cover letter in the body of an email, you will need to format it slightly different to cover letters that are attached to emails or submitted as a document.

Email cover letters do not need to include the address of the company you’re applying to work for. You also do not need to include your name at the top of the cover letter, as is demonstrated in some of the cover letter examples in this guide.

Here is an example of an email cover letter:

Email Cover Letter Example

How to Write a Cover Letter with No Experience

If you’ve got no experience in the profession that you’re pursuing a job in, focus on your transferable skills and experiences.

For example, if you’re applying for a customer service job but have no customer service experience, you could focus on your communication skills and your experiences working with customers.

Here is an example cover letter for someone with no experience:

Cover Letter Example - No Experience

How to Professionally Format Your Cover Letter

Line spacing.

Using appropriate line spacing between paragraphs ensures your cover letter is professional in appearance and easy to read.

Letters that don’t use line spacing often appear as one huge block of text. Most recruiters won’t even read these letters, so make sure to utilise your word processor’s line spacing feature.

To add spacing to your cover letter in Microsoft Word, highlight the text, click ‘Layout’, then add 8 pt. spacing in the ‘After’ section.

This will ensure your paragraphs are easily distinguished from each other. It will also optimise your recruiter’s reading experience, which can only be a positive thing!

Margins are the blank spaces at the edges of your cover letter. The size of your margins will depend on the amount of content in your cover letter.

If you have a lot of content to include, your margins should be narrower, which would give you more space. If you have a shorter cover letter, your margins should be wider.

Ideally, you should be aiming for margin sizes of between 1.7 cm (0.66”) and 2.5 cm (0.98”).

3. Fonts & Fonts Sizes

Select a common, easy to read font, such as Calibri, Times New Roman and Arial. Avoid using overly creative fonts. Such fonts will make your cover letter look unprofessional and difficult to read.

For most fonts, including Times New Roman, Calibri and Arial, you should choose a font size of between 10.5 pt. and 12 pt.

Further Cover Letter Tips

Don't exceed one page.

Unless you’ve been specifically asked to submit a longer cover letter, don’t exceed one page in length. Long cover letters make for a poorer reading experience and recruiters may not read your cover letter if it’s too long.

Proofread your cover letter

Ensure to proofread your cover letter to iron out any spelling and grammatical errors. Errors in your cover letter can make you look unprofessional and have a negative impact on your job applications.

Give your document a professional title

When saving your cover letter, make sure to give it a simple, professional title. Examples of professional titles for your cover letter include ‘Cover Letter’ or ‘My Cover Letter’.

Avoid unprofessional titles such as ‘coverletter023432’. When recruiters see such titles on documents, they may instantly see you as unprofessional.

State that your CV is attached/enclosed

If you’re submitting your CV along with your cover letter, state that you’ve enclosed the CV. To do this, include the abbreviation ‘Enc.: CV’ at the bottom of your cover letter, as demonstrated in the cover letter samples in this guide.

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Top 21 Cover Letter Tips [to Land the Job!]

You’ve narrowed in on the perfect job and you’ve got your resume down.

There’s one more step before you send out that application: the cover letter.

The cover letter is ESSENTIAL in the job application process. It complements your resume by giving the hiring manager a taste of your personality and enthusiasm for the position.

If you’re wondering whether you’re doing it right, stop worrying. We’ve got you covered!

In this article, we’ll give you all the cover letter tips you’ll ever need!

We’ve divided  our cover letter tips into three main parts, in order of importance:

• Essential Tips - These tips are fundamental to writing a killer cover letter.
• Important Tips - These cover letter tips are also important, but not as essential.
• Nice-to-have Tips - Not super important, but these tips can still be a nice addition to your cover letter.

9 Essential Cover Letter Tips

Tip #1 - get the basics right.

Before we get into any of the other tips, we want to make sure you know what a great cover letter looks like .

In a nutshell, a cover letter consists of six main parts:

• A header , which contains your contact information
• A greeting for the hiring manager
• The opening paragraph , where you open with an attention grabber and list your top achievements
• The second paragraph , where you explain why you’re the perfect candidate for the job
• The third paragraph , where you explain why you’re compatible with the company, its work culture, and its goals
• The closing remarks

Tip #2 - Tailor your cover letter to the position

You might be tempted to write one awesome cover letter and use it for every position you apply to.

After all, if it’s so good, it should work everywhere, right?

The thing is, the whole point of a cover letter is to show your achievements and enthusiasm about the particular company and position you are applying to.

Different positions have different requirements and responsibilities. You can convince a recruiter to hire you if you make a case for why you’re great for that particular position , not why you’re great in general. 

This is why a one-letter-fits-all approach does not work.

To personalize your cover letter to the exact position you are applying for, you should:

• Identify the position’s key responsibilities and get a sense of what kind of person they are looking for.
• Write a cover letter that demonstrates how you can handle those responsibilities and how you’re the right person for the job.

Both candidates are applying for the position of brand development manager in company XYZ.

I am responsible and creative. I have also done well in all my previous positions. I enjoy the work culture in your company and I believe I would be a great fit here.

A brand development management position in XYZ is key to successfully launching XYZ’s brands into e-commerce. In my previous positions, I have led 14 projects and have developed four separate brand launch plans, all of which have raised awareness of the brands within 6 months of the launch plan application.

Rose obviously sends the same cover letter to all job applications because there is nothing position-specific about the way she describes her skills. 

Candance, on the other hand, has identified the position’s requirements and key roles and demonstrates how she’s a great fit for it.

Now, which one would you hire based on what you read?

Tip #3 - Use your professional email

This might sound obvious, but it’s something important that might easily slip your attention.

If you use that [email protected] email you made in the fourth grade in your cover letter, the hiring manager immediately X-s you out.

No silly puns and no pop culture references: use a professional email that has your first name and last name.

Tip #4 - Don’t repeat your resume

The hiring manager already has your resume. If you simply repeat the information you’ve provided there, what’s the point in writing a cover letter at all?

So what exactly can you say besides what they already know?

Think of the cover letter as the “story” behind your resume. Write about what makes you passionate to do what you do and why you’re a good fit for the position.

Let’s say that in your resume you mention that you worked as a tech assistant and highlighted your key responsibilities. 

In your cover letter, you want to highlight how working as a tech assistant prepared you for the position you are applying for and why you’re passionate about joining the team. 

This way, the hiring manager can also see part of your personality and motivation.

Tip #5 - Make it easy to read

You might be tempted to use long, convoluted sentences and SAT words to show how you’re a professional, sophisticated person.

You don’t want the hiring manager to spend five minutes on one sentence wondering just what the heck you are trying to say.

Keep your language simple and your sentences short and straightforward.

Tip #6 - Keep it short

This one’s pretty simple: don’t drag out your cover letter. One page is more than enough.

The golden rule is to keep it between 250-400 words long in 3-6 paragraphs .

You don’t want to risk the hiring manager getting tired and stopping halfway through reading it.

Tip #7 - Follow submission instructions

The company usually specifies the format you should use when submitting your application.

Look out for specifications about:

• File format (Word, PDF)
• Font & margins
• Content specifics, like which sections or contact information to include

Follow those instructions to a T or the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) might end up not reading your file at all .

If there is nothing specific in the job posting, your best bet is to submit your cover letter in PDF format . Use the same font and design as your resume to enhance your personal brand .

You can pick one of our custom Novorésumé cover letter templates and start writing. 

Once you’re done creating your resume, it automatically downloads as a PDF.

Tip #8 - Proofread your cover letter

Once you’re done writing, make sure your cover letter doesn’t have any spelling mistakes or grammatical errors. They’re absolute turn-offs for recruiters.

Use a spelling checker or the online writing app Grammarly to make sure your letter is flawless.

Tip #9 - Match your cover letter with your resume

Want your application to stand out from the rest?

Match your cover letter style & formatting to your resume.

CIt will make you more memorable as a candidate and show that you care to put in the extra effort by presenting a unified application package.

And you know what's the best part? Creating a matching resume and cover letter doesn’t have to be hard!

At Novorésumé, each of our resume templates comes with a matching cover letter design, so all you have to do is pick a style you like, and half the work is already done for you. 

9 Important Cover Letter Tips

Tip #1 - address the letter to the hiring manager.

The days when you used “To whom it may concern” or “Dear Sir/Madam” to address your cover letter are long gone.

The best practice is to address your cover letter directly to the hiring manager , as “Dear Mr. Doe”.

That’s usually the head of the department you are applying for or the HR manager.

How can you find his or her name??

• Check the job posting for any contact details.
• Check the company’s LinkedIn and website for the job title.
• Ask any contacts you might know inside the company.

If you still don’t have any clue who to address your cover letter to, here’s what you can use:

• Dear [Department] Team,
• Dear [Department] Hiring Manager,
• Dear Hiring Manager

Tip #2 - Open up with your achievements

The first impression you make is vital because you only get one chance, and it can make or break your application.

The opening paragraph of your cover letter serves as the first impression to the hiring manager. He or she has countless cover letters to read so yours should pop out from the start.

Thus, you must start outlining why you’re a great candidate for the position in the introduction .

Let’s demonstrate how to do it correctly by looking at the two examples below.

What’s the difference between these two cover letter introductions :

“My name is Justin Brown and I would like to contribute towards ABC’s goal to create an outstanding visual experience for end customers throughout the world. Previously, I’ve worked for XYZ, a renowned graphic design company, for 5 years, where I helped create high-quality visual designs from concept to specs to final product. I believe my updated industry experience, along with my ability to adjust between the bigger picture and concrete problems, as well as my attention to detail, makes me the right candidate for the position.”

“Hi, my name is Josh and I really want to work for your company. I heard about the job opening from LinkedIn and decided to apply. I used to work as a graphic designer for XYZ for 5 years, and this is the perfect opportunity for me.”

If there’s one obvious thing, it is that the second one is a WINNING introduction. 

Why? Well, unlike Josh, Justin’s introduction:

• Opens with an attention-grabbing sentence , highlighting how Justin can contribute directly towards the company’s goals.
• Outlines his responsibilities and achievements in his previous position.
• Describes what makes him the perfect candidate .

Meanwhile, Josh’s introduction doesn’t say much about him as a candidate except that he used to be employed for five years. 

Granted, Josh could be better qualified than Justin, but you could never tell from his cover letter. The hiring manager probably stopped reading and added Josh to the “Rejected” pile.

That’s why you should go beyond the basics in your cover letter’s introduction. Make your intent, contribution, and skills known upfront.

Tip #3 - Use bullet points for your qualifications

There’s a good reason why we use bullet points so much:

• They help us list things effectively 
• They get the point across
• They break up the paragraphs into smaller chunks and overall makes the cover letter easier to skim or read
• They summarize a lot of information in a digestible manner

See what we did there?

That’s what you should do when you list your qualifications in your cover letter as well. 

Instead of writing everything out, use bullet points to sum up all your successes. The hiring manager will be immediately drawn to them and WON’T just skim through your cover letter mindlessly. 

Tip #4 - Use numbers and facts

Whenever you describe your successful experiences, you want to enrich them with actual percentages, numbers, and tangible facts.

When achievements are backed up by real performance metrics, they boost your credibility.

So, instead of simply describing your achievements:

“I have previous experience with transfusion therapies and taking care of people with rare diseases. I also speak three languages, which can come in handy with patients from different nationalities.”

Use the power of numbers (and bullet points) to convince the hiring manager.

My 10 years of experience in the medical field have contributed towards my excellence in:

• Managing the medical care of 75+ patients with rare diseases.
• Assisting 25+ patients attending transfusion therapy. 
• Taking care of 50+ patients from different nationalities, made easy by my fluency in English, German, and Spanish.

Tip #5 - Avoid cliches

Cliches are so overused, they risk making you look as if you have no original thoughts.

Any of the following can be a cliche (but not only):

• I am a great team player.
• I am a multi-tasker.
• I have great attention to detail.
• I am a good communicator.

After all the insights we’ve shared with you so  far, you might guess why cliches are a NO:

They add nothing of substance to your content. And you want to use the valuable space in your cover letter to showcase why you’re a great fit for the job. 

Whenever you are tempted to write a cliche, twist it by providing facts to back up your experience.

So, instead of saying : 

“I am a great team player”.

Show them why you are one by describing your experience: 

“In my previous position, I worked with five other colleagues from three different departments to arrive at a marketable digital solution for our customers. Working with individuals with diverse opinions taught me the value of effective teamwork, a lesson I am happy to utilize in this position.”

Tip #6 - Use acronyms correctly

Acronyms are great. They save up space and show the hiring manager that you speak the industry lingo, especially if you’re applying for a technical position.

And yes, chances are the recruiter understands all the acronyms you might use in your cover letter. 

Nonetheless, you should never use acronyms thinking the recruiter understands them. Instead,  write the word the first time around and put the acronym into brackets, and then you can go ahead and use just the acronym if it repeats throughout the text. 

Here’s what we mean:

I have two years of experience with Amazon Web Services (AWS). I have specifically worked with Amazon Elasticsearch (AES) in my previous position. I believe the cloud computing service model provided by AWS can be successfully applied to your business model. 

I have two years of experience with AWS. I have specifically worked with AES and AMI in my previous positions.

Tip #7- Don’t include your address

By all means, you should include your contact information in your cover letter.

However, your address or area of work goes into your resume , not the cover letter.

Tip #8 - Don’t apologize

There comes a time when you have to account for possible red flags in your work experience.

These can include:

• Getting fired or being laid off
• Having too many short-lived jobs
• A gap in your resume
• Lack of experience

You might want to rush and explain these red flags in your cover letter, just to let the hiring manager know there’s nothing to worry about.

We’re here to say NO.

Do not apologize or explain anything you think is “negative”. The hiring manager will bring up any concerns he or she might have in your interview. You’ll have an opportunity to answer there.

Tip #9 - Don’t be arrogant

Just as being apologetic is not a good look, being over-confident is equally damning.

Nobody likes someone cocky, so avoid talking in superlatives or praising your abilities. 

Let your work experience and achievements speak on your behalf.

In my previous position, I surpassed my yearly conversion targets by 34%.

I am a great employee. All my previous managers loved having me around because I was the best at my job.

4 Nice-to-Have Cover Letter Tips

Tip #1 - insert your social media and personal website.

Including your professional social media or personal website adds an extra touch to your cover letter.

Hint: We’re not talking about your Facebook or VSCO. You probably take great pictures of your food, but that will not get you hired.

If you have a LinkedIn, Github, Behance, or Dribble account, however, it can give the hiring manager something extra to look at.

If you have a personal website with your showcased work or portfolio, even better!

Make sure to add a link to those under your contact information

Tip #2 - End with a call to action

Ending a cover letter is usually the hardest part. You’ve described all your achievements, thanked the manager for their time, now what?

We recommend concluding your letter with a “call to action”, inviting your hiring manager to take further steps.

For example, you could write something like: 

“I look forward to further discussing how my legal skills and experience can help ABC with corporate and commercial transactions for its international operations.”

Tip #3 - Use power words and action verbs

Power words and action verbs are selected words you can use throughout your cover letter to make your achievements *pop* more .

So, instead of saying “I was responsible for” fifteen different times, you can use some action verbs to make your language more diverse, like:

• I managed a team of five people.
• I facilitated the communication and task allocation of five people.
• I coordinated a team of five people.

They make your text flow smoothly, enhance the power of your actions, AND make your language more versatile.

If you want to sprinkle some of these magical words in your resume, check out our complete list of 340+ action verbs and power words .

Tip #4 - Get a second opinion

Sometimes when we’re writing we get so lost trying to put our thoughts into words, we lose sight of the bigger picture.

If you have a capable friend, recruiter, or career advisor, it doesn’t hurt to ask them to take a look at your cover letter. 

Have them check it for spelling and grammatical mistakes (just in case you missed any) and whether they think your cover letter does your skills and qualifications justice.

Got the green light?

Ready to go!

And that’s it!

The road to writing your cover letter is filled with Dos, Don’ts, and lots of caffeine. 

We hope you enjoyed the guide and have a good sense of what’s expected of you.

Now stop procrastinating and get to writing!

Or, check out some of our other top articles:

• How to Write a Resume | Professional Guide w/ 41+ Examples
• Top Cover Letter Examples in 2024 [For All Professions]
• How to Write a Motivational Letter (and Get Accepted Anywhere in 2024)

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How to Write a Cover Letter That Sounds Like You (and Gets Noticed)

• Elainy Mata

Do the research, start off strong, and emphasize your value.

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Cover Letter Outline (With Examples)

Table of Contents

A cover letter is a simple communication explaining why you, out of all the applicants available, are the best pick for the job. Every company doesn’t require cover letters, but they represent the skills and background experience that help you stand out from the crowd.  Before putting the digital pen to paper for your cover letter outline, it’s crucial to understand proper cover letter formatting and etiquette to ensure you set the right tone. 

Begin by choosing traditional, commonly accepted professional fonts such as Calibri or Arial, and set your font size between 10 and 12. 

Every paragraph on your cover letter should be left-aligned and double-spaced. A spacing of 1 – 1.15 between lines is traditional, and lastly, the margins should be spaced 1 inch on both sides. 

Most of these settings, except the spacing, are default settings on Microsoft Word. Make sure to keep your cover letter outline in PDF format to preserve the professional layout you’ve created.

Another critical step before you sit down to write your letter is to craft a cover letter outline. Doing so allows you to structure your points—namely, why you’re a perfect candidate—throughout your paragraphs to engage the hiring manager. 

Over time, the structure has become standardized to match the following cover letter outline template:

• A header with contact information and the date
• A customary greeting
• An opening, middle, and closing paragraph
• A complimentary close and signature

A well-structured, logically progressing cover letter outline signals professionalism and level-headedness to the reader and demonstrates that you have put thought and effort into your work to make your cover letter outline stand out among other applicants.

Writing Your Cover Letter

First, begin with a header that provides relevant contact information: 

Street Address

City, State ZIP

Month Day, Year

Employer Name

An appropriate greeting will follow this:

Dear Mr./Ms. (name): 

Ultimately, the body of your cover letter is the crux of your argument and the main contributor to your likelihood of success. Your goal is to persuade the person reading your letter that you have the skills, experience, and passion for filling the role they are missing. 

Generally, the first paragraph should  hook  the reader’s interest while showcasing your knowledge of the company, why the job interests you, and how you learned about the opportunity. 

The second paragraph handles your background and qualifications, referring the employer to your enclosed resume. 

The concluding paragraph summarizes the first two paragraphs, expanding your skills and knowledge while reiterating the finer points. It should explain how your capability meets the company’s needs for the particular job.  

Stand out; don’t stand aside. Toot your own horn a little regarding your interest in the company’s work, your ethical standards, and any prior achievements you’re proud of to set yourself apart from the other entries. 

For best results, consider following the method of the four P’s: prime, promote, persuade, and proofread.

The first and most crucial step in getting a potential employer to take your cover letter seriously is to engage them with a hook and prime them to form a positive initial impression of you. 

It’s too easy for hiring managers, who spend too long staring at similarly-formatted pieces of paper, to gloss over your cover letter and not give you a second thought. 

It’s not their fault; if you’ve ever read a long wall of uninteresting text, you know the feeling. That’s why it’s crucial to hook your reader immediately so that the reviewer pays attention to what you have to say rather than casually glancing over.

One of the simplest ways to catch the reader’s attention is to include the name of the person you are writing to. 

“Dear Mr. Davis,

As an experienced writer with a range of experience in technical and analytical writing, I’m thrilled to apply for your technical writing position at Fluid Solutions.”

If you don’t know who that is, address the hiring department. Demonstrating that you’ve done a little digging to correctly reference your potential future employer goes a long way to creating a positive impression.

Based on the development of your cover letter outline, the following line in your writing should be a hook. Tout a particular skill you’ve developed, tell a story of how you contributed to solving a problem in a prior workplace. 

For example:

“I interact well with people, and those social skills benefit me when it comes to resolving problems. As a teacher at X, I had a parent come into the office furious over his child’s grades. Before I went into the conference room, a coworker warned me that he was ‘really mad.’ To her surprise, when we emerged from the room, he was laughing and shaking my hand.”

When considering the scope of your achievements, “. . . find three things about yourself that you want to highlight. Focus all of your communication on those three elements.”  (   The Guardian

Ask yourself the following questions and craft a 1-2-line response:

• What distinguishes me from other applicants?
• What interpersonal skills have I developed in my work experience?
• What skills make me a unique asset to the team?

Now for the best part—the chance to sell yourself. If necessary, expand on your skill set and describe what you know and love about the company:

“Continuing to develop my writing craft is one of my greatest life pursuits. After graduating from Such-and-Such college with my English degree, I’ve had the opportunity to broaden my skill set on several technical and analytical writing assignments working with different companies, including Special Writing Co., We Write, Inc., and Writers for Life.”

A foreknowledge of your potential future employer’s work ethic expectations and company values suggests to the hiring manager that you’re willing to follow departmental guidelines, which is a valuable trait in an applicant.

Most of all, you should express your enthusiasm for your job. Ask yourself: why do you love doing what you do? 

It’s a simple question, but at the heart of the matter, employers are looking for passionate individuals that can contribute to a healthy work environment.

Persuade (Call to Action)

Just like putting a beautiful bow on a gift, wrapping up with a persuasive closing paragraph, including a call to action, is an integral part of your cover letter outline.

You want to avoid going through all the hard work of selling yourself and expressing your personality, then leave the letter without a persuasive closing.

Encourage the hiring manager to call you for an interview or visit your website. The bottom line is that once the hiring manager reaches “Sincerely,” they should have a reasonable expectation of how to move forward with the hiring process. 

“Thank you for considering me. As someone who’s always had a gift for words and has continued to develop that skill set, I’m excited to learn more about this position. As one of your writers, I’ll have the opportunity to create exceptional projects for our clients. To discuss the opportunity to work together more, please contact me at [email protected]”

Here is an example when all is put together:

Always review your work carefully to check for grammar errors, repetition, and non-sequiturs to ensure your cover letter outline is as brilliant as it can be. 

Consider the tone of your cover letter outline and keep it brief. Remember, your cover letter is one of many of the hiring manager will read. Trimming down your unwieldy sentences to get right to the point improves their readability.

The Bottom Line

A cover letter is one of many factors contributing to your chance of getting hired. Still, for some companies, it’s an ample opportunity to demonstrate your professionalism, skills, and personality. 

All told, it’s a chance to advertise yourself, and what could be better?

Further reading:  Cover Letter Tips For First Time Job Applicants, Proper Business Letter Format

How to Write a Cover Letter For an Internship

What Is a Letter of Intent & How to Write One (with Examples)

Curriculum Vitae vs a Resumé: What’s the Difference?

How To End A Cover Letter

Winning Intro Sentences for Resume Cover Letters

Cover Letter Tips For First Time Job Applicants

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Cover Letter Writing Guide

The purpose of a cover letter.

Anatomy of a Cover Letter

Sometimes called a “letter of intent” or “letter of interest”, a cover letter is an introduction to the rest of your job application materials (e.g., resume/CV, research statement, teaching philosophy, writing samples, etc.). The purpose of a cover letter is to quickly summarize why you are applying to an organization or for a particular position, and what skills and knowledge you bring that make you the most suitable candidate for that position. The cover letter is often the first impression that a prospective employer will have of you, especially if they do not know you, or have not heard about you from their network of contacts. First impressions count, and so getting your cover letter right is a critical step in your job application process. Like all your job application materials, it may take time and focus to write your cover letters well. You will likely have several drafts before you come up with a final version that clearly articulates your skills and your understanding of the employer and the job requirements.

While your resume briefly states your skills, knowledge, experience, and (most importantly) what you have achieved using your abilities, the cover letter gives you an opportunity to create a narrative that shows the path you have taken in your career or education, emphasizing the skills you’ve used along the way, and explaining why the position you are applying to is the next desirable step on this path. To find out more about the structure of the cover letter, you can see some examples here. Also, it is important to know that there are some differences between cover letters written for faculty positions and those written for non-faculty positions. You can review some of the key differences of cover letters for faculty positions here .

When you start the process of looking for job opportunities, you will probably read through lots of job advertisements. You will notice that most job ads ask for a cover letter of some sort. The exception to this might be when you apply for some jobs through an employer’s online job application system, where they may ask you to upload your letter as a document, cut and paste the contents of your letter into specific fields, or they may not ask for a letter at all. For most jobs, and whenever you are submitting a formal application, cover letters are usually expected – and can be very helpful – even if a letter is not requested in the job ad itself.

Cover Letter Etiquette

You might be tempted to send the same version of your cover letter to multiple employers, especially if you are applying for similar types of positions. Don’t. It can be fairly obvious to an employer when they receive a stock letter, and this will make a bad first impression. Tailor your letter to the employer and to the specific job. This may require you to do some background research on the employer’s website, or talk to someone you know (or don’t yet know) who already works there. Use this information to explain why you want to work at that particular place, doing that particular job. It takes time, but it is worth it. You’ll probably have more luck with three tailored cover letters than with 30 stock letters sent out to 30 different employers. Your cover letter will be read by someone as part of a formal job application, so make certain that it is free of spelling mistakes, grammar issues, and typos. Make sure your cover letter fits onto 1 page (for non-academic position applications), has consistent margins and formatting, and a readable font that is between 10-12pts.

When Not to Use Cover Letters: There are some occasions during the job search process where cover letters shouldn’t be used. During career fairs, you would typically only hand out your resume to employers (and a 1-page resume is ideal). Employers want to be able to quickly scan your resume for the key points, and you should be able to verbally communicate some of the ideas that a letter might contain (for example, why this company interests you). Recruiters won’t have the time to read a letter.

Timeline: Getting Started with your Cover Letter

Step 1: The first step to writing a good cover letter is to first have a good resume. For information on putting these documents together, click here . Your cover letter expands upon some of the information you include within these documents, and describes the role you have played in achieving your academic or non-academic goals (i.e., showing how your experiences have made you the best candidate for the position).

Step 2: The next step is to find an open position that interests you, or at least the type of job to which you want to apply. There is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all cover letter, as each should be tailored to each job you apply to, but there will certainly be parts of the letter that will stay much the same, and be appropriate for multiple jobs. This might mean changing some of the key words in the letter, so that you are describing your experience in the employer’s language (using some of their keywords), not your own.

Step 3: Go through the job ad and carefully note all of the requirements and skills the employer is looking for. Based on your background research of the employer and the people you have spoken to who know about this employer, try to identify the two or three most important skills that the employer is looking for. You should then try to create a cover letter that illustrates that you have these skills and have used them effectively. Your cover letter will be stronger if it addresses these requirements and the job duties.  Ensure that you talk about your experiences in the language used by the employer, echoing their words in descriptions you use to illustrate your skills. Write out a list of the keywords that you highlighted from the job ad, and then next to each of these words, write a brief statement that illustrates the fact that you have this skill/ability/knowledge using a specific example. You may not have an experience for all of the requirements, but the more you think about what you have achieved, the more likely it is that you will find something relevant to talk about. When you have all of this information, then you can begin to structure it within the format of a formal cover letter.

Cover letter template

Here is a general template for a cover letter:

Your Name Street Address City, State, Zip Email and phone number

Today’s Date

Mr./Ms./Dr. Name Title Organization

Dear ______:

The opening paragraph should explain why you are writing, giving your specific employment interest. Mention how you found out about the position. If it was advertised, refer to the website or resource in which you saw it. If a contact told you about it, say so. It is also helpful to include an overall summary of the key skills, knowledge areas, or experiences that you are bring to this role right here in the first paragraph. If you start off with these very specific conclusions that confidently state that you have what the employer is looking for, then the reader will also have a lot of confidence that your letter and resume are worth reading. The next paragraphs will then expand on and illustrate what you are summarizing in this first paragraph.

The middle paragraph(s) should summarize the aspects of your background which will interest the employer. The more information you have about the organization and its needs, the better.  Discuss your qualifications in terms of the contributions you can make. While you should not repeat your resume verbatim, don’t hesitate to refer to the most important information discussed in it. Ideally, both your cover letter and your CV/resume would be able to stand alone. It is not necessary to describe yourself in superlatives. Rather than saying, “I can make a uniquely valuable contribution to your organization,” give the employer enough relevant, targeted information to allow the reader to reach that conclusion independently. Be specific and credible. Tell stories that have a touch of drama, for example: “When I was working as the president of X student group, one of the challenges that we faced was XYZ.” Once you have created a touch of drama, describe how you used your skills to overcome it, for example: “So what I had to do was build relationships with administrators on campus by communicating the critical role our group played in doing ABC.” Once you have told the story, reflect on it in terms of how this is particularly relevant for the reader, for example: “I really enjoyed being placed in a position where I had to reach out to contact and bring them all together by creating a shared vision for everyone to buy into. I think this combination of strong marketing skills and relationship building will be valuable to the role of Advertising Associate.”

The closing paragraph should explain why the position and the particular organization is attractive to you, and should hopefully pave the way for the interview. Provide an authentic reason why you are excited about bringing your skills to the role, and what you will also gain from being in the role. Speaking with former or current employees at the organization as part of your networking will help in this regards.  You can also offer to send any additional information, restate your contact details, and state that you look forward to hearing from them.

More From Forbes

Cover letters are now essential to standout to employers. here's an example.

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Man is typing a cover letter to apply for a new job.

Today's job market is very competitive, so you need a way to stand out. “The biggest mistake many job hunters are currently making is that they skip writing a cover letter when sending off a resume,” says Jim, a 61-year-old AT&T Human Resource Manager. Cover letters are very influential, and a well-written letter can grab an interview just on its own merit. It is too bad most job hunters are so lazy they don't write one anymore, notes this HR manager in charge of employee recruiting.

What doesn't work is sending a generic letter. Put the effort in to tailor your letter specifically to the needs of the job. Another mistake to avoid is losing them in your opening sentence. Never begin your letter with the overused standard – I'm applying for the ad I saw online. This fails to address the employer's needs and the skills you bring to the job. Another overused starting line is telling the company you think they are great and how much you want to work for them. However, this fact can be stated in the letter later – it is too weak to open it. This overused approach does not sell this employer on how you will keep them great and how you have the skills they seek.

Most Effective Opening

Power Impact Technique™ is the best way to start your letter. I created this technique years ago, and it has had a very high success rate of getting employers to call the applicant, which is the goal.

The Power Impact Technique is a two-step process. First, analyze the job — both the noted and assumed needs — and determine the essential skills the employer is looking for. Next, immediately address how you will meet the employer's needs. You begin your letter with a strong opening sentence emphasizing the major selling points and skills you would bring to the job. Compare the difference between the typical opening, I'm applying to the job opening I found on Indeed and these two openings using The Power Impact Technique:

· Ten years in senior management with proven expertise in international finance for a Fortune 100 company...

· Strong leadership in operations having reduced costs by 12% while improving productivity....

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· Five years in B2B tech sales growing territory sales by 18% in a highly competitive marketplace…

These openers are eye-catching, designed to get the employer to see what you can do. The secret lies merely in addressing their needs right up front. After all, these are the necessary skills and experience they are seeking. This first paragraph is what they will read, so it needs to have your top selling points in it. You must demonstrate "proof" that you can perform the duties desired. To develop this proof, outline the critical things that the employer wants. Just underline the significant items from the job opening. Whenever possible, use your network to gather any inside information. The next step is to ask yourself: What were the RESULTS of my efforts on previous jobs, projects, or tasks that I've undertaken? That is the key to compose your letter. Just highlight the duties and skills needed by referencing your abilities to perform them plus offer any known results from your past efforts as proof that you CAN do the job.

Sample Letter

William Morris Motley

Newark, DE 19713

123.555.2565 [email protected]

Dear Hiring Manager

With a demonstrated record of leadership in medical diagnostic equipment manufacturing and operations, I would bring excellent experience in increasing profit, enhancing productivity, and reducing costs to your organization.

Highlights of my background include:

• Establishment of a new manufacturing culture based on self-directed teams and continuous improvement leading to high quality levels. Results: achieved 20% productivity increase plus $3.5 million increase in profits .
• Headed production turn-around. Results: achieved 26% productivity increase with $2 million in annual cost reductions.
• Designed and set up new part repair center: Results: saved $13 million over previous repair process costs.
• Directed reduction effort on six-month product backlog of large, complex medical diagnostic device. Results: increased production from 19 units per month to 30 units per month while maintaining quality level and same per unit manufacturing cost.

As you can see, I pride myself on being an excellent team developer who can exceed goals and build highly productive employees to contribute to a company’s bottomline.

I am interested in discussing with you some of the valuable contributions I could make to COMPANY NAME’s manufacturing operations. You can contact me: 123.555.2565

Your time and consideration are most appreciated.

Bill Motley

This formula has opened many doors for my career counseling clients and will do so for you too.

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How to write an NZ cover letter (with examples and templates)

Along with your CV, a cover letter is essential to any NZ job application. Let's get you started.

Every New Zealand job application should include a cover letter.

This document is key to showing an employer you’re serious about their vacancy, and for demonstrating what you bring to the table . Despite its importance, many people aren’t sure how to write a cover letter – and their applications suffer as a result.

That’s why we’ve created this guide, giving you advice on everything from what to include, to how to lay it out.

We’ve also snuck in a few examples to make life even easier for you … aren’t we nice?

Cover letters vs. CVs: what’s the difference?

To understand the role cover letters play in job applications, it’s important to realise how they differ from CVs:

1. Purpose:

CVs give a broad picture of you as an applicant – providing details such as educational background and employment history . By contrast, a cover letter targets why you want this specific role, and how your skills and experience make you a great candidate.

While there will be areas of overlap as you select qualifications or abilities to draw out in your cover letter, it definitely should not be an elongated version of your CV.

An NZ cover letter should be no longer than one page, while CVs are usually between one and two.

The most obvious visual difference between these documents and CVs hinges around bullet points.

While your CV should be a bullet point bonanza, cover letters favour full sentences. That’s not to say you can’t have any bullets in a cover letter, just use them more sparingly.

You should include a cover letter with every job application.

What to include in a cover letter

1. your contact info, the date and the business’ address.

At the top of your cover letter should be:

• Your full name, contact details and home address
• The date you submit the application
• The business’ postal address

It should look like this:

Head up your cover letter like this.

2. Your opener

People worry about how to start a cover letter , but there’s a simple formula and structure for getting this right:

Make it personal : start with ‘dear’, and address it to a person – i.e. the hiring manager. If their name isn’t in the job listing, try a good old fashioned stalk of the company website, or ring the business and find out. ‘To whom it may concern’ is a no go.

Make it clear : organisations often list multiple vacancies at a time, so make it obvious which position you’re applying for. A sentence like, ‘I’m writing to apply for the Marketing Assistant role, as advertised on Trade Me Jobs’, will do the trick.

Make it punchy : next, add a snappy one-liner summing up why you’re interested in the role and what you’d bring to their business. Remember, you can go into more detail in the interview itself. For example:

3. Why them

A common cover letter mistake is to only focus on yourself. Before choosing you, employers want to know why you’re choosing them. This helps sort candidates who are genuinely passionate about their organisation from those who are mass applying to anything and everything.

Warning : this section is not about inflating the hiring manager's ego by flattering the company – be positive, but be thoughtful.

Now, it’s time to sell yourself.

This section of your cover letter is where you highlight your most relevant skills and experience.

You can draw on anything from previous work experience to certificates and qualifications. The important bit is linking whatever you mention to the job – simply listing skills is not the answer.

To do this effectively, you need to carefully study the job ad and identify what capabilities the employer values most. If your Trade Me Jobs Profile is up-to-date, you can then quickly skim your skills and experience to find those which most closely match the job description.

Top tip: the more detail you can give, the better. Helped raise sales? Great. Helped raise sales by 6%? Even better.

If you want to add some extra skills or information to this section, a bullet point list is a good option. Note : only do this after introducing your headline examples in full sentence form, as above, and keep your list to three or four concise bullets.

5. Signing off

The end of your cover letter should (politely) prompt the reader to get in touch with you to arrange the next steps. Make sure you end on a high, and continue the energy from earlier in your closing sentence, for example:

How to format a cover letter

With your content sorted, it’s now about nailing the visuals. Cover letters are usually easier than CVs in this regard, as they’re laid out like a traditional letter. However, there are a few things to bear in mind:

• What font should I use? Keep it simple, and the same as on your CV. If your font is hard to read, or too small, the letter will end up in the wrong pile.
• How long should a cover letter be? New Zealand cover letters should be under one page long.
• Should I use paragraphs? Would you read huge, unbroken chunks of text? We doubt it, so make sure to break up your cover letters into paragraphs.
• What are the correct cover letter margins? Leave these at their default setting so your cover letter has plenty of blank space, and doesn’t look crowded.

All done? Not quite.

Perhaps the most important stage of cover letter writing is proofreading. After all that hard work, you don’t want a few silly typos or poor punctuation letting you down.

So check it yourself, then get someone else to have a look, then have a final glance.

Once you’re happy, it’s time to attach it to your application, and hit send.

Al Hall is a regular contributor at Trade Me Jobs and Trade Me Property. He’s dedicated to helping people succeed in their aspirations to find their dream job and place to live.

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A good cover letter intro is like a good espresso – short, sharp and energising. Here’s how to brew one of your own.

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Ibram X. Kendi Faces a Reckoning of His Own

In 2020, the author of “How to Be an Antiracist” galvanized Americans with his ideas. The past four years have tested them — and him.

Ibram X. Kendi, the founding director of the Boston University Center for Antiracist Research. Credit... Wayne Lawrence for The New York Times

Supported by

By Rachel Poser

Rachel Poser is an editor for the magazine. She spoke to Kendi over a period of several months and visited him at his research center in Boston.

• June 4, 2024

Ibram X. Kendi has a notebook that prompts him, on every other page, to write down “Things to be grateful for.” There are many things he might put under that heading. First and foremost, his wife and two daughters, and his health, having made it through Stage 4 colon cancer in his 30s — a diagnosis with a 12 percent survival rate. Tenure at Boston University, where Martin Luther King Jr. earned his doctorate in theology. A National Book Award, and a MacArthur “genius” grant for “transforming how many people understand, discuss and attempt to redress America’s longstanding racial challenges.” Then there were the millions of people who bought “How to Be an Antiracist,” the first of five of his books to take the No. 1 spot on the New York Times best-seller list. But he was particularly grateful to the readers who wrote to him to say his work changed them for the better.

Listen to this article, read by January LaVoy

These days, he could use the reminder. Four years have gone by since George Floyd was murdered on the pavement near Cup Foods in Minneapolis, sparking the racial “reckoning” that made Kendi a household name. Many people, Kendi among them, believe that reckoning is long over. State legislatures have pushed through harsh antiprotest measures . Conservative-led campaigns against teaching Black history and against diversity, equity and inclusion programs are underway. Last June, the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in college admissions. And Donald Trump is once again the Republican nominee for president, promising to root out “the radical-left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.”

Kendi has become a prime target of this backlash. Books of his have been banned from schools in some districts, and his name is a kind of profanity among conservatives who believe racism is mostly a problem of the past. Though legions of readers continue to celebrate Kendi as a courageous and groundbreaking thinker, for many others he has become a symbol of everything that’s wrong in racial discourse today. Even many allies in the fight for racial justice dismiss his brand of antiracism as unworkable, wrongheaded or counterproductive. “The vast majority of my critics,” Kendi told me last year, “either haven’t read my work or willfully misrepresent it.”

Criticism of Kendi only grew in September, when he made the “painful decision” to lay off more than half the staff of the research center he runs at Boston University. The Center for Antiracist Research, which Kendi founded during the 2020 protests to tackle “seemingly intractable problems of racial inequity and injustice,” raised an enormous sum of $55 million, and the news of its downsizing led to a storm of questions. False rumors began circulating that Kendi had stolen funds, and the university announced it would investigate after former employees accused him of mismanagement and secrecy.

The controversy quickly ballooned into a national news story, fueled in large part by right-wing media, which was all too happy to speculate about “missing funds” and condemn Kendi — and the broader racial-justice movement — as a fraud. On Fox News, the conservative activist Christopher Rufo told the host John Roberts that the center’s “failure” was “poetic justice.” “This is a symbol of where we have come since 2020 and why that movement is really floundering today,” he said. In early October, a podcast affiliated with the Manhattan Institute, the conservative think tank where Rufo works, jubilantly released an episode titled “The End of Ibram X. Kendi?”

‘I don’t know of anybody more ill suited for fame than Ibram Kendi.’

In December, I met Kendi at the Center for Antiracist Research, which was by then mostly empty, though I caught signs of its former life: Space heaters sat idly under desks, and Post-it notes lingered around the edges of unplugged monitors. On the frame of one cleared-out cubicle, a sticker in the shape of Earth read “Be the change.” Kendi welcomed me into his office in a pink shirt and a periwinkle blazer with a handkerchief tucked neatly in its pocket. He was calm on the surface, but he seemed to me, as he often did during the conversations we’d had since the layoffs, to be holding himself taut, like a tensile substance under enormous strain. The furor over the center, he said, was a measure of how desperate many people were to damage his reputation: “If this had happened at another center, it would either not have been a story or a one-day story.”

In “How to Be an Antiracist,” his best-known book, Kendi challenges readers to evaluate themselves by their racial impact, by whether their actions advance or impede the cause of racial equality. “There is no neutrality in the racial struggle,” he writes. “The question for each of us is: What side of history will we stand on?” This question evinces Kendi’s confidence that ideas and policies can be dependably sorted into one of two categories: racist or antiracist.

Kendi is a vegan, a tall man with a gentle, serious nature. “He’ll laugh at a joke — he’ll never crack one,” Kellie Carter Jackson, the chair of the Africana studies department at Wellesley and someone who has known Kendi for years, told me. He considers himself an “introvert and loner” who was chased down by the spotlight and is now caught in its glare. “I don’t know of anybody more ill suited for fame than Ibram Kendi,” said Stefan Bradley, a longtime friend and professor of Black studies at Amherst. There is a corniness to Kendi that’s endearing, like his use of the gratitude notebook — a thick, pastel-colored pad with gold spiral binding — or the fact that his phone email signature is “Sent from Typoville aka my iPhone.” Though he is always soft-spoken, volume sometimes seems to be a gauge of how comfortable he feels. The first time I met him in person, he greeted me so quietly that I worried my recorder wouldn’t pick up his voice.

Kendi had hired a pair of crisis-P.R. consultants to help him manage the fallout from the layoffs, a controversy that he believed had fed into dangerous, racist stories about Black leaders, and about him in particular. In the fun-house mirror of conservative media, Kendi has long loomed as an antiwhite extremist trying to get rich by sowing racial division. Kendi told me he received regular threats; he allowed me to come to the center only on the condition that I not reveal its location. “When it comes to the white supremacists who are the greatest domestic terrorist threat of our time, I am one of their chief enemies,” he told me.

Boston University had recently released the results of its audit, which found “no issues” with how the center’s finances were handled. The center’s problem, Kendi told me, was more banal: Most of its money was in its endowment or restricted to specific uses, and after the high of 2020, donations had crashed. “At our current rate, we were going to run out in two years,” he said. “That was what ultimately led us to feel like we needed to make a major change.” The center’s new model would fund nine-month academic fellowships rather than a large full-time staff. Though inquiries into the center’s grant-management practices and workplace culture were continuing, Kendi was confident that they would absolve him, too. In the media, he’d dismissed the complaints about his leadership as “unfair,” “unfounded,” “vague,” “meanspirited” and an attempt to “settle old scores.”

In the fall, when I began talking to former employees and faculty — most of whom asked for anonymity because they remain at Boston University or signed severance agreements that included nondisparagement language — it was clear that many of them felt caught in a bind. They could already see that the story of the center’s dysfunction was being used to undermine the racial-justice movement, but they were frustrated to watch Kendi play down the problems and cast their concerns as spiteful or even racist. They felt that what they experienced at the center was now playing out in public: Kendi’s tendency to see their constructive feedback as hostile. “He doesn’t trust anybody,” one person told me. “He doesn’t let anyone in.”

To Kendi, attacks from those who claim to be allies, like attacks from political enemies, are to be expected. In his books, Kendi argues that history is not an arc bending toward justice but a war of “dueling” forces — racist and antiracist — that each escalate their response when the other advances. In the years since 2020, he believes, the country has entered a predictable period of retrenchment, when the force of racism is ascendant and the racial progress of the last several decades is under threat. To defend antiracism, to defend himself, he would simply have to fight harder.

Not so long ago, Kendi thought he saw a new world coming into being. “We are living in the midst of an antiracist revolution,” he wrote in September 2020 in an Atlantic cover story headlined, “Is This the Beginning of the End for American Racism?” Nearly 20 percent of Americans were saying that “race relations” was the most urgent problem facing the nation — more than at any point since 1968 — and many of them were turning to Kendi to figure out what to do about it. They were buying his memoir and manifesto, “How to Be an Antiracist,” much of which he wrote while undergoing chemotherapy. “This was perhaps the last thing he was going to write,” Chris Jackson, Kendi’s editor, told me. “There was no cynicism in the writing of it.” (Jackson was the editor of a 2021 book based on The 1619 Project, which originated in this magazine in 2019 ; Kendi contributed a chapter to that book.)

Kendi confesses in the introduction that he “used to be racist most of the time.” The year 1994, when he turned 12, marked three decades since the United States outlawed discrimination on the basis of race. Then why, Kendi wondered as an adolescent, were so many Black people out of work, impoverished or incarcerated? The problem, he concluded, must be Black people themselves. Not Black people like his parents, God-loving professionals who had saved enough to buy a home in Jamaica, Queens, and who never let their two sons forget the importance of education and hard work. But they were the exception. In high school, Kendi competed in an oratory contest in which he gave voice to many of the anti-Black stereotypes circulating in the ’90s — that Black youths were violent, unstudious, unmotivated. “They think it’s OK to be the most feared in our society,” he proclaimed. “They think it’s OK not to think!” Kendi also turned these ideas on himself, believing that he was a “subpar student” because of his race.

Kendi’s mind began to change when he arrived on the campus of Florida A&M, one of the largest historically Black universities in the country, in the fall of 2000 to study sports journalism. “I had never seen so many Black people together with positive motives,” he wrote at the time. Kendi was disengaged for most of high school, as concerned with his clothes as his grades. His friends at the university teased him for joining a modeling troupe and preening before parties, particularly because once he got to them he was too shy to talk to anyone. “He would come out, and you could smell the cologne from down the hall,” Grady Tripp, Kendi’s housemate, told me. But experimenting with his style, for Kendi, was part of trying on new ideas. For a while, he wore honey-colored contact lenses that turned his irises an off-putting shade of orange; he got rid of them once he decided they were a rejection of blackness, like Malcolm X’s straightening his hair with lye.

Over long hours spent reading alone in the library, Kendi found his way to some unlikely conclusions. In “How to Be an Antiracist,” he describes bursting into his housemate’s room to declare that he had “figured white people out.” “They are aliens,” he said. Kendi had gone searching for answers in conspiracy theories and Nation of Islam theology that cast whites as a “devil race” bred by an evil Black scientist to conquer the planet. “Europeans are simply a different breed of human,” he wrote in a column for the student newspaper in 2003. They are “socialized to be aggressive” and have used “the AIDS virus and cloning” to dominate the world’s peoples. Recently, the column has circulated on right-wing social media as evidence of Kendi’s antiwhite extremism, which frustrates him because it’s in his own memoir as an example of just how lost he had become.

Kendi went on to earn a Ph.D. in African American studies from Temple University. The founder of his department was Molefi Kete Asante, an Afrocentrist who has called on the descendants of enslaved people to embrace traditional African dress, languages and religions. Kendi eventually changed his middle name to Xolani, meaning “peace” in Zulu; at their wedding, he and his wife, Sadiqa, adopted the last name Kendi, meaning “loved one” in Meru. Kendi has called Asante “profoundly antiracist,” but Kendi remained an idiosyncratic thinker who did not consider himself a part of just one scholarly tradition; he knew early on that he wanted to write for the public. In a 2019 interview, when asked about his intellectual lineage, Kendi named W.E.B. Du Bois, Ida B. Wells and Malcolm X.

Kendi became part of a cohort of Black writers, among them Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ta-Nehisi Coates, who, through the sunset of the Obama presidency and the red dawn of the MAGA movement, argued that anti-Blackness remains a major force shaping American politics. They helped popularize the longstanding idea that racism in the United States is systemic — that the country’s laws and institutions perpetuate Black disadvantage despite a pledge of equal treatment. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 ended de jure white supremacy, but President Lyndon B. Johnson, who signed it into law, acknowledged that it wouldn’t uproot a racial caste system grown over centuries.

“The next and the more profound stage of the battle for civil rights,” he said, would be to achieve “not just equality as a right and a theory but equality as a fact.” Kendi and others wrote bracingly about the failure of that promise. Far from economic redress, Black Americans were met with continued discrimination in every realm of life, while being told the country was now “colorblind.” Kendi and others argued that remedying the impact of hundreds of years of subjugation would require policies that recognize, rather than ignore, that legacy, such as affirmative action and reparations.

‘The vast majority of my critics either haven’t read my work or willfully misrepresent it.’

Far too many Americans, Kendi felt, still thought of racism as conscious prejudice, so conversations got stuck in cul-de-sacs of denial, in which people protested that they were “not racist” because they harbored no anti-Black animus. To convey this, he landed on the binary that would become his most famous and perhaps most controversial idea. “There is no such thing as a not-racist idea” or a “race-neutral policy,” he wrote in “How to Be an Antiracist,” published in 2019. “The opposite of ‘racist’ isn’t ‘not racist.’ It is ‘antiracist.’”

Black activists have long used the word “antiracist” to describe active resistance to white supremacy, but “How to Be an Antiracist” catapulted the term into the American lexicon, in much the same way that Sheryl Sandberg turned “Lean In” into a mantra. After George Floyd’s death, the book sold out on Amazon, which was “unheard-of,” Kendi said. Media coverage of Kendi in those days made him sound nearly superhuman. In a GQ profile, for example, the novelist ZZ Packer describes Kendi as a “preternaturally wise” Buddha-like figure, “the antiracist guru of our time” with a “Jedi-like prowess for recognizing and neutralizing the racism pervading our society.”

During the summer of 2020, Kendi sometimes appeared onstage or onscreen alongside Robin DiAngelo, the educator whose book “White Fragility” was also a No. 1 best seller. Kendi and DiAngelo write less about the workings of systemic racism than the ideas and psychological defenses that cause people to deny their complicity in it. They share a belief in what Kendi calls “individual transformation for societal transformation.” When Kendi took over Selena Gomez’s Instagram, for example, he urged her 180 million followers to “1. Acknowledge your racism,” “2. Confess your racist ideas” and “3. Define racism and antiracism.” Then they would be ready for Steps 4 and 5, identifying and working to change racist policies.

Kendi and DiAngelo’s talk of confession — antiracism as a kind of conversion experience — inspired many people and disturbed others. By focusing so much on personal growth, critics said, they made it easy for self-help to take the place of organizing, for a conflict over the policing of Black communities, and by extension their material conditions, to become a fight not over policy but over etiquette — which words to use, whether to say “Black Lives Matter” or “All Lives Matter.” Many allies felt that Kendi and DiAngelo were merely helping white people alleviate their guilt.

They also questioned Kendi’s willingness to turn his philosophy into a brand. Following the success of “How to Be an Antiracist,” he released a deck of “antiracist” conversation-starter cards, an “antiracist” journal with prompts for self-reflection and a children’s book, “Antiracist Baby.” Christine Platt, an author and advocate who worked with Kendi at American University, recently co-wrote a novel that features a Kendi-like figure — a “soft-spoken” author named Dr. Braxton Walsh Jr., whose book “Woke Yet?” becomes a viral phenomenon. “White folks post about it on social media all the time,” rants De’Andrea, one of the main characters. “Wake up and get your copy today! Only nineteen ninety-nine plus shipping and handling.”

Those who thought of him as a self-help guru, Kendi felt, simply hadn’t read his work. Like most scholars of race, Kendi believes that Blackness is a fiction born of colonial powers’ self-interest, not just ignorance or hate, meaning that combating racism today requires upending the economic and political structures that propagate it. But Kendi doesn’t like the term “systemic racism” because it turns racism into a “hidden and unknowable” force for which there’s no one to blame, so he prefers to talk about “racist policies.”

In The Atlantic, he warned against the country going down a path of symbolic change where “monuments to racism are dismantled, but Americans shrink from the awesome task of reshaping the country with antiracist policies,” like Medicare for All, need-based school funding and reparations. Changing policy was exactly what he aimed to do at Boston University. During the protests, in the summer of 2020, the university named Kendi the Andrew W. Mellon professor of the humanities, a chair previously held by the Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel, and announced the creation of a center on campus to put his ideas into action. Donations came pouring in, led by an anonymous $25 million gift and a $10 million gift from the Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, which the provost said would give Kendi “the resources to launch the center like a rocket ship.”

Kendi started the center from his home in Boston, while Sadiqa, a pediatric E.R. doctor, came and went from the hospital in full protective gear. Kendi ran a research center as part of his old job at American University, but he felt unable to make a meaningful impact because the resources were modest and he was diagnosed with cancer just four months after its founding. Now, granted tens of millions of dollars to enact his most ambitious ideas, Kendi was determined to create an organization that could be a real engine of progress. “We’ve got to build an infrastructure to match what the right has created,” he later told a co-worker. “We’ve got to build something equally powerful.”

Kendi’s two centers were part of a wave of racial-justice spaces being founded at universities, like the Thurgood Marshall Civil Rights Center at Howard or the Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab at Princeton, that pledged to work in partnership with activists and community groups to achieve social change. Kendi envisioned an organization that supported people of color in campaigning for policies that would concretely improve their lives.

To reflect that mission, he designed a structure with four “pillars” or offices: Research, Policy, Narrative and Advocacy. He recruited data scientists, policy analysts, organizers and educators and brought in faculty members working on race from across the university. They set up a model-legislation unit, which would draft sample bills and public-comment notes; an amicus-brief practice, which would target court cases in which race was being overlooked as an issue; and a grant process to fund research on racism by interdisciplinary teams elsewhere at the university, among other programs. Kendi also struck up a partnership with The Boston Globe to revive The Emancipator, a storied abolitionist newspaper. “It was a really exciting time,” he told me.

That summer, however, Kendi found himself on the defensive beyond Boston as Republican book-banning campaigns revved up. On Fox News, Tucker Carlson denounced “How to Be an Antiracist” as “poisonous,” plucking out Kendi’s summary of the case for race-conscious policymaking, which sounded particularly maladroit when taken out of context: “ The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination ,” Carlson read in mock disbelief. “In other words, his book against racism promotes racism.” This was around the same time that Rufo, the conservative activist, started to position Kendi as a leading proponent of critical race theory, a school of thought, Rufo told The New Yorker, that he discovered by hunting through the footnotes of “How to Be an Antiracist.”

Critical race theorists were a group of legal scholars in the 1970s and ’80s who documented ways that the American legal framework of racial equality was nevertheless producing unequal treatment. They elaborated the idea of systemic racism and the critique of “colorblindness” that inform much of the writing of Kendi’s cohort. Rufo wrote on Twitter that his goal was to change the meaning of the term “critical race theory” — to “turn it toxic” by putting “all of the various cultural insanities under that brand category.” In his attacks on Kendi, Rufo also amplified the left’s critique of Kendi’s corporate-friendliness, caricaturing Kendi as a grifter out to enrich himself by raking in speaking fees. The number of threatening messages Kendi received began to rise. “I don’t feel safe anywhere,” Kendi later told a colleague. “I’m constantly looking over my shoulder.”

By the time the academic year began, in the fall of 2021, Kendi decided to take extraordinary measures. Before the center began in-person work that September, Kendi sent the staff an email about “security protocols,” instructing them to conceal the location of the center even from other Boston University faculty members and students. “It is critical to not share the address of the center with anyone or bring anyone to the center,” Kendi wrote. The email included a mock script to be used in the event of an inquiry about the center’s location, which ended abruptly with, “I gotta go.”

Though such precautions felt necessary to Kendi, they were met with incredulity and frustration by some employees who were starting to question his leadership. Problems emerged within the first six months, according to more than a dozen staff and faculty members I interviewed. Some told me they had gone to the center because they considered Kendi a visionary; others had reservations about or flat-out disagreements with his work but believed he had brought much-needed attention to issues they cared about. They would be able to find common ground, they thought. They were ready for some chaos as they tried to spin up a new organization remotely, but they quickly ran into difficulty as they tried to execute some of Kendi’s plans.

Kendi emphasizes in his books that policies alone are the cause of racial disparities today. In “Stamped From the Beginning,” his 2016 history of anti-Black ideas from the 15th century to the Obama presidency — which won the National Book Award and was recently made into a Netflix documentary that made the Oscar shortlist — Kendi writes that blaming Black people for their own oppression, by implying that Black people or Black culture are inferior or pathological, was one of the oldest cons in America. He had witnessed it again during the early days of the pandemic, when the numbers suggested that Black people were dying from Covid faster than every racial group save Native Americans. Some pundits speculated about the “soul food” diet or posited that Black communities weren’t taking the virus seriously, even though a Pew survey found that Black respondents were most likely to view the coronavirus as a major threat.

Kendi wanted the center to build “the nation’s largest online collection” of racial data to track disparities like this one and do analytical work to understand each policy responsible. In the case of Covid, for example, Black Americans are disproportionately likely to work in low-income essential jobs, to live in crowded conditions and to lack access to high-quality insurance or medical care. The center might research these conditions and propose targeted interventions, like changes to Medicaid coverage, or more transformative measures, like a universal basic income. One faculty member involved told me that she was “initially incredibly enthusiastic” about the idea. “It seemed like an opportunity to do rigorous, well-funded social-science research that would be aimed at real policy change on issues that I cared about,” she told me.

Like Kendi, his staff believed that historical oppression and ongoing discrimination explained why Black Americans fared comparatively poorly on so many measures of well-being, from education to wealth to longevity, and that centuries of injustice demanded a sweeping policy response to remedy. But understanding that past and present racism is the underlying cause of Black disadvantage is different from the work of assessing its role in any single policy, let alone figuring out how to change the policy to eliminate it. That takes careful analysis. “You have to have specificity,” the faculty member said, “or you can’t measure.”

Kendi pushed back at staff members who argued that the center should constrain its focus. There were plenty of academic centers and researchers that tracked data on racial disparities in one policy area or another, he said; he wanted to convene that pre-existing data, bringing it together in one place for easy access by the public. In a 2022 meeting, when the team tried to get a better sense of his vision, Kendi told them that he wanted a guy at a barbershop or a bar to be able to “pull up the numbers.” To many employees with data or policy backgrounds, what Kendi wanted didn’t seem feasible; at worst, they thought, it risked simply replicating others’ work or creating a mess of sloppily merged data, connected to too many policies for their small team to track rigorously. In the midst of the pandemic, the center struggled to hire a director of research who might have been able to mediate the dispute.

In November, a confidential complaint was filed with the university administration raising concerns about Kendi’s leadership. The anonymous employee told a university compliance officer that Kendi ran the center with “hypercontrol” and created an environment of “silence and secrecy” that was causing low morale and high turnover, claiming that “when Dr. Kendi is questioned, the narrative becomes that the employee must be the one with the ‘problem.’” The employee warned the university that the situation “is potentially going to blow up.”

One of Kendi’s refrains is that being antiracist demands self-criticism. “If I share an idea that people don’t understand, I’m to blame,” he told an interviewer in 2019. “I’m always to blame.” Kendi told me that his most productive conversations with critics of his ideas often happened in private, including one with a prominent Black thinker who inspired him to make a change in the revised edition of “How to Be an Antiracist.” “This person talked about how the goal should not just be equity,” Kendi said. “The goal should not be the same percentage of Black people being killed by police as white people. The goal should be no one being killed by police.” But some Black scholars, as the right-wing backlash strengthened, debated whether to make their criticisms in public. The philosopher Charles Mills, after listening to a graduate-student presentation about Kendi and DiAngelo at a conference in 2021, asked the presenter: “Are their views now sufficiently influential, or perhaps sufficiently harmful, that we should make them a part of the target?”

Kendi was frustrated to be constantly lumped in with DiAngelo, whose ideas diverge from his in important ways. DiAngelo considers “white identity” to be “inherently racist,” while Kendi argues that anyone, including Black people, can be racist or antiracist. That puts him at odds with an understanding — common in the academy and the racial-justice movement — that Black people can’t be racist because racism is a system of power relations, and that Black people as a group don’t have the structural means to enforce their prejudice; this notion is often phrased as a formula, that racism is “prejudice plus power.”

Kendi thinks of “racist” not as a pejorative but as a simple word of description. His reigning metaphor is the sticker. Racist and antiracist are “peelable name tags,” Kendi writes; they describe not who we are but who we are being in any particular moment. He says he opposes the censoriousness that has become the sharp edge of identity politics, because he doesn’t regard shame as a useful social tool. But he has no intention of taking the moral sting out of “racist” completely. “I wouldn’t say that a person is not being condemned when they’re being called a racist,” he told Ezra Klein in a 2019 interview.

Rather than replacing one definition of racism with another, Kendi is really joining two senses into one. For much of the 20th century, the white mainstream considered racism a personal moral issue, while Black civil rights activists, among others, argued that it’s also structural and systemic. In his definition, Kendi aims to connect the individual to the system. A “racist,” he writes, is “one who is expressing an idea of racial hierarchy, or through actions or inaction is supporting a policy that leads to racial inequity or injustice.”

Kendi’s focus on outcomes is not new. For decades, civil rights activists have brought lawsuits based on the legal theory of “disparate impact,” which holds that unequal outcomes prove that certain practices (by, for example, an employer or a landlord) are racially discriminatory, without evidence of malicious intent. Kendi’s definition urges us to perform this sort of disparate-impact analysis all the time. In Politico in 2020, Kendi proposed the creation of a federal agency that would clear every new policy — local, state or federal — to ensure that it wouldn’t increase racial disparities. But as his team at the center knew well, policies can have complicated effects. Let’s say that a local environmental policy would improve the air quality in Black neighborhoods near factories but would also lead to hundreds of lost jobs and worsen the area’s racial wealth gap. Should it be cleared? Is such a policy racist or antiracist?

The question is made even trickier by the fact that the racial impact of many policies might not become clear until years later. The legacy of desegregation, for example, shows that even a profoundly antiracist policy can be turned against itself in its implementation. This is what the term “systemic racism” captures that can be lost in Kendi’s translation of “racist policies.”

In “Stamped From the Beginning,” Kendi writes that “racist policy is the cause of racial disparities in this country and the world at large.” Mary Pattillo, a sociologist at Northwestern, told me that Kendi’s focus on race didn’t fully capture the complexity of social life — the roles of class, culture, religion, community. “No one variable alone explains anything ,” she said. But she thought there was value in simplifying. She understood Kendi not as an official making policy but as a thought leader making a “defensible, succinct provocation.” “We live in a country whose ideology is very individualistic, so the standard response to any failure is individual blame,” she said. “Those of us who do recognize the importance of policies, laws and so on have to always push so hard against that that we have to make statements like the one that Kendi is making.”

I came to think, after months of talking to Kendi, that this was the key to understanding him — to remember that he is trying to push so hard against that . To shove back the anti-Black stereotypes he documented in “Stamped From the Beginning,” the racist ideas that poisoned his own mind and sense of self-worth. His aim, at every turn, is to blame the policies that create unequal conditions and not the people enduring them. But Kendi is so consumed by combating the racist notion of Black inferiority that some of what he says in response is overstated, circular or uncareful, creating an easy target for his critics and discomfiting his allies. Conservatives were far from the only ones alarmed, for example, by his proposal for a constitutional amendment to appoint a panel of racism “experts” with the power to discipline public officials for “racist ideas.” (Kendi told me he modeled this proposal on European countries like Germany, where the bar for hate speech is much lower.)

Some of Kendi’s ideas are softer than they appear at first. Kendi told me that people who believe that his binary applies to “everything” are misreading him. Though he writes that “there is no such thing as a not-racist idea, only racist ideas and antiracist ideas,” he says he never meant that sentence to apply to the whole universe of ideas, only to ideas about race. When I asked him whether the environmental policy above would be racist or antiracist based on his definition, he qualified that “policies can be like people, both racist and antiracist,” and went on: “By improving the air quality in Black neighborhoods near factories, the policy is being antiracist. By exacerbating the area’s racial wealth gap, the policy is being racist.” Many of his critics might find this a more reasonable position, but it also leads to a question about how useful or powerful a dichotomy it is in the end.

Kendi wanted to remain open to criticism, but so much of what he encountered was racist mockery, lies, professional jealousy, misreadings and threats. “I have thought many times about exiting my vocation as a scholar who studies racism,” he wrote in the revised edition of “How to Be an Antiracist.” “After the experience of the last three years, it does not feel safe for me to be publicly self-reflective or self-critical. It feels dangerous for me to be vulnerable.” Though he commits to doing so anyway, the onslaught brought on by celebrity seemed to cause Kendi’s introversion to harden into distrust. “Fame can be defeating and depleting,” Stefan Bradley, Kendi’s friend, told me. “Every word he puts into the atmosphere will be chopped up a hundred different ways, and that takes a toll on somebody’s mental health.” Bradley continued: “I think that if he were a lesser spirit, he would have been destroyed.”

That Kendi felt under siege became clear to Yanique Redwood when she started her job at the Center for Antiracist Research. Redwood had met Kendi once, in 2017, and she remembered him as soft-spoken but burning with big, exciting ideas. In the fall of 2021, when she interviewed to be the center’s executive director, Kendi told her he felt as though he was failing. Fund-raising while also running the center was too much for one person, and he wanted Redwood, a Caribbean American health and racial-equity researcher who had spent nearly a decade running a small foundation, to take over internal operations. Redwood was prepared to find some disorder, but the state of the center’s finances was a mess unlike any she had ever seen. “Nothing was in place,” she said. “It was unbelievable that an institution like that, with so much spotlight on it, just did not have systems. I understood why I was being brought in.”

Before starting, she conducted a round of entry interviews with faculty and staff members, and by her 27th and last conversation, she was exhausted from absorbing their frustration. “There’s something really wrong here,” she told Kendi. Much of the staff was relieved when Redwood was hired. There had been widespread confusion as employees were asked to do “damage control” by performing jobs for which they weren’t hired, or even qualified. “Everyone was overwhelmed,” Redwood told me. “There were too many promises being made to funders. Products were being promised that could never be delivered.”

Redwood designed a process to help get researchers going on pilot projects tracking disparities relating to felony murder, the health and social safety net, reparations and student-debt forgiveness. She wanted to share some takeaways from her round of entry interviews with the staff, in a tactful and encouraging way, to start the work of repairing the center’s culture, but Kendi worried that whatever she wrote might leak. A reporter from a conservative media outlet was reaching out to former employees, asking about problems at the center. “This media storm was coming,” Redwood told me. “It was brewing.”

Employees said Kendi’s fear of leaks slowed the work and created confusion and unease. The first time Rachael DeCruz, the head of the Advocacy office, asked Kendi about the center’s finances to help her budget, in 2021, he reacted “bizarrely,” she told me. “Why do you need that information?” he asked. (Kendi denies that this conversation took place. DeCruz says that after asking repeatedly, she received the information about six months later.) The threat of outside scrutiny exacerbated what employees described as Kendi’s tendency to withhold information to avoid interpersonal conflict. “He doesn’t understand people, how to nurture them, how to make them want to do their best work,” Redwood told me. “It’s not his strength, not even a little bit.”

During her entry interviews, Redwood asked each employee what the organization’s values were, and many of them responded by saying something along the lines of “I’ve been wondering that myself.” She encouraged Kendi to hold a retreat to talk through the mission as a group. Kendi was hesitant because he found work retreats “uncomfortable” — “sitting in a room with a large group of people all day long is exhausting for me,” he told me — but he committed to holding one anyway and solicited staff comments on a document he wrote laying out his theory of social change and the center’s role in it. “I was happy to receive all this great feedback,” he wrote to Redwood. “I think the changes will make the document much stronger and clearer.”

On a spring day in 2022, the staff met at a conference center a half-hour’s drive from campus. The day’s agenda, though couched in the gentle jargon of nonprofits, contained hints of the mood: The organizers on staff had scheduled time for an acknowledgment of the center’s growing pains, for a “healing justice moment” and for a period of “wicked questions” when concerns or challenges could be raised. At the start of the day, Naima Wong, an outside facilitator, encouraged the staff not to hold back. “We’re here to really get into this,” she said.

Late in the afternoon, when it was time to wrap up, the group assembled at tables arranged in a circle. Saida Grundy, a sociologist, was seated across from Kendi. She had never been on board with Kendi’s understanding of racism, subscribing instead to the “power plus prejudice” view. Grundy had forwarded Kendi’s email about security to colleagues with the note “The paranoia is INSANE.” “Ibram is so lily-livered he probably jumps when the biscuit tin pops,” she told me. Grundy was the one who, back in November, had made the anonymous complaint, in which some charges carried a hint of paranoia of her own, like the idea that Kendi “despises academia” and had “gotten satisfaction out of pulling academics out of their own research.” She had accused the center of being an exploitative workplace and, after having conflict with her supervisor, had already mostly stepped back from her role. Grundy had told the compliance office that the center might explode, and now she was ready to blow it up herself.

Her voice raised, Grundy laid out an indictment of the document Kendi wrote. “This is a mile wide and an inch deep,” she said. She argued that the center needed to be more specific about its goals; “fighting racism” was such a broad mission that it felt cynically strategic, allowing the center to take in money for all sorts of projects. “If there is a grant for antiracism on Jupiter, great,” she said. “We do extraterrestrial antiracism.” Grundy, unlike most of the staff, thought the center should become a resource for university faculty members and students; her parents were Black student activists in the 1970s, and she believed that real change starts where you are. “If you lined up 99 Black students at B.U.,” she said, “99 will tell you the center’s made no difference to their experience.”

When she finished speaking, the room was silent. Several people were crying. Dawna Johnson, the center’s financial director at the time, called it an “explosion.” “People didn’t know what to say after that,” she said. “It just left you so unhappy and uptight.” Kendi, his face inscrutable behind a Covid mask, said nothing, and the facilitator wrapped up the session. “Scholars who study the experience of Black leaders find that the No.1 racist challenge Black leaders face is contested authority, even from other Black leaders and staff,” he wrote to me later. I asked him what he remembered from that day. “It’s almost like trying to remember a day in which you were really happy, but then something horrible happened at the end,” he told me. “It’s hard to remember anything else other than that horrible thing.”

Grundy had admittedly come in hot, many staff members agreed, but it didn’t seem to matter how they couched their concerns. Employees continued to push to make sure that the center’s research projects were both rigorous and responsive to community needs, but the issues they raised in response to Kendi’s “theory of change” document never seemed to get fully resolved. “He’s communicating one thing,” one person said. “Behind the curtain, he’s behaving a very different kind of way.” Redwood and several others said that if someone was too persistent about a concern, Kendi would slow or stop his communication with that person. “If someone disagrees or someone is being vocal, you can’t just get rid of them,” she wanted to tell him. “Like, this is how you breed distrust.”

Redwood ultimately decided that Kendi wasn’t interested in building consensus around a shared mission. “Only he had the ideas,” she said. “We were there to execute on his ideas.” Redwood resigned in October 2022.

In a memo to The Times, Kendi disputed many of the staff’s recollections of his leadership. “This is not me, and anyone close to me, who has worked with me for a long time, knows that I’m open to constructive criticism as a writer and a thinker and a leader,” he wrote. Many progressive advocacy groups, Kendi pointed out, have been torn apart by internal clashes in recent years, conflicts that he said were driven by employees who “care more about performing their radicalism” than working to “improve the lives of everyday people.” “Former employees constantly deauthorized me as the director of the center — not because they were against hierarchy — but to assume authority for themselves,” he wrote.

Even before Redwood’s departure, Kendi told me, he realized the center was in financial trouble. He was far from the only nonprofit leader caught short as funding for racial-justice work collapsed after 2020. Funders that doused organizations with cash in the wake of George Floyd’s murder proved unwilling or unable to sustain their commitment, and layoffs were taking place across the sector, even at large nonprofits like the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative. The center had gone from raising $40 million in 2020 to a fraction of that — $420,000 — the next year.

In June 2023, after he went on parental leave, Kendi approached university leaders with the idea of switching to a fellowship model, which could adjust its number of awards to fluctuations in fund-raising. He told the staff only that he would be announcing some major changes when he returned from leave. Dawna Johnson, who succeeded Redwood as executive director, was left to manage a staff frustrated by being kept in the dark. “I think the staff thought I knew more than I actually did, as far as what the future of the center was,” she told me. “He’s like, Just don’t spend money, essentially, which is kind of difficult in an organization that needs to move forward.” (Kendi denies that he said anything like this to Johnson, who remains in her role today.)

Kendi spent the next three months taking care of his newborn daughter, Imara, and his wife, who was diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer while pregnant. In his absence, at another staff retreat, four employees stood up and spoke in turn about the problems at the center. Much of the staff had just learned that the center agreed to partner with the D.E.I. arm of the consulting company Deloitte, which does work for the police and prisons, on designing an antiracism training for corporate workplaces. “Why wasn’t this shared with the broader staff sooner, as a potential high-risk partnership that could impact the relationships we are forging with movement leaders?” one person said. “Why are we contemplating this partnership that arguably goes against our values?”

Kendi, who identifies as a police and prison abolitionist, suggested that donations from corporations could be seen as a “form of reparations,” and he stressed to me that the Deloitte agreement “allowed us to control the products from design to delivery.” He once again dismissed the critics at the retreat as “performative radicals” of the sort that have been “causing all kinds of havoc in Black-led social justice organizations for years, claiming that they are against hierarchy when they really are against being directed by a Black person.” He thought they were being hypocritical in objecting to the Deloitte partnership because they “do not object to personally having profiles on social media corporations that platform copaganda, or buying goods from retailers employing incarcerated labor in their supply chains, or using technology from corporations providing carceral states with technologies of surveillance.”

When I asked the employees about this, one of them called Kendi’s comments about hypocrisy a “deflection tactic.” She stressed that the staff was not making a demand but asking for an open dialogue — or at least a clearly articulated rationale — about decisions that affected them. His response fit a clear pattern, they thought, of believing that employees were trying to undermine him when they really just cared about the work. “I understand he’s coming from a place of trauma,” another told me. “He’s criticized unfairly and through a racist lens constantly. I do understand it. But then to distort that into an inability to receive feedback that’s going to ensure the success and usefulness of the center — that’s where it becomes a problem.”

In September, Kendi fired 19 of the center’s 36 employees in a series of Zoom meetings. Many told me they could understand the layoffs given the financial climate, but to change the model from an ambitious organization that had pledged to drive social change to one that handed out academic fellowships felt like a betrayal of the mission. The abruptness of the decision forced the staff to scramble to find other homes for projects, including a research program supporting Boston-area organizers on a campaign to challenge family policing in schools, for which they were in the midst of sensitive interviews with affected parents and caregivers. Breaking promises they’d made to grass-roots partners was what bothered her team most, said DeCruz, the head of the Advocacy office, because equitable and sustained relationships between communities and advocates build a strong network — a movement aligned on its goals. Pulling out damaged those relationships.

Though some staff members told me they appreciated Kendi — “My life forever, forever changed because I worked for someone who pushed me to envision what’s possible,” one said — many others had become darkly cynical about him. The most vocal among them was Grundy, who took to Twitter calling Kendi a “grifter” and fueling the rumor that he might have stolen funds. Redwood tried to have empathy. She imagined what it must be like to be constantly attacked — to have your intelligence insulted, your motives questioned. “I wonder if some of the secrecy and paranoid behavior came about as a result of that,” she told me. “I have no idea, and I had to just eventually stop trying to figure it out and just move on, because I couldn’t understand how the person I met when he was at American, when I sat down with him for lunch, the person who appeared to be so humble, so committed — and I still think he is committed — could be the person that I worked for. It is not something that I have ever been able to understand.”

Several people stressed to me that Kendi’s weaknesses as a leader were not as important as the larger forces that surrounded his leadership — the opportunism of white-led institutions, the boom and bust of trend-chasing nonprofit funding, the commodification of Black thought and activism. I asked Boston University to comment on a complaint I heard from the staff, that its administration had failed to provide adequate oversight. “Boston University provided significant financial and administrative support to Dr. Kendi and the center. Dr. Kendi did not always accept the support,” a spokesperson wrote. “In hindsight, and with the fuller knowledge of the organizational problems that arose, the university should have done more to insist on additional oversight.”

The spokesperson also said that the decision to end the center’s projects was Kendi’s choice. “Several different models were discussed with Dr. Kendi, including bringing many of the projects to completion over the next two years and lessening the impact on staff,” he wrote. “However, Dr. Kendi’s preference was to terminate the ongoing projects and ask the funders to repurpose the funds for his new endeavor.” (In a written response, Kendi accused the interim university administration of trying to undermine the center’s work. “The center has faced more oversight and scrutiny than every other center at B.U. from the Office of Research and this interim B.U. administration,” he wrote. “I’m disappointed that this interim B.U. administration is giving The Times a version of events that doesn’t reconcile with the facts.”)

The last time I saw Kendi in person was in January, when he came to New York to promote his newest book, a young readers’ adaptation of Zora Neale Hurston’s “Barracoon,” based on her 1927 interviews with Cudjo Lewis, one of the last survivors of the Middle Passage from Africa. That night, Kendi was doing an event at an independent bookstore in Brooklyn Heights, where the streets were salt-streaked after a light snowstorm and white string lights glowed on a tree outside. One of the three personal-security officers he brought with him — bearded Black men in black peacoats and dress pants, fitted with earpieces — was checking bags at the door.

Kendi was standing by a wall of books in a teal blazer, his pocket square in place. For a while, he said, he stopped doing many public events because of his security concerns, but he realized it had contributed to his feeling alienated and embattled. “Not doing live book signings prevented me from engaging with the people who were reading and appreciating my work,” he told me later. Going on tour again had “helped tremendously,” he said. But he didn’t want to be away from home long while Sadiqa was in treatment. “It’s incredibly difficult to witness someone you care about deeply facing so much pain and loss,” he said. “I’d much rather just be the one facing that pain.”

Boston University had cleared him and the center of grant mismanagement, but he was still waiting for Korn Ferry, the management consulting firm hired by the administration, to finish its culture inquiry, and he continued to attribute any dysfunction at the center to the hardships of the pandemic and employees who repeatedly contested his leadership. He was coordinating with the university on the center’s next phase, he said, but the work that felt most meaningful to him at the moment was “getting back to my roots as a writer.” He was at work on his next big project, a contemporary political history.

Kendi has spun out 13 books since “How to Be an Antiracist” in 2019, 10 of which are adaptations of his or others’ work for children. Since becoming a father, he told me, it has become even more important to him to reach young readers — particularly Black kids like him who may have internalized racist ideas about themselves. Earlier that day, Kendi spoke to 250 kids at a middle school elsewhere in Brooklyn, taking questions from a panel of seventh and eighth graders. “Barracoon” was the latest in a series of books he was adapting by Hurston, the Harlem Renaissance ethnographer he has called the “greatest antiracist novelist of the interwar era.” “I wanted it to read like a grandparent sharing their difficult life story with care and love to their grandchild,” Kendi wrote on Instagram.

During the talk, Kendi told the audience that there are some Black people who, from the way they maneuver in the world, you can tell are spiritual maroons. “This is the person who truly is living and navigating from the standpoint of a freedom,” he said. “They’re unafraid or not worried at all about the white gaze. They’re operating and navigating the world based on their own destiny, based on what they want.” Hurston, who traveled throughout the South, Jamaica and Haiti collecting folklore from the descendants of slaves, was one of those people, Kendi said.

Listening to him, I wondered how often he felt like one of them, too. I got the impression that Kendi spent a lot of time in his head, in that defensive pose, anticipating or parrying attacks from his critics. When I asked him later where he and Sadiqa had gone on vacation over the New Year holiday, he declined even to name the country for fear that “bad-faith people” would try to figure out where they had stayed and how much their hotel room cost. I told him it seemed as though he devoted a lot of thought to how something he said or did could be used against him by the least generous person on the internet. “I certainly don’t want to provide fodder for it,” he told me.

Kendi is right that there’s a mess of misinformation about what he believes. He has become a cipher for the unfinished national conversation about the post-George Floyd moment — the outrage and wild hope of the protests, the reactionary anger, the disillusionment. In tying together racism’s two senses — the personal and the systemic — Kendi has helped many more Americans understand that they are responsible not only for the ideas in their heads but also for the impact they have on the world. But this gap between intention and action, so core to his thinking, is where all the hard work takes place, DeCruz told me. That’s where organizing and movement-building happens, where you practice the kind of world you want to live in. “Having a shared language is important,” she said, but “it’s just the first step.”

Read by January LaVoy

Narration produced by Emma Kehlbeck and Krish Seenivasan

Engineered by David Mason

Rachel Poser is a story editor for the magazine. She has previously written about whiteness in classical studies, sting operations and the charms of paleoart. Wayne Lawrence is a visual artist in Brooklyn and Detroit whose work is focused on community and purpose. His work is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture.

An earlier version of this article misstated the center’s fundraising in 2021 as compared to the previous year. It was approximately one-hundredth of the amount raised in 2020, not a tenth. The article also misstated the recognition given to the documentary adaptation of “Stamped From the Beginning.” The documentary was named to the Oscar shortlist, but was not nominated for the award.

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