A university of California professor is facing backlash over a passage in her newly released book where she falsely claims that Kyle Rittenhouse shot two Black men. Professor and author Kara Cooney came under fire on Wednesday after a passage in her newly released book, "The Good Kings" falsely claims Rittenhouse killed two Black men.
The book published by National Geographic Press made quite a few errors and this is among the ones that has been drawing maximum heat. The errors were first spotted by a journalist who posted it on Twitter on Wednesday, with the entire social media slamming Cooney for being a racist.
Big Blunder
On Wednesday, Kara McKinney, the host of Tipping Point on One America News Network (OANN), found Cooney's error and posted the alleged screenshots of her misstatements from her new book "The Good Kings" on Twitter. Cooney writes that Rittenhouse shot dead two Black men while his victims were white.
Cooney in her book asks readers to "consider 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, who used his semi-automatic weapon to kill two Black men in Kenosha, Wisconsin, while waging a glorious race war on behalf of his inherited White power."
Rittenhouse shot three men in Kenosha on August 25, 2020, night and killed two people. Both the men were white. He also injured a third person who too was white.
Cooney's claims in her book are in line with the falsehood continually propped up by some media elites and progressive politicians.
Following the shooting, Rittenhouse was slapped with five charges for fatally shooting two people and injuring a third person. During his hyped trial Rittenhouse's attorneys argued that that he acted in self defense after being attacked from behind when he wounded Gaige Grosskreutz, 27, and killed Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, and Anthony Huber, 26, in the riots following the police shooting of a 29-year-old Black man, Jacob Blake.
He was eventually acquitted on all charges on November 19 after being found not guilty.
Not Spared
Cooney concluded the paragraph on Rittenhouse by writing, "Fear has gripped the patriarchy, and the threat of righteous violence- or the lethal use of it- is the patriarchy's response." However, she never realized what was in the coming.
The author and professor was immediately slammed on social media for her insensitive remarks and false claims in her book. Cooney's book uses Rittenhouse to make her claims about white patriarchal hegemonic rule of the United States, according to the Post Millennial.
Cooney did apologize for her mistake but that didn't help much. "On p. 341 of THE GOOD KINGS I state that Kyle Rittenhouse shot two Black men when instead he shot two white men," Cooney wrote on Twitter on Wednesday.
"That was my mistake, and I apologize. The response has been a hateful stew of ridicule and denial that America has a race problem at all."
Her apology although came with her own set of arguments and reflected that she was more defensive than apologetic. Defending herself against the feedback she's received over the factual errors she said that it was a symptom of White supremacy and misogyny, calling the Rittenhouse passage a "tiny detail of the book."
"If one mistake in a little-known book about ancient Egypt elicits this much howling, it is to avoid discussing our larger problem, to avoid seeing our deep-seeded obsession with patriarchal power," Cooney wrote. "So yeah, tiny detail of the book with a big mistake about a massive American issue. And that's on me. But the white supremacy is still a problem. And the misogyny is still a problem."
Cooney is a professor of Egyptian Art and Architecture and Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at UCLA, according to nelc.ucla.edu. Her Amazon profile describes her as a professor of Egyptology at UCLA.
Clooney in her book about Egyptian Pharaohs, also claims that "Patriarchal anger exists in a purely binary space in which the male of the species has been the good king for so long that he sees no other way."
Cooney made another major error while writing about the case of civil rights icon Rosa Parks, who famously gained national attention for her protest on a public bus. The author retells the event as "when [Rosa Parks] took a seat in the White section of a public bus and started the Montgomery bus boycott."
Parks did not sit in a White section of the bus. Instead, she famously refused to give up her seat to a White passenger after the White section at the front had filled up.
