Fall 2025 brought big news in the small world of Arkansas academia, taking up many inches of newsprint in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette (ADG) and other outlets. The University of Arkansas at Little Rock (UALR) terminated a newly hired law professor who reacted to Charlie Kirk’s assassination by declaring that she would “not pull back from CELEBRATING that an evil man died by the method he chose to embrace,” apparently meaning Second Amendment rights. As her UALR Law colleague Rob Steinbuch pointed out in ADG, long before her hiring, this professor had a history of controversial tweets denigrating whites. Steinbuch noted that when he led the law school’s personnel committee, it scrutinized job candidates’ social media profiles to see if they might show questionable judgment. In contrast, last year’s hiring committee missed red flags, or perhaps did not perceive them as problematic. At any rate, comments like those denouncing Kirk’s mourners, who included much of Arkansas’s political class, as akin to the KKK, were cited by her employer as a “disruption to the efficient operation of the Bowen School of Law and UA Little Rock,” violating civility and other values required in public sector, public-facing professions like teaching.
Many have made predictable points about tradeoffs between the need for professors at public universities to avoid discrimination—don’t insult people based on their race!—and fostering an environment where people can share controversial views without fearing punishment. The first part, assuring equal treatment, gets lots of attention, and rightly so. For decades, most Americans, whatever their race, have taken offense when public employees like cops or professors denigrate the races of the taxpayers they serve. That’s good! Yet punishing people for offensive speech creates martyrs. And if bad ideas go underground because people fear expressing them, how do we disprove those ideas?
So while others have addressed the legality and wisdom of firing the UALR professor for tweets, I will instead critique the ideology of those tweets, racial essentialism, the view that race defines us.
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To be clear, I am not saying racial essentialists are bad people. Many are good people with bad ideas. Through nearly all human history and most U.S. history, racial essentialism in one form or another was a dominant idea. In the early 20th century, bestselling authors like Harvard-educated historian Lothrop Stoddard argued for segregation and even sterilization of blacks, Asians, Italians, and Jews so “under-men” like my grandparents could not outbreed the “superior Nordic races.” (Germany copied the terminology.)
Stoddard’s views never completely disappeared and may even be making a comeback. Yet, as my collaborator Craig Frisby observes, today the most influential racial essentialists by far are critical race theorists who divide us into white and “white adjacent” oppressors and nonwhite victims. Like Stoddard, CRT portrays relations as zero-sum: if one group wins, another loses. And like Stoddard in his day, CRT has power. In many academic fields, it’s tough to get a job unless you pretend to like CRT. That has effects.
For example, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) prioritized frontline workers for COVID-19 vaccines over the far more vulnerable elderly, since the latter are disproportionately white. As liberal political scientist Yascha Mounk detailed in “Why I’m Losing Trust in the Institutions,” this would have killed thousands more Americans, including more nonwhites. Yet, until outsiders intervened, bureaucrats explicitly prioritized CRT ideology over lifesaving, believing as a matter of principle that whatever helps whites must harm nonwhites.
Those views are awful and commonplace. At a national academic conference this fall, I saw prominent (white) social scientists denounce the spread of university centers for the teaching of constitutional democracy as “white supremacist,” because those centers teach ancient Greek philosophers, who were “white.” (Most would have likely self-identified as Athenian.) So, are we supposed to end democracy because its originators came from a supposedly oppressor race?
That is worthy of ridicule—where is Monty Python when you need it? Americans of all groups benefit from better schools, less crime, stronger families, effective vaccines, and democracy. Racial essentialism distracts from what matters. Most Americans know this. As my friend Eric Kaufmann shows empirically in “Americans are divided by their views on race, not race itself,” even on race-themed issues, Americans of different races share similar views. In his recent book, Eric shows that four out of five whites, blacks, and Hispanics agree that wokeness has gone too far. This, rather than white supremacy, almost certainly explains why Kamala Harris is not in the White House.
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Though discrimination occurs, and cultural differences are both real and fascinating, we Americans are far too complicated to be defined by race. As my collaborator, Kentucky State Professor and patriotic American, Wilfred Reilly details in his wonderful book Taboo: 10 facts you can’t talk about, census data indicate that 18 nonwhite groups, on average, make more money than whites. Some, including Indian Americans, Taiwanese Americans, and Nigerian Americans (mainly of the Igbo people), prosper despite suffering discrimination. On income, the variation within races often dwarfs differences between races, reflecting age, education, region, and family structure. As my postal worker father often said, someone’s race tells you little about their condition, much less their character.
To see the right way to fight racial essentialism, and feel good about America’s future, watch the debate between Wilfred Reilly and white nationalist Jared Taylor, hosted by Wilfred’s historically black university, about whether diversity makes America stronger. Among other things, Wilfred notes that Americans of different races are marrying and having kids at levels never seen anywhere, and those kids are doing fine. So long as they grow into law-abiding citizens who respect the freedoms guaranteed by our national Constitution, why obsess over their race? To take this view a step further, do those who obsess over race have the wisdom to be called educators? Colleges would not hire supporters of Lothrop Stoddard, so why should we hire more critical race theorists when the current crop retires?
I’ll end with Wilfred’s closing line in Taboo: “God bless America.”
Image by U. J. Alexander on Adobe; Asset ID#: 471405027
