Ibram X. Kendi, a professor at Boston University and an anti-racist activist, has recently deleted a tweet he wrote amid speculations online that it contradicted his narrative about white privilege.
The deleted tweet in question, whose screenshots have since gone viral, featured a link to an article by The Hill about a survey that found “that 34 percent of white students who applied to colleges and universities falsely claimed they were a racial minority on their application”.
The survey also discovered that the majority of these students (48 percent) claimed to be Native American, and that 77 percent of white applicants who “faked minority status” got accepted.
"More than a third of White students lied about their race on college applications, and about half of these applicants lied about being Native American. More than three-fourths of these students who lied about their race were accepted," Kendi wrote in his post.
He apparently deleted the tweet soon after, with his critics taking note of that fact and arguing that he did that “after realising it didn’t advance his argument that whites are privileged in every way”.
One netizen even claimed that Kendi started searching whoever shared a Post Millennial’s article about his tweet, and blocking them on Twitter.
Said article, while noting how Kendi described America as a “slaveholder” republic, inquired: “But if white privilege is so prevalent and persuasive, why would white kids feel the need to disguise their whiteness in order to gain admittance to college and aid to help them attend? Could it be that these white students felt that as opposed to giving them an edge, their whiteness was a hindrance to admittance?”
Meanwhile, Kendi himself insisted on Twitter that his critics “lie” about what he said “to defend the lying of White college applicants.”
“Here is their tortured line of thinking: When White applicants *think* they have an advantage by lying about being a person of colour then that means they *do* have an advantage which then means structural racism doesn’t exist,” he declared.
“They imagine White people are disadvantaged while White people are on the higher end of nearly every racial disparity,” he added. “They imagine Black and Native people have racial advantages at the same time Black and Native people are on the lowest end of nearly every racial disparity. SMH.”
Some social media users, however, did not seem convinced by his reasoning.