A UCLA professor and author is facing criticism after claiming Kyle Rittenhouse shot two black people in Kenosha, Wisconsin, last year.
Professor Kara Cooney has come under fire for part of her book, “The Good Kings”, where she claims Rittenhouse shot two black men instead of three white men.
The author called it a “tiny detail of the book with a big mistake about a massive American issue”.
In the book, Cooney writes “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”.
On Aug. 25, 2020, Rittenhouse wounded Gaige Grosskreutz and killed Joseph Rosenbaum and Anthony Huber, all of whom were white. In November, he was found not guilty on all counts.
Cooney was criticized on social media for the error in her book, causing her to acknowledge it on Twitter.
“On p. 341 of THE GOOD KINGS I state that Kyle Rittenhouse shot two Black men when instead he shot two white men,” she tweeted 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”.
“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,” she continued.
Cooney also tweeted “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”.
In the book, she makes an error when explaining the case of Rosa Parks. Cooney writes that Parks “took a seat in the white section of a public bus”. Parks was sitting in the right spot but refused to give up her seat to a white passenger after the white section was filled.
