Notable Race-Related Stories from the Last Ten Years in America
A review of the literature
by John Morrison
March 28, 2025
ABSURD DEI/RACIAL JUSTICE-RELATED INCIDENTS
In 2015, The Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston canceled “Kimono Wednesdays” following accusations of cultural appropriation and racial stereotyping. The museum relented despite a Japanese counter-protestor encouraging visitors to continue with the event
Every Wednesday, the MFA encouraged visitors to “channel your inner Camille Monet” by posing in a replica kimono in front of Monet’s “La Japonaise”.
But a social media controversy ensued and protesters accused the event of being racist and encouraging cultural appropriation. Protesters organized a Facebook ground named “Stand Against Yellow-Face @ the MFA”.
The MFA initially defended “Kimono Wednesdays” but soon relented and canceled the event.
One Japanese man counter-protested the protests and encouraged visitors to continue wearing the kimono.
In March 2017, Bret Weinstein wrote a letter to faculty at Evergreen College in which he objected to that year’s “Day of Absence” after an administrator called for white participants to stay away from campus. In May, campus-wide protests broke out during which protesters disrupted one of Weinstein’s classes and accused him of racism. Weinstein later resigned and received a six-figure settlement.
Traditionally the Day of Absence involved ethnic minority faculty and students voluntarily staying away from campus but in 2017 an administrator called for white participants to leave. Weinstein wrote,
“There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space to highlight their vital and underappreciated roles ... and a group encouraging another group to go away. The first is a forceful call to consciousness, which is, of course, crippling to the logic of oppression. The second is a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself.”
The Washington Post reported that “racial tensions have been simmering at the school all year” until protests broke out in May 2017. Protesters entered Weinstein’s class to confront him, accuse him of racism, and demanded that he resign.
Weinstein and his wife Heather Heying sued the college for not instructing campus police to stop the protests. Weinstein and Heying settled in September 2017 for $250,000 each.
In May 2023, the “Citi Bike Karen” video attracted international media attention and tens of millions of social media views. Sarah Comrie, a pregnant white woman, accused a black man of stealing her rental bike, but the man disputed her claim which led to Comrie facing death threats and being put on leave at her job pending an investigation. But it transpired that Comrie was the victim in the incident.
Comrie was a 34-year-old physician’s assistant. The New York Times had even profiled Comrie in 2020 as a healthcare worker risking her life to care for patients during the pandemic.
Comrie told the New York Times that she had left hospital after a 12-and-a-half-hour shift and was using e-bikes on doctor’s orders because of a uterine condition.
During the incident, Comrie was filmed shouting for help and arguing with a group of black men about who had the right to the bike.
The men harassed her and prevented Comrie from taking the bike. They accused her of “fake-crying” and tell her that her baby is “going to come out retarded.”
In an autopsy of the incident, USA Today wrote that “For almost a week in the middle of May, “Citi Bike Karen” was the face of American racism” as she went viral for seemingly stealing the bike from a black man. The New York Times notes that,
Comrie was doxed and suffered death threats. The hospital where she works placed her on leave pending an investigation.
Ben Crump, a civil rights attorney, said the incident was “the type of behavior that has endangered so many Black men in the past.”
A blog on Daily Kos claimed Comrie “weaponized her whiteness over a stupid bike ride.”
A local NBC News affiliate event sent a camera crew to her apartment.
But Comrie’s lawyers produced a receipt, confirmed by NBC News’s New York affiliate, that proved Comrie had rented the bike. USA Today said the receipt proved Comrie was the victim of the incident.
In August 2020, a group of BLM protesters provoked a backlash after they accosted white diners at several Washington D.C. restaurants.
In one viral incident, the protesters demand a woman raise her fist in solidarity and scream in her face. Ironically the woman was a BLM supporter but didn’t want to be coerced into showing support.
Google’s Gemini AI made international headlines in early 2024 after its AI bot created ethnically diverse pictures of historical people. Examples from users included images of the founding fathers as black, ethnically diverse popes, as well as black Nazis and Vikings.
A former Google engineer named Debarghya Das posted on X that “It’s embarrassingly hard to get Google Gemini to acknowledge that white people exist.”
You can see a selection of images below.
In June 2020, over 1,200 healthcare professionals signed an open letter expressing their concern that the George Floyd protests could be shut down due to fears over the spread of Covid-19. Some of the authors of the letter were part of the University of Washington’s Division of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
CNN reported on extracts of the letter,
“We created the letter in response to emerging narratives that seemed to malign demonstrations as risky for the public health because of Covid-19. Instead, we wanted to present a narrative that prioritizes opposition to racism as vital to the public health, including the epidemic response.”
“We believe that the way forward is not to suppress protests in the name of public health but to respond to protesters demands in the name of public health, thereby addressing multiple public health crises.”
“However, as public health advocates, we do not condemn these gatherings as risky for COVID-19 transmission. We support them as vital to the national public health and to the threatened health specifically of Black people in the United States.”
“We can show that support by facilitating safest protesting practices without detracting from demonstrators’ ability to gather and demand change. This should not be confused with a permissive stance on all gatherings, particularly protests against stay-home orders.”
Dr Abby Hussein, an infectious disease fellow at the University of Washington called racism a “life or death matter” for black Americans, telling CNN,
“While everyone is concerned about the risk of Covid, there are risks with just being black in this country that almost outweigh that sometimes… It’s something they’re doing because if they don’t fight for this now, they may never be able to fight for it in the future, because while Covid is right now, and we don’t know how long it’s going to last, white supremacy and oppression has been a long way longer, and we can guarantee that it’s going to continue if people don’t do anything about it now.”
In 2018, the satirical Twitter account Titania McGrath accused Julie Andrews of applying blackface during the 1964 film Mary Poppins, the joke being that Poppins was covered in chimney soot. But in 2019, the New York Times published an unironic article entitled “‘Mary Poppins,’ and a Nanny’s Shameful Flirting With Blackface.”
Andrew Doyle first posted the accusation on his satirical Twitter account in September 2018, only for the New York Times to publish a serious article on the topic a few months later.
There have been a number of incidents where academics have claimed that standard English is racist. In one incident, a black professor of rhetoric objected to the claims but was then accused of being racist himself.
At the 2022 Conference on College Composition and Communication, Asao Inoue, Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at Arizona State University, said that “if you use a single standard to grade your students’ languaging, you engage in racism. You actively promote white language supremacy which is the handmaiden to white bias in the world.”
Erec Smith is an Associate Professor of Rhetoric at York College of Pennsylvania and co-founder of Free Black Thought, “a website dedicated to highlighting viewpoint diversity within the black intelligentsia.” Smith was in the audience and later wrote a response stating that it was a disservice to minority students not to teach standard English.
Despite being an African-American, Smith was told to check his privilege and warned of the harms he “consistently perpetuates”.
Inoue has form for this. At the 2019 conference, he gave a keynote presentation entitled “How Do We Language So People Stop Killing Each Other, Or What Do We Do About White Language Supremacy?” and told a group of his white colleagues “You are the problem… Your body perpetuates racism.”
On August 3, 2020, the Conference on College Composition and Communication (an affiliate of the National Council of Teachers of English) approved a statement that demanded “teachers stop using academic language and standard English as the accepted communicative norm.”
The statement was entitled “This Ain’t Another Statement! This is a DEMAND for Black Linguistic Justice!” and was written by Black Language scholars at big universities.
“As language and literacy researchers and educators, we acknowledge that the same anti-Black violence toward Black people in the streets across the United States mirrors the anti-Black violence that is going down in these academic streets.”
Towson University held a virtual “Antiracist Pedagogy Symposium" on June 17, 2021.
April Baker-Bell, associate Professor of Language, Literacy, and English Education at Michigan State University, claimed that Standard English is used to uphold racist views on “black language”. Bell said it’s clear that,
“Anti-Blackness that is used to diminish black language of Black students in classrooms is not separate from the rampant and deliberate anti-black racism and violence inflicted upon black people in society.”
Indiana University of Pennsylvania English professor Cristina Sánchez-Martín says her teaching is about “undoing Whiteness” in university students’ work.
“The repeated references to ‘correct grammar’ and ‘standard language’ reinforce master narratives of English only as White and monolingualism and a deficit view of multilingualism.”
RACIAL JUSTICE-RELATED MONEY AND CORRUPTION
By October 2022, companies pledged almost $340 billion to racial justice causes since the George Floyd protests. Goldman Sachs alone announced in March 2021 that it would invest $10 billion over the following ten years to support black women. But the Washington Post reported that much of this money “is allocated as loans or investments (that banks) could stand to profit from.”
McKinsey revealed that the cumulative total was $340 billion committed to racial justice causes by October 2022. McKinsey reports,
“From May 2021 through October 2022, 16 Fortune 1000 finance companies made up 93.0 percent of the value of commitments, followed by 4.5 percent from 11 businesses worth $588 billion in the retail sector, 1.3 percent from eight companies in the food and restaurant industry, and less than 1.0 percent for any other sector.”
In June 2020, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon took the knee at a local Chase branch in solidarity with racial justice protests.
McDonald's released an advert that declared victims of police shootings including George Floyd were “one of us” and that the company stands for racial justice.
However, the Washington Post revealed in August 2021 that over ninety percent of the $45.2 billion it investigated was “allocated as loans or investments they could stand to profit from, more than half in the form of mortgages. Two banks — JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America — accounted for nearly all of those commitments.”
Tax records revealed in May 2022 showed that BLM had $42 million in assets and received $90 million in donations from 2020 to 2022, of which only a third went to charitable causes. BLM’s co-founder Patrisse Khan-Cullors bought four homes worth $3.2 million while BLM as an organization bought luxury homes in LA and Toronto worth at least $12 million.
BLM was reported to have $42 million in assets following a wave of donations after the George Floyd protests. The group received $90 million between 2020 and 2022 but just a third went to charitable causes.
$30 million in grants to charitable foundations
Over $22 million in expenses, including more than $2.1 million to a BLMGNF board member and her consultancy firm, as well as another $2.5 million to two companies with links to BLM officials.
$12 million for two luxury homes in LA and Toronto
Nearly $1 million in investment loss
$833,000 in fundraising costs
Over $700,000 in salaries.
The New York reported that BLM spent $6.3 million on a 10,000-square-foot downtown property in Toronto. The group also bought a mansion in LA worth nearly $6 million.
The Times of London reports that the LA property has six bedrooms and bathrooms, as well as a soundstage and a swimming pool.
Patrice Khan-Cullor rented the space twice and paid $390 for its use, even though rents for mansions in the area used for events can be as much as $10,000 a day.
The New York Post also reported that Patrisse Khan-Cullors bought four properties in the US for $3.2 million.
The four homes bought by Khan-Cullors, as well as a Bahamas home she looked at buying
ABSURD DEI TRAINING EXAMPLES
Christopher Rufo reported that in 2020, Lockheed Martin sent white male executives to a three-day diversity-training program aimed at deconstructing their “white male culture” and encouraging them to atone for their “white male privilege.”
The diversity-consulting firm “White Men as Full Diversity Partners” hosted the Zoom program for 13 senior Lockheed officials to deconstruct their “white male culture” and atone for their “white male privilege.”
Ruffo writes that “At the beginning of the program, the diversity trainers led a “free association” exercise, asking the Lockheed employees to list connotations for the term “white men.” The trainers wrote down “old,” “racist,” “privileged,” “anti-women,” “angry,” “Aryan Nation,” “KKK,” “Founding fathers,” “guns,” “guilty,” and “can’t jump.””
“According to the participants, these perceptions have led to “assumptions about white men and diversity,” with many employees believing that white men “don’t care about diversity,” “have a classical perspective on history and colonialism,” and “don’t want to give away our power.””
In June 2022, Judicial Watch obtained over 600 documents relating to the teaching of Critical Race Theory (CRT) at West Point after suing the Defense Department. Cadets were warned of the dangers of “whiteness” and asked how to apply CRT to hypothetical situations.
The government watchdog group Judicial Watch had to sue the Defense Department twice to get the documents.
One slide says that whiteness is "a location of structural advantage, of race privilege," is a "standpoint or place from which white people look at themselves and the rest of society," and refers "to a set of cultural practices that are usually unmarked and unnamed."
Another slide asks “Do you think Affirmative Action creates an environment for ‘reverse discrimination? Use CRT to support your answer.”
Another asks “How would you apply a tenant of CRT to this idea,” referring to the difference between desegregation and integration.”
The New York Post reports that “An additional slide has a graphic that states “Modern Slavery in the USA” with accompanying statements that say black people are less likely than white people to have a college education, receive recommended medical screenings, receive a bank approval for a mortgage or get promoted at a job.”
A slide (original source is cropped like that, the missing word is “whiteness”)
In 2021, Coca-Cola held a training session that included a video encouraging staff to “try to be less white”, as well as asking white staff to be “less ignorant” and “less oppressive”. The training session was held in association with Robin DiAngelo but she later claimed that the content in question was taken out of context and was not part of her courses.
A Coca-Cola employee leaked pictures of the slides which were part of a training session held in association with Robin DiAngelo entitled “Facing Racism”.
DiAngelo’s training session told staff that "to be less white" is to be less "arrogant", "certain" and "defensive".
DiAngelo’s representatives claimed that the content was not from one of her courses but a collection of interview clips that had been edited together and used as a training tool without her consent.
“She had no involvement in it being presented or marketed as a training session, did not approve its distribution, did not know it was being used in corporate settings, and because of that, it has been removed from the site and discontinued voluntarily by the groups that created and distributed it.”
A whistleblower leaked slides from the event
In 2024, The Dive, a newsletter produced by the intelligence community’s diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility office, circulated a newsletter filled with diversity guidance. One article encouraged intelligence officials to stop using the term “blacklisted” because of racist implications and claimed that the phrases “cakewalk” and “grandfathered” were unacceptable because of links to slavery.
Fox News Digital analysed the newsletter which was reported on by conservative outlets in the US and abroad. The New York Post reports that “The document’s theme is “the importance of words,” focusing on ways spy agencies can be more inclusive.” The New York Post summed up the six articles as follows:
“The newsletter includes six articles — one about changing terminology related to counterterrorism.
“One about “linguistics diversity”
“Another about reimagining how “we talk about Africa””
“A fourth highlighting an intelligence officer’s gender expression”
“One about accessibility in the combat zone”
“A final article about the 6th Annual African American & Hispanic Leadership Summit.”
The first article claims that some training and presentations were offensive and alienate(d) our Muslim-American colleagues” because they conflated terrorism and Islamic beliefs.
Another article in the newsletter encouraged officials to stop using the word “blacklisted” because it suggests “black is bad and white is good”. The phrases “cakewalk” and grandfathers” are deemed unacceptable because of their links to slavery.
