Professor's woke history book gets Rosa Parks, Kyle Rittenhouse facts wrong
A recently published book by National Geographic included factual errors that caught readers' attention.
The author apologized for the Rittenhouse error and the electronic version contains an apparently corrected passage.
National Geographic has published University of California Los Angeles professor Kara Cooney’s book, which upon release contains historical errors about Rosa Park and Kyle Rittenhouse.
Campus Reform obtained a copy of Cooney’s e-book, a work of historical nonfiction on ancient Egyptian pharaohs that uses recent cultural history, which according to the description, “uncovers the reason why societies have so willingly chosen a dictator over democracy, time and time again.”
[RELATED: UCLA faculty call for admin to defund police]
The publication, The Good Kings: Absolute Power in Ancient Egypt and the Modern World, asserts that Rosa Parks “took a seat in the White section of a public bus and started the Montgomery bus boycott.”
Parks was not seated in the “White section” of the bus, but rather “ just behind the front ‘white’ section,” the Henry Ford Museum of American Innovation explains on its website.
”When every seat in the white section was taken, the bus driver ordered the black passengers in the middle row to stand so a white man could sit. The seamstress refused,” the museum’s text states.
”[T]he driver told the riders in the four seats of the first row of the ‘colored’ section to stand, in effect adding another row to the ‘white’ section,” the History.com website states.
Cooney is a professor of Near and Middle Eastern languages and culture.
Additionally, Amazon reviewers noticed that the hard copy of the book contained a factual error about Kyle Rittenhouse, who was recently acquitted of five charges including two counts of first-degree intentional homicide.
I’m literally wheezing this is so funny 😂🤣 this is the last chapter of “Good Kings” by Egyptologist Kara Cooney. I’ll say this delicately… she’s not the brightest and it shows. pic.twitter.com/YoI4sGGM49
— Kara McKinney OANN (@Nefertari_25) January 5, 2022
”Or consider 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, who used his semi-automatic weapon to kill two Black men in Kenosha,” Cooney wrote.
Rittenhouse killed two White men, which his legal representation argued during the trial was in self-defense.
[RELATED: WATCH: UT Austin students protest in response to Rittenhouse verdict]
The error was apparently corrected in the e-book, which now states that Rittenhouse killed “two white men in Kenosha, Wisconsin, while waging a glorious race war...”
In a tweet Tuesday, Cooney addressed the error and apologized for the “mistake.”
On p. 341 of THE GOOD KINGS I state that Kyle Rittenhouse shot two Black men when instead he shot two white men. 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.
— Kara Cooney (@KaraCooney) January 5, 2022
Professor Cooney’s apology was followed up by stating “[t]he response has been a hateful slew of ridicule and denial that America has a race problem after all.”
Professor Cooney, UCLA, and National Geographic have yet to respond to requests for comment.
