In the wake of the horrific assassination of Charlie Kirk, many conversations online have popped up about his message while on earth. Regarding racism, the dialogue often goes something like this:

Person 1: I mourn and condemn the brutal assassination of Charlie Kirk, but I won’t sit back and watch his outright racism be sanitized.

Person 2: Show me where he was racist?

Person 1: Lists numerous quotes over the years.

Person 2: All that is out of context.

Person 2 has a point. It is important that we take people’s words in context. Case in point: Some have claimed that Kirk once said that gay people should be stoned to death. He didn’t actually say that. What he did was reference an Old Testament passage to prove a theological point. It’s a very BAD theological point that leads to the dehumanization of LGBTQ+ individuals. But still, he didn’t say gay people should be stoned to death.

So let’s take one quote that is being passed around and give it the full context that Kirk’s defenders are saying they want.

Black Pilots

(The following quotes are pulled from a Yahoo News story about the controversy. The story provides direct links to where the quotes can be found.)

The first dialogue is the source material. It is from a segment on Kirk’s podcast. The full converstation includes Kirk, Jack Prosobiec, Andrew Kolvet, and Blake Neff:

KOLVET: We’ve all been in the back of a plane when the turbulence hits or when you’re flying through a storm and you’re like, “I’m so glad I saw the guy with the right stuff and the square jaw get into the cockpit before we took off. And I feel better now, thinking about that.” 

KIRK: You wanna go thought crime? I’m sorry. If I see a Black pilot, I’m gonna be like, “Boy, I hope he’s qualified.”

KOLVET: But you wouldn’t have done that before!

KIRK: That’s not an immediate … that’s not who I am. That’s not what I believe. 

NEFF: It is the reality the left has created. 

KIRK: I want to be as blunt as possible because now I’m connecting two dots. Wait a second, this CEO just said that he’s forcing that a white qualified guy is not gonna get the job. So I see this guy, he might be a nice person and I say, “Boy, I hope he’s not a Harvard-style affirmative-action student that … landed half of his flight-simulator trials.” 

KOLVET: Such a good point. That’s so fair. 

KIRK: It also … creates unhealthy thinking patterns. I don’t wanna think that way. And no one should, right? … And by the way, then you couple it with the FAA, air-traffic control, they got a bunch of morons and affirmative-action people. 

Here is Kirk following up on the comments on Megyn Kelly’s podcast:

The essence of that clip that was missed by almost everybody — Jordan Peterson, to his credit, really picked up on it — which was I was trying to be, you know, very vulnerable with the audience is that DEI invites unwholesome thinking. … I was saying in the clip, “That’s not who I am, that’s not what I believe.” But what it does is it makes us worse versions of ourselves, Megyn. That’s the whole point of what I was saying is that I now look at everything through a hyper-racialized diversity-quota lens because of their massive insistence to try to hit these ridiculous racial hiring quotas. Of course I believe anybody of any skin color can become a qualified pilot. 

And here is Kirk responding to the comment on a panel conversation when he was asked about it:

When it comes to pilots or surgeons, if I see somebody who is Black, as I said on the show, I’m going to hope that that person is qualified. That’s what I said, which of course is legitimate because they’re begging the question, we’re not hiring based on merit anymore. We’re hiring based on race.

Analysis

Now, if you believe that racism is only about using racial slurs, hating all people of color based on their skin shade, or creating legislation that specifically limits the rights of non-white people, then there is no analysis of Kirk’s words here that is going to convince you otherwise, so it’s probably best to just go about your day and read no further. But if you believe that racism is more subtle and often resides between the lines of otherwise “respectful conversation,” then continue reading.

What is true (on the surface) about Kirk’s comments is that he wasn’t actually discussing Black pilots. He was discussing DEI hiring policies. He claims, essentially, that he doesn’t want to think like this, but that DEI hiring initiatives have forced him to. I’ll get to DEI in a second, but first, let’s assume the best about Kirk and take him at his word that he “doesn’t want to think like this.”

The first words from Kolvet are instructive. They don’t come from Kirk, but Kirk didn’t push back on them. Instead, he built on them. “We’ve all been in the back of a plane when the turbulence hits or when you’re flying through a storm and you’re like, ‘I’m so glad I saw the guy with the right stuff and the square jaw get into the cockpit before we took off. And I feel better now, thinking about that.'” 

Kolvet doesn’t explicitly state that the pilot “with the right stuff and the square jaw” was a white guy, but it was implied. (The Right Stuff was a film based on a story about Air Force pilots, all of them white.) It was so implied that Kirk pivoted from that statement to talk about Black pilots.

What was Kolvet’s (and, by virtue of his silence, Kirk’s) assumption in that statement and the follow up ones? The assumption is that we don’t have to worry about the qualifications of any white pilot we see. But if we see a Black pilot (because of DEI, not my internal racism) then we should question his (or her) qualifications. This is the definition of white supremacy.

That was an example of an internalized form of racism that I suspect many of us who are white in the U.S. have had to deal with and (hopefully) fight against over the course of our lives. It takes a lot of self-reflection and a lifetime of internal work to move beyond.

But the second form of racism in Kirk’s statement is more sinister, because it is easily overcome with readily available information. This racism is in the assumption that DEI hiring practices lower the qualifications for minoritized job applicants, making it easier for them to get the job than for white applicants. Now, if you just passively consume the news and what certain talking heads say about DEI hiring practices, then it is easy to think this. But study DEI practices. Read books by professionals who practice it. Once you do so, you will see that corporations that use DEI practices in their hiring are looking for ways to find a more diverse pool of QUALIFIED candidates that adequately represent the public and recognize that many demographics have been systemically excluded from certain jobs. DEI hiring practices do not lower the bar for non-white candidates.

This is where Kirk cannot be given a pass. Sure, it requires a little bit of work to learn the truth about DEI practices. But Kirk was a brilliant guy who could have put in that work and easily understood it. But outrage generates clicks, clicks generate income, and outrage thrives in a culture of ignorance. So he benefited from either not knowing (assuming the best of him) or not caring (assuming the worst) about the truth, and propogating the lie instead.