Brittney Cooper, an associate professor in Rutgers University’s Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Africana studies, appeared to suggest she wants to eliminate white people last week.
“The thing I want to say to you is we got to take these motherf-ckers out but like, we can’t say that right?” Cooper said in a Target-sponsored conversation titled “Unpacking The Attacks on Critical Race Theory” with Michael Harriot, a senior writer at The Root.
Cooper, who is on track to receive at least $114,248.95 from Rutgers in 2021 per Campus Reform, later claimed that she doesn’t “believe in a project of violence” but then celebrated the drop in birth rates among white populations.
“White lives actually are structurally overvalued, to the extent that they undervalue other groups of people and part of what that means economically is that they explode property value so much when they move in, that they can’t afford it, which is why they not having no kids,” Cooper explained. “That is a world in which, economically, we literally live in a system where even white people can not sustain the cost of their own lives. By that, I mean the elevated cost of their own lives. It’s super perverse and also they kind of deserve it, right? And so they’re losing. That’s why their birth rates are going down. That’s why demographics are shifting.”
The professor also rejoiced in her belief that “whiteness is gonna have an end date.”
“Despite what white people think of themselves, they do not defy the laws of eternity, right? Their projects are not so sophisticated that the natural laws of physics change for them. And when we sort of humble them and humble our own understandings of whiteness, it seems like the biggest giant that we face, but in the end, right, it is what I like to say is, you know, black folks were out here for centuries and centuries and millennia doing all kinds of wonderful things, and probably some f-cked up things too, but whiteness is largely an inconvenient interruption,” Cooper said.
Cooper’s commentary, which was published in a video on Sept. 21, was produced as part of The Root Institute conference, a gathering designed to “help set the Black agenda” and “empower it.” This year’s conference was introduced by President Joe Biden who, in his speech, claimed that “systemic racism” still plagues the nation and touted his administration’s equity and diversity goals.
During her conversation, Cooper agreed that systemic racism exists and thinks “white people are committed to being villains in the aggregate.” She bragged about teaching her students critical race theory and claimed that conservatives are pushing back on it because they are angry they are losing power.
“Kids actually can grasp critical race theory because the issue that the right has is the critical race theory is just the proper teaching of American history. Right?” Cooper said. “It’s literally saying like, ‘y’all didn’t discover America, people were already here, white supremacy is a farce, and you have committed acts of violence in order to make yourself seem superior.’ Kids get that right? … They are mad because critical race theory is an accurate account of American history and they can’t stand up under the weight of what that means for a white supremacist project if we actually begin to have real honest conversations about it.”
Cooper has come under fire in the past for referring to God as an “an a–hole” with “nothing holy, loving, righteous, inclusive, liberatory theologically sound about him” and tweeting “F-ck each and every Trump supporter. You all absolutely did this. You are to blame” during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.