On Sept. 10, 2025, Charlie Kirk was shot in the neck at Utah Valley University during the first stop of his “American Comeback” tour. I was in my audition seminar class when I absentmindedly checked my phone and audibly gasped as my eyes glanced over the Washington Post notification.
I followed the story into my next class, refreshing my laptop for updates and texting my friends. I was vaguely familiar with Kirk for his controversial right-wing extremist takes, and his murder came as a shock to me and many others, most likely because we tend to view public figures as untouchable.
This was a story I followed for days. I analyzed my classmates’ reactions to it, the media’s coverage of it, social media and politicians’ takes, etc. I wondered why his death and the handling of such (being flown on Air Force 2 and posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom) was of the highest honors despite him being a podcaster and having held no public office.
As news outlets chronicled his legacy and Kirk’s friends and family emotionally reflected on his life, I was curious to see what truly made this man so great. Some surface-level research and video compilations of his most controversial quotes quickly left me frustrated but not surprised, most specifically his comments about race.
This piece could’ve been “What Charlie Kirk got wrong about Black people,” instead of Black women. The only reason it is not is because I am loosely bound to a word count, so I will instead focus on the demographic that most directly affects me.
For about as long as America has been alive and colonized, Black women have been devalued, degraded and unfairly depreciated. It is a common saying in Black households that Black women must be “twice as good” to be awarded half as much as their white counterparts.
There are two direct quotes that I would like to pick apart. Both were said by Kirk on “The Charlie Kirk Show.”
The first is, “If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic Black woman, I wonder is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because of affirmative action?” The second is as follows, “If we would have said that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative action picks, we would have been called racists. Now they’re coming out and they’re saying it for us … You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.”
First, let’s take a quick crash course in affirmative action. Affirmative action is when organizations make an active effort by devoting resources to better the employment and educational opportunities of marginalized groups such as ethnic minorities and women. Historically, white women have been the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action. It is not executed in the form of quotas (banned by the Supreme Court in the late 1970s), it does not discriminate against white men and it certainly does not hire unqualified individuals (which is against federal law).
Additionally, Joy Reid went to Harvard for her undergraduate degree. Michelle Obama went to Princeton and Harvard Law School. Sheila Jackson Lee went to NYU, transferred to Yale, and later attended UVA Law School. Ketanji Brown Jackson attended Harvard University for her undergraduate degree and Harvard Law School. Charlie Kirk attended Harper College for one semester before dropping out. Why was he challenging the intellectual competency of these Black women when they have run educational laps around him?
Kirk saying that these highly educated women do not possess the “brain processing power” to be taken seriously is problematic primarily because it is reminiscent of 19th-century pseudoscientific rhetoric that white people would use to justify the abuse of Black people and their low social status. They alleged that Black people had thicker skin and could thus tolerate more pain, less lung capacity and smaller skulls — attributed to the pseudoscience of phrenology, which asserts that cranium size and shape is indicative of mental ability.
Finally, Kirk’s assertion that these women are “stealing a white person’s slot” is troublesome because it implies that only white people are entitled to prestigious roles like “first lady” or “talk show host” or “Supreme Court justice”. This is white supremacist ideology that should be condemned on all fronts. The idea that white people are the only ones deserving of positions of power is incredibly racist and false, given that they are not the only competent ethnic group and those “slots” in question are fair game for anybody.
Kirk’s harmful rhetoric toward Black women is something that I felt compelled to address given that his words are not only insulting to me, but to my Black female friends, family, classmates and colleagues as well. His racist remarks are inevitably a part of his legacy, and should be consequently painted into the picture of his character.
Zora Rodgers is a senior studying film, television, and theatre. She's from Falls Church, Virginia and has the pajama pants to prove it. When not watching the TODAY Show or writing, she can be found wearing too much perfume and spending her NBC paychecks on SKIMS. You can reach out to her at zrodgers@nd.edu.
