'Take these m-----f-----s out': Rutgers prof rails against white people while defending CRT

Professor Brittney Cooper called Critical Race Theory “the proper teaching of American history” and said that white people are “committed to being villains in the aggregate.”

During a talk titled “Unpacking the Attacks on Critical Race Theory,” Rutgers University professor Brittney Cooper called white people villains and said that they “kind of deserve” the current declining birth rate.  

She also told writer Michael Harriot, “I think that white people are committed to being villains in the aggregate.” 

The event took place on Sept. 21 as part of The Root Institute, a conference hosted by an African American-focused online publication called The Root. President Biden delivered this year’s opening address.  

Cooper is an associate professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers University. A document obtained by Campus Reform via public records request reveals that Cooper will earn at least $114,248.95 from Rutgers this year. 

Cooper began teaching at the university in 2012, and she has been paid a six-figure salary each year from 2018 onward. Cooper did not respond to request for comment, though an auto-reply email stated that she is not regularly checking email because she is on sabbatical leave. 

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Rutgers is funded in part by both federal and state taxpayer dollars; it is New Jersey’s flagship public university. This fiscal year, 18.9 percent of the university’s budget comes from state appropriations. Additional taxpayer dollars flow to the university through federal student aid, research grants, and COVID relief.  

She addressed the rising cost of living for white people, saying, “White people’s birth rates are going down…because they literally cannot afford to put their children, newer generations, into the middle class…It’s super perverse, and also they kind of deserve it.” 

When asked if white people would ever release the power they currently hold, Cooper answered, “The thing I want to say to you is, ‘We gotta take these m-----f-----s out,’ but like, we can’t say that, right? I don’t believe in a project of violence, I truly don’t,” because “our souls suffer from that.”

Cooper said that, when she teaches Critical Race Theory to college students, she asks them if “we can legislate [racism] away and we can march it away…or, do we think white people just always gonna be like this, and our job is to hold back their ability to do the most harm?” 

She says that conservatives oppose Critical Race Theory because they oppose truth. “The issue that the right has is that Critical Race Theory is just the proper teaching of American history,” she said. 

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Campus Reform has covered hateful comments made by Cooper in the past. In 2020, she lambasted Trump supporters for the disproportionate impact that COVID-19 had on the Black community, tweeting, “F*** each and every Trump supporter. You all absolutely did this. You are to blame.” In 2016, Cooper blamed racism for Brexit. The year prior, she wrote in Salon that white religious conservatives worship a God who is “an a**hole” with “nothing holy, loving, righteous, inclusive, liberatory theologically sound about him.” 

On Sept. 27, Campus Reform filed a public records request for Cooper’s salary information and the courses she has taught at Rutgers this year. The university’s public records office states that it must notify a requestor and provide an estimated date of completion if a request is going to take longer than 7 business days. Ten business days later, on October 11th, the university provided the salary data and notified Campus Reform that it would be extending the deadline for the course list to Oct. 15. On Oct. 21, the university notified Campus Reform that it would be extending the deadline until October 28, and that it may continue to extend the deadline due to staff turnover in the H.R. office.

A university employee could not answer if the $114,248.95 figure is what Cooper will earn in total this year, or what she has already been paid this year, not counting future payments between the time the record was produced and the end of the calendar year, telling Campus Reform, “I have to circle back to HR, so I will definitely ask, but that might be kind of another long waiting question.”

Follow the author of this article on Twitter: @AngelaLMorabito