Answering Charlie Kirk’s Racist Ideas about Black Pilots and Surgeons with Easily-Found Facts
Charlie Kirk was obsessed with whiteness—he said liberal black women had to “go steal a white person’s slot” and the Civil Rights Act “created a beast, and that beast has now turned into an anti-white weapon.” On Jan. 18, 2024, he said,
“If I see a Black pilot, I’m gonna be like, “Boy, I hope he’s qualified.”… 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.” … And by the way, then you couple it with the FAA, air-traffic control, they got a bunch of morons and affirmative-action people.”
On June 3, 2025, he tried to clarify what he meant:
“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.”
The simple proof Kirk was wrong: The Federal Aviation Administration does not have lower standards for black pilots, and state medical boards do not have lower standards for black surgeons. Airlines and hospitals do not have lower standards for black people for a very simple reason: they do not want to be sued if their employees fail to do what needs to be done.
Anyone who knows a little history knows black people have been great pilots and surgeons. In World War 2, the Tuskegee Airmen won over 150 Distinguished Flying Crosses and 14 Bronze Stars. In 1893, Dr. Daniel H. Williams performed one of the first successful heart surgeries, and Dr. Charles Richard Drew is known as the “Father of the Blood Bank” because of his work in the preservation of blood plasma. Yet this is history Charlie Kirk either did not know or did not want to acknowledge.
Because people like Kirk keep casting doubt on the ability of black pilots, the Organization of Black Aerospace Professionals issued a statement in 2024 that included this:
The training and qualifications demanded of commercial pilots are the same for every individual who aspires to uphold the highest standards of professionalism and safety in the skies.
The recent unfounded claims regarding the qualifications of Black commercial pilots not only perpetuate harmful stereotypes but also undermine the hard-earned achievements of countless professionals within our community.
Learning the basic facts about black pilots and surgeons is not hard. Kirk was no intellectual—he dropped out of a community college after one semester—but he must have known how to Google. Either he did not bother to learn basic facts because he was a racist, or he did not want to share basic facts because he was a racist.
PS. Those of us who believe in free speech believe racists like Charlie Kirk should be free to speak, and then the rest of us should be free to point out their racism. This is the wisest thing Kirk ever said:
“You should be allowed to say outrageous things.” —Charlie Kirk
It is a tragedy that would-be censors are abusing his memory to silence his critics instead of answering us.
