Dr. Wilfred Reilly teaches at Kentucky State University, a historically black college, and perhaps not where you would expect to find a black professor who had written a book titled Hate Crime Hoaxes: How the Left is Selling a Fake Race War, which uses empirical evidence to dismantle the panicked narrative that hate crimes and racial tensions are an epidemic sweeping the nation.
Reilly grew up in and around Chicago, or “Chi-cah-go,” as he pronounces it. His mother was an inner-city school teacher. He canvassed for Environment America and the Human Rights Campaign. He checked every box you might expect to have produced a hardcore leftist. Instead, he emerged as a staunch centrist with a penchant for diving head-first into controversial topics. For instance, in Reilly’s 2020 book Taboo: 10 Facts You Can’t Talk About, a follow-up to Hate Crime Hoaxes, he challenges popular mainstream narratives by claiming that “White privilege and ‘cultural appropriation’ turn out hardly to exist at all when examined using modern empirical methods.”