Subject: Re: Charlie Kirk in His Own Words
It is an accurate quote...

It's not.

From your post, here is the entire quote (from your link), with the altered word in bold:

If we would have said three weeks ago […] that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative-action picks, we would have been called racist. But now they're coming out and they're saying it for us! They're coming out and they're saying, "I'm only here because of affirmative action."

Yeah, we know. 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.

Charlie Kirk did not utter the sentence "Black women do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously." He said "You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously." Attiah revised the quote.

Now, you can revise a quote to replace personal pronouns with the objects they are referring to - especially if what you're excerpting cannot be understood without doing so. Words like "it," "them," "you," "he" or "she" can be replaced with the actual names/objects being referred to. However, if you do that, you want to do two things.

First, you want to provide some indication to the reader that the language you're using is not what the speaker literally said. So, for example, either:

"[Black women] do not have the brain processing power...." or
Black women "do not have the brain processing power...."

In both the above, the quoter has made it clear that the original speaker did not use the words "Black women" as part of the actual sentence. That alerts the reader to the change made by the quoter (and makes it pretty clear that you're replacing a pronoun).

Second - and super importantly - you should never do this if there's any ambiguity about what the speaker is referring to with the pronoun, without some additional clarification. In the original quote, there are (at least) four different categories of people that Kirk could have meant when saying "You" in "you do not have the brain processing power":

1) The four individuals he mentioned;
2) Black women who gain from affirmative action, and then admit to it unprompted;
3) Black women who gain from affirmative action; or
4) Black women.

Attiah chose #4 - and it was misleading to do so. Not because that's an indefensible reading of the quote. It's certainly a plausible reading of what Kirk meant when he said that sentence. But it's not the only plausible reading, and it's probably not the most likely reading. It might very well be what he meant, but it's definitely not what he said - and that's definitely not appropriate when quoting.

You can actually say anything you like about Women, Black Folks, Jewish Folks, Minorities, as was proven by Charlie Kirk, (kinda?) but you sure as heck better watch your tongue when talking about christian white men.

I don't think that's true necessarily true. There's tons of places that Charlie Kirk would not have been able to work at (or even walk in the door at) based on his past statements; and similarly, there's probably a bunch of places that will welcome Attiah as an employee despite her comments.

But I think the writing on the wall is pretty clear. Conservatives have been agitating forever against the belief that, as my daughter has told me, "you can't be racist against white people." Academic analysis of racism in sociology is grounded in considerations of power - one needs both racial prejudice and the ability to act on/enforce it. Individual acts of racial prejudice can be committed against white people, but "racism" cannot properly be understood to embrace actions against white people, and certainly not when discussing sociological issues or talking about racial issues at the cultural or societal level (as Attiah did).

As I said upthread, conservatives are now in charge of a lot of institutions, and that sociological reading of racism is going out the window at those places. They don't agree with it, and now they don't have to follow it. It will now be just as racist to talk about white people as a group if it would be racist to talk about black or brown people as a group in that context.

It's going to be quite a dislocation for people who have grown accustomed to being able to talk about racial matters in a certain way. It's going to be very difficult for those who have a lot of public statements about race using language or phrasing that the New Powers That Be are going to now categorize as racist.