Johnathan Perkins, formerly of Harvard, has also asserted Jews ‘enjoy the benefits of whiteness’
The University of California, Los Angeles has placed its controversial race and equity director, Johnathan Perkins, on leave after he celebrated conservative commentator Charlie Kirk’s assassination in a series of social media posts.
Perkins, a veteran diversity consultant who worked in the Office of the General Counsel at Harvard University before joining UCLA in 2019, took to left-wing X copycat Bluesky on Friday to disparage Kirk. In one post, he responded to a user who called Kirk the right’s “Rush Limbaugh replacement” with the message, “Yup. Good riddance, both.” In another, he wrote, “It is OKAY to be happy when someone who hated you and called for your people’s death dies—even if they are murdered.”
When the Washington Free Beacon contacted UCLA about the posts on Friday, the school first provided a statement that condemned “any statement in the strongest possible terms that celebrates or condones violence” but did not reveal whether Perkins would face discipline. UCLA sent a follow-up statement Sunday evening revealing Perkins is on leave.
“UCLA has placed a campus employee on immediate leave and has launched an investigation following reports of social media posts regarding the murder of Charlie Kirk,” the statement reads. “While free expression is a core value of UCLA, violence of any kind—including the celebration of it—is completely unacceptable and will not be tolerated.”
Around the same time, UCLA took down its Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion’s “Who We Are” page, which featured Perkins’s bio. Perkins also deactivated his Bluesky account.
Perkins has a history of making inflammatory statements against white people and Jews. In May 2020, he said Jewish people “enjoy the benefits of whiteness,” benefits he said include “the assurance that your race will never be the root cause of any such pain.” Perkins reiterated that position following Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre.
“Jews are latterly white yes,” he wrote months after the attack in January 2024. “Does any of this happen if the Jewish people persecuted in the Holocaust are not also considered ‘white?'” he wrote in another post that questioned the support Israel received in the attack’s immediate aftermath.
All of those posts—as well as others that called Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas an “Uncle Tom” and declared white people should be forced to work on Juneteenth—are no longer publicly available, as Perkins deleted his X account after the Free Beacon reported on the posts last year.
UCLA has come under intense scrutiny from the Trump administration for both its diversity, equity, and inclusion policies and its lax response to campus anti-Semitism.
The administration launched a civil rights investigation into UCLA’s David Geffen School of Medicine in March, a probe that was a direct result of a May 2024 Free Beacon report that provided evidence suggesting the school holds black and Hispanic applicants to a lower academic standard than their white and Asian counterparts. California law has banned racial preferences in university admissions for nearly three decades, well before the Supreme Court followed suit in 2023.
The administration has also accused the school of discriminating against its Jewish students. Last year, UCLA students behind an illegal anti-Israel encampment prevented Jewish students from accessing portions of campus in what became known as a “Jew Exclusion Zone.” Three Jewish students sued the school in response, alleging UCLA officials “routinely turned their backs on Jewish students” and allowed activists to enforce the “Exclusion Zone.”
U.S. district judge Mark Scarsi admonished UCLA in an August 2024 preliminary injunction against the school, writing, “Jewish students were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith. This fact is so unimaginable and abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom that it bears repeating.”
UCLA agreed to pay more than $6 million and enter into a consent decree to settle the lawsuit in July. But the move did not put UCLA in good standing with the federal government: Hours after the settlement was inked, the Justice Department announced UCLA had violated civil rights law by failing to protect Jews.
The Trump administration recently sent UCLA its own settlement proposal. It includes a $1.2-billion fine and “seeks to drastically overhaul campus practices on hiring, admissions, sports, scholarships, discrimination and gender identity,” the Los Angeles Times reported.
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