Historian says its racist to question her after her book about slavery pulled from shelves over inaccuracies

The author of an acclaimed book about slavery is crying racism after her writing came under scrutiny by scholars for questionable assertions and sloppy sourcing.Kerri Greenidge’s 2022 book “The Grimkes,” which tells the story of a prominent South Carolina slaveholder family who later played a role in the abolitionist movement, was lauded by critics and won the American Historical Association’s Joan Kelly Memorial Prize.But skepticism grew as her prose came under the microscope by historians and scholars, including Myra Glenn, an author and retired American history professor at Elmira College.In a 2024 examination of “The Grimkes,” Glenn called it “deeply flawed,” and called out that Greenidge “all too often lacks the evidence to substantiate many of her major claims.”She added that “her work is also riddled with factual errors and repeatedly omits needed endnotes.”Presented with these and other disputed findings discovered through Glenn’s analysis by the New York Times, Greenidge immediately cast herself as the victim, and accused her growing roster of critics of racism.“I am heartbroken that a field I have given my life to can treat me this way,” she told the outlet.“The attack on Black women academics is real.”Though she claimed to have never plagiarized or fabricated anything, she conceded “are there citations that were misattributed? Probably.”The resulting firestorm has since seen “The Grimkes” removed from her author page on the publisher’s website, and her entry as a winner of the Joan Kelly Memorial Prize was absent from the American Historical Association’s homepage.She also seems to have lost her job as a tenured associate professor in the Department of Studies in Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University, a spokesman for the greater Boston school telling the Times that she was no longer employed there.The spokesman declined to elaborate on the reason for her departure, however.Pressed by the outlet ...