No, it appears that the real reason is that some White leftists were offended that he said that there is no systemic discrimination against Blacks. The Chief complainer was a rich high school girl attending Andover School, one of the most elite schools in the world.
Even more revealing, the girl complained that he recommended the 1997 book Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, book by Jared Diamond. The book won many prizes, and was favorably reviewed in all the mainstream media.
Diamond argues that Eurasian civilization is not so much a product of ingenuity, but of opportunity and necessity. That is, civilization is not created out of superior intelligence, but is the result of a chain of developments, each made possible by certain preconditions.Most of those developments were quirks of geography.
Liberals loved this book because it gave an academic basis for Jews saying Whites were not superior.
I have criticized Diamond on this blog, such as here. His work is crap. The preppy girl disliked the book for other reasons.
My biggest issue with Diamond is that he draws grand sweeping conclusions about people who died out centuries ago and left no written records of what happened. While I don't know what happened either, he also tells stories about XX century America, and he gets those badly wrong.
I am also suspicious of him because all of his conclusions appear to be carefully calculated to please the prejudices of his audience.
For more insight into ideological malice at the NY Times, see Prof. Scott Aaronson's criticism of the outing of Scott Alexander. There are more Jewish leftists, with mainstream leftist political views. They have blogs with mostly leftist readers and commenters. You would think that the NY Times would like them. But no. Their biggest sin seems to be that they facilitate discussion of issues that should not be discussed. That is how it seems to me, anyway. Read it yourself to form your own opinion.
Aaronson says that he cooperated with the reporter because:
The NYT is still the main vessel of consensus reality in human civilization.I guess that is why I read the newspaper, but it is getting increasingly extreme and dishonest, and I am not sure that I would consent to an interview. They are evil. He goes on:
Last night, it occurred to me that despite how disjointed it feels, the New York Times piece does have a central thesis: namely, that rationalism is a “gateway drug” to dangerous beliefs. And that thesis is 100% correct — insofar as once you teach people that they can think for themselves about issues of consequence, some of them might think bad things. It’s just that many of us judge the benefit worth the risk!This is why gatekeepers must control the dissemination of facts. If people think for themselves, they will not come to the conclusions that the lizard people want. Stanford and MIT have been suckered into supporting some math student who was arrested in Russia for participating in a political protest. I don't know the merits of this, but it is an internal Russian matter and the guy only got 10 days in jail, and was released.
Compare that to the 200 protesters who have been jailed for participating in a Jan. 6 Capitol demonstration. They were pro-democracy, and there is no proof that they hurt anyone. The Democrats keep calling it a "deadly insurrection", but the only thing deadly about it was that a non-white cop shot an unarmed woman in an area where citizens should have been welcome. And there was no insurrection. They are being held with nasty charges, and may not get out for a long time. They are political prisoners, right here in America.
Update: Aaronson has changed his mind, and regrets cooperating with the NY Times. He adds:
As far as I’m concerned, the ongoing collapse of Enlightenment norms of discussion and debate across the Western world, and its replacement by dueling self-certain authoritarianisms, really is a huge problem, commensurate with any of the worst problems that the world has ever faced.
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