When Joy Reid confidently announced a couple of weeks ago that “Whites can’t invent anything,” I must admit that she had me scratching my head. I mean, suddenly I am second-guessing some of those things I learned over my past half-century-plus of life. Could I be wrong about inventors and inventions?

Reid stated this observation on a program called “The Left Hook” hosted by Wajahat Ali. And Ali took the opportunity to add:

“These people cannot create culture on their own. Without Black people, Brown people, and the DEIs, there’s no culture in America. We make the food better. We make the economy better. We make the music better. Right? MAGA can’t create culture. They got Cracker Barrel and Kid Rock.”

I was hopeful that The New York Times, or at the very least The Babylon Bee, would work their journalistic magic and dig into these claims, but, as of now, nada from either of them—or any of the big media outlets.

So, I immediately jumped into action and did my own exhaustive and extensive research (i.e., I Googled it) and found that, by gosh by golly, Reid and Ali seemed to be onto something.

Here’s one example: the by-product of a Person of Color (POC) inventing the Edison phonograph was the invention of wax paper. Apparently, after marveling at audible words emanating from a hand-cranked, metal cylinder, a little-known lab assistant named Thomas developed wax-covered paper that could be wrapped around said cylinder and, once scratched properly by a person speaking into a tube on the machine, recorded a voice for playback. Great invention, right? But note how it proves Reid and Ali’s assertion that “whites can’t invent anything” without DEIs?

Then there’s rope. Yes, something as simple as rope. Naturally, a POC invented that; however, it was a middle-aged white man who dovetailed from that by unraveling the rope and turning it into single strands—what we all know today as “string.” And what was that man’s name? George Kelsi String, Jr.

I could go on and on about how only minor inventions and advances in the arts, science, medicine, music, etc., resulted from white folks pilfering genius ideas made by non-whites. And in some cases, as you will see, they only made things worse.

Here is a chart of a very limited and select collection of inventors and inventions that will give you a general idea:

Again, this certainly is not an exhaustive list (far from it) of evidence of pilfering by whites.

OR:

Perhaps this chart makes a lot more sense:

Yes, Reid and Ali have certainly given us a lot to consider.

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Albin Sadar is author of Obvious: Seeing the Evil That’s in Plain Sight and Doing Something About It, as well as the children’s book collection, Hamster Holmes: Box of Mysteries. Albin was formerly the producer of “The Eric Metaxas Show.”