From Slate:

Why So Many People Think Eli Whitney, Cotton Gin Inventor, Was Black By Ruth Graham … Commenters from Georgia, California, Kentucky, Indiana, Ohio, Virginia, Kansas, Florida, and Massachusetts insisted online on Wednesday they had been taught in school that Whitney was black. … As of this writing, 55 percent of respondents to a BuzzFeed poll posted Wednesday say they have always believed Whitney was black.

There’s a general effort in the U.S. to massively inflate the contributions of black inventors in the mind of impressionable children. As I pointed out last year, if you type “American inventors” into Google, you’ll will see pictures of inventors, the great majority of whom are black. Here’s Google’s current Top Ten:

Thomas Alva Edison in 8th place and nine blacks. So it’s hardly surprising that Americans would grow up assuming that if Eli Whitney was an American inventor, the odds are he was also an African American inventor. I mean, didn’t blacks invent practically everything we were taught about in school.

One might hope that this effort to mislead the public would inspire young blacks to be more inventive. But it’s worth noting that blacks have long held an inflated opinion of their inventiveness without it having much real world payoff. For example, Evelyn Waugh noted in his 1938 novel Scoop, when William Boot goes to get his visa for an Ethiopia-like country: