The Problem with Claudine Gay
Harvard as Test Case for Racism
For those of you not paying attention, Claudine Gay is the current (hopefully temporary) president of Harvard University. She’s a Black woman in her early fifties. She started her tenure in July. In October she made headlines when being interviewed by congress and refusing to condemn student calls for the genocide of Jews. Following this, a few instances of plagiarism were discovered, which soon bloomed into dozens of instances of plagiarism. Currently she’s now accused of not releasing her data-sets from her early 2000s paper which gave her a PhD at Stanford. She’s been criticized roundly on all sides for most of this.
The claim on the Left and by many at Harvard is the usual: This is a “right-wing conspiracy” and “racism.” Or else there have been bizarre rationalizations of the plagiarism claiming that it’s “not really plagiarism.” (For cases where it clearly is, for instances where Harvard students are routinely disciplined, and according to Harvard’s own designation of the act of plagiarism.)
This is the most blatant and obvious moment of Woke Racism. To elite white progressives, both at Harvard and off, Claudine Gay is nothing but a political football, to be hurled around for virtue-signaling points. She’s not a full human being but rather a symbol. The most superficial thing about her—her skin pigmentation—is being used as the main criteria for defending a clearly disastrous record. Do you realize how awful and detrimental doing is this going to be for all Black Americans? From now on whenever a Black American gets into a high position of power, people are absolutely going to think, Hmmmm; were they hired because of competency and merit…or because they’re Black?
This is the inevitable outcome of an ideology that focuses solely on one’s racial identity and “victim status” and cares not one bit about someone’s qualification for any job. Certainly there were any number of educated Black people from which to choose for president, but they chose someone not because of their competency but someone who had a secretive, questionable, and very slim publishing record. (Very unusual for Harvard.) Gay—just like all Black Americans in progressive eyes—is a token. She doesn’t possess full humanity. She’s a stick-figure. It’s as if progressives are saying, Look, we know you're not that smart, and you did a lot of shady things in the past, and plagiarized, hid data, etc, but that’s OK because you’re Black. We don’t expect much from Black people.
With the anti-free speech sentiment, the Nazi-like antisemitism, and now this, I hope the average American can finally open his or her eyes and see Wokeism/fringe progressivism for what it actually is: Racist; ignorant; backwards. Progressives have a classic Freudian projection problem. Me think thou dost protest too much. When a group of people are constantly pointing the finger and assigning blame to some other group and decrying “White Supremacy,” engaging in bold revisionist history (1619 Project) and lying, gaslighting and denying anything that goes against their knee-jerk tribal presumptions, it makes one ask the obvious question:
Who, actually, are the racists? Average Americans? Or the 8% of mostly white, mostly wealthy, mostly young fringe progressives who treat minorities like pawns, chant “gas the Jews,” and throw racial epithets at Black Americans who aren’t on the “right” side of the political aisle. There’s a reason that Black, Asian and Hispanic voters are cracking off in droves to the Republican Party. The double-standard here is atrocious. Racism under the rubric of “social justice” is still racism. (George Orwell wrote eloquently about the totalitarian manipulation of language.)
I wish I could say the Republican Party had a moderate candidate and that they were more sane than the progressives. Sadly this is not the case: Republicans have mostly lost their minds as well. And there’s plenty of racism on their side, too. Two wrongs, my friend, do not make a right.
Pay attention. Think.
Think.