The Trial of President Claudine Gay
White Supremacy, Misogynoir & Higher Education on the Fascist March
Dearest Reader,
My memory of the first days in office of President Barack Obama often turns to a placard I saw outside the White House where there was an encampment of disgruntled, propagandized Americans sold on birtherism—the false notion that President Obama was not born in the United States and therefore illegitimate as president. Coming from a neo-colonial nation where on occasion mis/disinformation has upended law and order, that placard and the seeming indifference to its virulent racism comingling with anti-democratic sentiment, gave me pause. Indeed, the familiar constructs of race and gender are the Trojan Horse ushering in a new age of fascism around the country.
In 2008 following the historic election of President Barack Obama, I felt hopeful but simultaneously had an ominous feeling. President Obama’s African relatives come from near my ancestral home in Kenya. My parents were also similarly well educated and well traveled like his. Therefore, President Obama has always resonated with me in a unique way from his background to his intellect to his broad humanitarianism which are all hallmarks of my ethnic community who often become and/or exalt teachers, academics, ministers, lawyers, doctors, politicians and the like.
His exceptional talent inspired millions of black children and exemplified the emergence of a majority non-white country by 2045. As much as the former president inspired me like no one else could, there was this seething anger I saw in others towards his irrefutable gifts. One could argue that President Obama and those like him became the avatar for white America’s need to embrace fascism (untruths + strongmen + scapegoating minorities/women + breakdown of institutions = abandoning democracy) in a desperate ongoing attempt to maintain America’s white majority power structure.
Birtherism is a device to uphold white supremacy by using racism (see: the sharpest tool of white supremacy) to claim the first black president is not a U.S. citizen. That is the general function of race and racism in the United States, as an ideological lever to modulate the heights of white supremacist power. Without these modulating financial and structural benefits of whiteness, other white people may be less amenable to maintaining the status quo.
However, the oldest tool of white supremacy is the construct of gender. European women were the first “property” a man could own before racism legitimated the wholesale subjugation of most of the world under a racial hierarchy. This is why African American women scholars like bell hooks referred to “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” or Kimberlé Crenshaw would popularize “intersectionality.” When you are black and a woman, you experience a doubling of oppressive systems on your person and this only compounds with each additional non-normative identity.
Another circumstance common among black women is a concept called “the glass cliff.” By contrast, “the glass ceiling” is a popular concept in feminism referring to the experience of seeing the possible professional heights a man can reach, but being impeded from achieving said heights because of gender. “The glass cliff,” is navigated often by women of color, though any woman or person of color end up on this cliff. The glass cliff speaks to the fraught circumstances under which a business, agency, corporation, etc. decides to hire a woman or person of color to lead.
Unlike the glass ceiling, the glass cliff is not merely a limitation, but a occupational or even corporeal hazard. For example, when a woman of color is offered a leadership position, which she is often vastly overqualified for, she is positioned in such a way that her appointment makes the institution look progressive while providing cover for the inevitable further collapse of that institution, the regime behind it or the culture therein. This way said woman of color leader can be scapegoated for whatever goes wrong despite being under-resourced and unsupported. It’s possible to survive the glass cliff, to navigate this perilous opportunity towards success (that’s the upside), but one is essentially set up to fail.
This brings me to the brilliant Dr. Claudine Gay, who resigned on January 2nd as the shortest serving president in Harvard University history. Much has been made of Dr. Gay’s “performance” at a congressional hearing on issues of antisemitism on college campuses. However, I think it’s slowly dawning on people, much like those birtherism placards in 2008, that all of this fallout has less to do with campus safety and more to do with the ongoing project to maintain white supremacy through weaponizing racism and sexism. It’s not lost on me that the three Ivy League university presidents speaking on campus safety during the congressional hearing were all women and all with coached, prepared legal ease rich remarks, in a futile attempt to be understood as both competent and concerned administrators during a very polarizing time.
Upon surviving an initial power grab following the controversial hearing that claimed the presidency of Liz Magill at U Penn, the second accusation against Gay’s leadership was for plagiarism in her academic work. Of course, this overqualified black woman is now, suddenly revealed to be an intellectual fraud. Please.
Conservative journalist, activist and anti-DEI crusader Christopher Rufo of the Washington Free Beacon claims to be the one who initially honed in on plagiarism as a means to oust Gay. Rufo is also the twisted mastermind behind attacks on “critical race theory.” Gay, it seems, was in his sights as he openly views her as unqualified and seems to equate her scholarship with DEI. Gay’s academic work focuses on American political behavior, public opinion, minority politics, and urban and local politics.
In reality Gay’s infractions are a mostly improperly credited citations rather than the theft of anyone’s work or ideas as her own—one of the authors she improperly cited called her errors “technically plagiarism” but also "trivial—wholly inconsequential.” Harvard’s investigation of her work determined “a few instances of inadequate citation” but “no violation of Harvard’s standard for research misconduct” and Gay, for her part, is actively correcting any mistakes with proper attribution.
However, in this post-truth atmosphere, facing pressure from wealthy donors, unrelenting racist harassment, doxxing and death threats, Dr. Gay decided to resign. Claudine Gay is the daughter of professional Haitian immigrants, is a tenured professor at Harvard University, boasts degrees from Phillips Exeter Academy, Stanford University and Harvard where she received her doctorate. With all this in mind, she was the first Black person and second woman to lead Harvard University—she lasted about 6 months. In a parting editorial in the New York Times, Gay writes “Having now seen how quickly the truth can become a casualty amid controversy, I’d urge a broader caution: At tense moments, every one of us must be more skeptical than ever of the loudest and most extreme voices in our culture, however well organized or well connected they might be.”
Meanwhile the wife of billionaire Bill Ackman, a major donor and graduate of Harvard who joined the conservative-led charge against Gay for her audacity to exist, has been revealed as a plagiarist in her own academic work. Ackman’s wife is American-Israeli artist, designer, former MIT professor and celebrity academic Neri Oxman. Oxman allegedly plagiarized sentences and whole paragraphs from Wikipedia, technical documents and other scholarly sources in numerous instances, including her doctoral dissertation.
Caught red handed, Oxman apologized and in response to his wife’s obvious plagiarism, Ackman says, “part of what makes her human is that she makes mistakes, owns them, and apologizes when appropriate.” A total eye-roll in the double standard for Gay. Embarrassed as this fresh scandal unfolds, Ackman is beating the war drums to investigate plagiarism across MIT and to retaliate against Business Insider/Bloomberg for uncovering his wife’s missteps. In recent days, Ackman declared DEI is “the root cause of antisemitism at Harvard.” He honed in on DEI on college campuses calling it anti-capitalist and racist (against white people) plus made a pledge to tackle ‘problems with how our media operates.’
When Barack Obama came to power, so many of us thought it was the dawning of a new day where the most qualified person to meet a moment could win a powerful position regardless of race. Little did we know there would be an enormous backlash. And years later with the near presidential victory of Hillary Clinton (no matter what you think of her), it’s clear women can barely get up to bat to access the power of the presidency. But the trial of Harvard’s president Claudine Gay was not conducted in a court room or even on court TV, it was conducted in full view of the public with no impartial jury or due process. It was effectively a pile-on with scant basis in fact or ethics, just a whole lot of white men’s loud feelings.
I group these exceptional people together because the prospect of fascism in America is essentially a creeping reality. As Gay articulates in her New York Times OpEd: the denial of facts and truth followed by uprooting trusted institutions (like higher education) and expertise are the most essential ingredients to undermining our ability to see through propaganda. And once you’re mainlining propaganda while cheering on racism and sexism, you may wake up in a country that used to be a democracy, now run by a bunch of emotionally unregulated men (and women) scrambling for their next scapegoat to pile-on as they gobble up our resources and rights. Unless…
With Love During End Times,
Agunda