🌓 The anti-Blackness of anti-DEI 🌓
the president of harvard steps down
💖Motivation Meows💖
Welcome everyone back to The Black Cat. I didn’t expect this to be the first edition of the new year. In fact, I had an interview with a Congresswoman all lined up to start off the new year. Alas, that will now come out next week. I preface this blog post by saying that it is easy to slip into the negative. In times of peril and pain, we must intentionally focus on the good. It will not find us naturally, but it is there. We must focus on the light and seize hope; it is the only state of being that can defeat doom.
As always, please feel free to subscribe, send around, email me your reflections, and follow me on Instagram at dominicmadori.
This month, I’m reading: Thérèse Raquin by Emilé Zola, a novella about murder and adultery. It scandalized France when it was first published in the 1860s.
This weekend, I can’t stop listening to: HiiiPower by Kendrick Lamar
💢From the Chatterbox💢
We now must discuss briefly today the resignation of now former Harvard President Claudine Gay. I know much has already been said, but I, too, would like to quickly opine (and trust, in the upcoming months, you will see I have much more to say).
She is an endless reminder that the bar is perfection when it comes to being a Black person in a high position; nothing less than that will suffice. Walking this type of line often gives me anxiety because there is no net to catch you if you fall and no ladder to help you climb back up. It’s like the glass challenge in Squid Games — once you fall, the bloody game is over. Gay fell from a literal glass cliff. The Harvard Corporation accepted her resignation “with sorrow,” and she has already been replaced interimly by a white man but will continue on as a professor at the college. (Gay wrote a guest essay in the New York Times explaining her thoughts about what happened to her).
Let me just say that, of course, the senate testimony where she did not condemn anti-Semitism was awful, disastrous, and did not reflect well on her or Harvard. The allegations of plagiarism are also worrying, and I also have no idea why she seemingly lazily lifted sentences from other authors. I’m also not going to sit here and do the whole “well, I bet other Ivy League presidents have plagiarised, too.” No, no, I won’t do that. The outrage, the fear, and my anxiety on this issue is less what happened and more how: the motives behind the critics wanting Gay to resign were rooted in racism and not in the genuine interest that she did something wrong; they were waiting for an excuse to topple her, then they did. This continues a dangerous precedent of conservatives attacking what they consider “DEI,” leaving every Black person exposed to their wrath. Gay’s resignation is not a story about plagiarism.
I am more hurt, if anything, by the comments wielded against her. I read critical comments like a haunting tune that plays through my head. In the New York Times, Bret Stephens essentially wrote that Harvard chose diversity over excellence when picking Gay. She has been a professor at Harvard since 2006 and has served as the dean of social science, in addition to teaching African American studies. He pointed out, though, what he called her thin scholarly record and how she has only published 11 journal entries and “made no seminal contributions to her field.” I must wonder if the indifference and dismissal of her work have anything to do with the fact that she studied African American studies, and the bar for that having meaning is high, too.
Then, Stephens wrote, “It may take a generation after the end of affirmative action before someone like Gay can have the opportunity to be judged on her own merits, irrespective of her color.” Someone like Gay — he means someone like me; I don’t know why he didn’t just say Black woman. This line also caught my attention in that he admits that Black people are judged respective of their skin color, despite conservative rallying cries to return to this “color-blind society.” Then I started thinking. DEI is not really about race; it’s about the structures of power and finding ways to redistribute that; in every country, DEI would look different because the way power moves is different in every society. In this country, marginalized communities are Black and brown, usually lower income and women. Tackling power means addressing the harm done to those communities. Critics want to return to a time when they felt their power was unthreatened by change and want to exert control once again over how that power is spread. Gay’s resignation is not a story about plagiarism.
By now, it is well known that the plan to oust Gay came from the far right (in addition to angry billionaires who were upset with her disastrous congressional hearing. I saw a certain billionaire, the one who held lead this campaign, now befallen in his own plagiarism scandal. The role of the billionaires here and their threat to our democracy is another story for another newsletter edition). Christopher Rufo has been on a press tour talking about his motives and his successful strategy to wield power and the media to continue leading anti-DEI campaigns. He, who himself was dishonest about his own academic credentials, wrote back in December that his plan was to launch Gay’s plagiarism story into the mainstream and topple her. And that’s exactly what he did. After Gay resigned, he tweeted, “SCALPED,” and chills went down my back. I think this is part of the trauma of being Black in this country: I started to see strange fruit. I saw the image of her head as some kind of trophy in his hands, and it gave me chills: why would anyone say that if this was just a matter of good grace and not a conquest of an ideological civil war?
To Politico, Rufo said his campaign against Gay had nothing to do with race, and he’s right — it’s about power, and that’s what he and other critics are trying to take back.
Now that critics and Rufo know this playbook can work with no probable challenge to it, they are just going to keep doing it again and again and again and again. “This is the beginning of the end for DEI in America's institutions,” Rufo wrote on Twitter. “We will expose you. We will outmaneuver you. And we will not stop fighting until we have restored colorblind equality in our great nation.” He also called out Disney and Budlight, saying, “We have established the playbook. Now it’s about execution.”
There is that word again — colorblind. When people say they want to return to a color-blind society, do they ever say when exactly society was colorblind? Jim Crow ended in the mid-1960s, and before that was slavery and Black people were considered three-fifths of a person. Then there was redlining and, today, socioeconomic persecution to the point where even banks are still denying us mortgages at higher rates. When was this so-called color-blind society I seemed to have missed out on? Chating more to De-De, I think there was a reason I saw strange fruit while reading Rufo’s comments.
“Dr. Claudine Gay just experienced what many professional leaders experience in business and PWIs [predominantly white institutions], and that is job lynching,” she said. “Job lynching occurs when a racist mob attacks and derails a powerful position held by a Black leader.”
Rufo’s comments reminded me of what Walter Greason, a history professor at Macalester College, once told me for a TechCrunch story. “One of the easiest ways to derail a program designed for equal justice is to target the most vulnerable groups in a society,” he told me. “Critics know that there is a historical and contemporary resentment against opportunities for African Americans, [so] making Black people the target of public outrage is a fast way to advance their agenda.”
In fact, nearly every industry is finding a way to attack Black people right now. From Fearless Fund to Abundant Birth Project, to say that Gay’s resignation is a standalone issue is to purposely miss the whole picture, to only see one stroke in the whole of The Starry Night. I also was disappointed to see the comments a lot of people in tech were specifically making. Paul Graham tweeted last month that I can’t get out of my head. He tweeted, “Can the next president of Harvard be someone chosen for their intellectual achievements? It's true that most smart people wouldn't want the job, but there must be some who would.” According to most critics, no Black person has ever been qualified to do anything. Back in 2007, even then-Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama had to fight critiques that he didn’t have enough foreign policy experience to run the nation. At the time, he said those criticisms amused him. He said: “These same folks who are talking about a lack of experience are the same folks who joined up with [President] George Bush and said this [the war in Iraq] was a good idea, that somehow we were going to be made safer, that we are going to be greeted as liberators, that are going to create a democracy in Iraq. Who's inexperienced?"
The idea that Gay was not qualified enough gives way to the idea that her critics assume someone, presumably a *wink wink, a non-DEI person*, could have done a better job than in handling this mess or that they wouldn’t have been in the same situation. This simply isn’t true. I don’t think enough credit is given to Black professionals who work in historically white industries and reach success. One must be quite multitalented to balance the emotional, physical, and mental expectations, requirements, anticipated wants, and needed preparations to even exist in those rooms. I would argue that people, especially critics, don’t know what Black people know, how they know what they know, or what they are capable of. There is no need to endlessly pout out the contradiction of the other side; hypocrisy is the point; it continues the inequities and discrimination that keep critics like Rufo in power.
Aside from the dog whistle, it seems to me that some people are thinking that believing in equality for all is somehow a distraction or synonymous with being an idiot and that people who are “anti-racist” cannot also be intelligent. With that, I better not see any of them posting Martin Luther King quotes next week, for I fear he might have been an advocate for DEI. As a young person, to me and my generation, I think that the qualifiers for brilliance and having the “best mind” have changed. As the most diverse generation in history, I feel many of us believe that those who sit at the intersection of excellence and social understanding are the future of this ever-the-more-diverse, cosmopolitan nation. With that, then, it always seemed to me that Harvard looked at Gay holistically when they hired her — yes, their infamous holistic standards — and thought long and hard about the old ways mastery was determined and what the future of it looked like.
For what it’s worth, Harvard did look into the allegations of plagiarism and found that the errors in her published works “were not considered intentional or reckless.” As The Crimson reported, two of the authors Gay is said to have plagiarised told the outlet that they did not consider her work to be a rip from theirs. David T. Canon, another author Gay is accused of plagiarising, told The Washington Free Beacon, the conservative outlet that has been hammering this story, that he too didn’t feel Gay did anything wrong. As De-De, a racial equity consultant, pointed out to me, the allegations of plagiarism came only from Gay’s political detractors rather than the authors themselves. Some blame does fall on Harvard, though, as Ivory Toldson wrote for BET. He asked if the institution betrayed Gay by not protecting her enough. It made me think that the reason these institutions have such a hard time protecting Black women is that they’ve never had to do it before, and they literally don’t know how; this is literally their first time on a stand, and sadly, it’s during the trial of a century.
It will take decades to clean up this mess, though by now, it should be clear that conservatives want the damage to remain done. The unraveling of social progress is always intentional and has been a mainstay since the Reconstruction, which also fell apart. Even then, when the idea of sharing and redistributing power became a reality, white citizens cowered, and many took to terrorizing Black communities. For centuries, experts have only tried to prove that diversity is good, and for centuries, those assertions have been refused. If anything, I hope Gay resigned in part to find peace of mind, something she was never going to find on the front lines of this latest diversity debacle. Contrary to popular belief, not every Black person wants to be a martyr, even though they don’t get to choose if and when they are. My final thoughts are that this was not a story about plagiarism, and I ask my fellow members of the media to better challenge, critique, and critically assess conservative activists who are using you to peddle narratives that threaten our democracy. Conservative and white rage are serious issues, and power is something that people have not only died to keep but also have killed to maintain.
Those who favor DEI are up against those who are quite privy to the ways systemic power maneuvers; critics understand the courts, the economics, and the socials of progress, meaning at any point, they can bend the law and the media to its will. In this fight, players are going against the maker of the game. Watching another Black face fall to anti-DEI is like watching a player fall through the glass during Squid Games. It was easy to oust Gay; all they had to do was make her lose the round. I was chatting with my friend Mark about it, and he said simply, “Her job is to make the university look good and stay out of the news. Bring in money and not bad press. She failed.”
🔥Please, Mind My Business🔥
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💫Kitty Talk💫
Here are some interesting articles I’ve read since we last met:
The New York Times, “Taraji P. Henson Is Tired of Fighting”
Financial Times, “What the drive for cleaner capitalism will look like in 2024”
New York Magazine, “My Unraveling: I had my health. I had a job. And then, abruptly, I didn’t.”