OPINION: In an era of extreme conservative tactics, Black people should note that any of us can be under attack to prove a political point.
Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more
Let’s not be naive. Most of us can barely remember the third university president’s name who testified on Capitol Hill, and that’s because this witch hunt stopped being about antisemitism long ago. Claudine Gay’s removal was always a 2-for-1 deal.
We should understand that the campaign to take down Dr. Gay is one that will continue until diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) is destroyed. We saw it with Nikole Hannah-Jones and the University of North Carolina. We saw it in the striking down of affirmative action and lawsuits against Black-focused businesses and even maternity programs. And the indignity of these takedowns will chafe even more in an election year featuring a Teflon Donald Trump, who has broken every norm and rule of a president and gets a pass from his supporters and the GOP establishment to do it all again.
There is too much glee in the reactions to Dr. Gay’s resignation for this to just be about academic integrity. This is about sticking it to us undeserving Blacks who have “taken” spots from people who so feared competing with us, they inscribed segregation into law to preserve their advantage for centuries. Many of the critics daring to stomp on Dr. Gay’s academic record, couldn’t hold a candle to her accomplishments — they wouldn’t cut it in these institutions and that is why they bitterly seek wins to validate their intelligence.
In Dr. Gay’s resignation statement, we can almost hear the exhaustion of a weary soul who recognizes that the cost of being “the first” and staying resilient was too high even for her:
“It has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor—two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am—and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus,” she wrote, noting that she will return to teaching at the university and her hopes for Harvard remained “undimmed,” a remarkable statement despite all she’s been through.
As a Black Harvard undergraduate back in the early 2000s, I remember unveiling the portrait of the first Black Harvard woman-tenured professor, Dr. Eileen Southern. It was the first portrait of a Black woman to hang on campus ever — a small gem of appreciation in a sea of statues and photographic tributes to men, mostly white, some eugenicists and racists, long dead and gone.
The ceremony was led by the great Black neurophysicist Dr. S. Allen Counter, and as we pulled the curtain down, the room filled with applause and smiles, the photo of which was memorialized in Jet Magazine.
Yet as we applauded Dr. Southern’s accomplishments in musicology, little did I realize that Dr. Southern hadn’t always had an easy time at Harvard in the mid-1970s, having to fight for things as simple as getting librarians to order African-American books and finding herself rejected as a grad student before coming back to teach in 1974.
“You have to be very, very aggressive to get along with Harvard if you’re a woman,” Dr. Southern once said. “And to be a Black woman, I mean, it’s just a rough life.”
No one now understands this better than Claudine Gay.
With a new generation of Black students and young people looking to us adults for lessons from this moment, perhaps they are better served to know the truth: that even being “twice as good” won’t always protect you from people who need your failure to justify their blind rage.
Perhaps the best example will be Dr. Gay’s — if given a choice between carrying the weight of the world for flawed institutions who will not carry the weight for you and choosing to preserve your well-being, dignity and knowledge of your own goodness — in the end, there is nothing to prove. Choose you.
Natasha S. Alford is VP of Digital Content and a Senior Correspondent at theGrio. An award-winning journalist, filmmaker, and TV personality, Alford is author of the forthcoming book “American Negra.” (Harper Collins) Follow her on Twitter and Instagram at @natashasalford.
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