In the same way that electing America’s first Black president resulted in a white backlash, Claudine Gay’s ascension also bred contempt.
In her op-ed Wednesday in The New York Times, Claudine Gay, who resigned as the first Black president of Harvard University the day before, after allegations of plagiarism in her scholarly work, writes that “The campaign against me was about more than one university and one leader.” She called the right-wing attacks that led to her resignation “a single skirmish in a broader war to unravel public faith in pillars of American society.”
That may be true, but there’s another way that the attacks on Gay prove to be bigger than her and Harvard. The first-generation American of Haitian parents who became the first Black president in Harvard’s 387-year-old history was subjected to the latest, most prominent example of know-your-place aggression, a backlash of violence — both literal and symbolic, both physical and discursive — that essentially says to people from marginalized groups: Know your place!
Gay has achieved many feats in her career, including rising to the presidency of Harvard after almost two decades of service to the university as a professor who took on various administrative posts and not simply the responsibilities of a productive teacher and scholar. She was recruited to Harvard in 2006 to be a professor of government because her research has shaped scholarly understandings of political behavior.
Many Americans viewed Gay becoming Harvard’s first Black president a sign of progress. Her ascension was positive news, but what exactly are we celebrating when acknowledging such a first? It can’t be that a person of color has finally become qualified to occupy this position. During my almost two decades as a professor, I’ve noticed an unmistakable pattern: Obsessing over whether a candidate of color deserves a spot prevents everyone from noticing that white people get and keep positions without needing to be impressive at all. So, I guess we’re celebrating that the institution finally noticed that white men are not always the best and brightest to be found, despite how relentlessly everyone is told they are.
But, in the same way that the election of the first Black president of the United States resulted in a white backlash, Gay’s ascension to the head of the country’s oldest university bred contempt.
Christopher Rufo, the right-wing ideologue who whipped conservatives into a frenzy over critical race theory, similarly telegraphed his intentions to create a political firestorm to bring down Gay, and he succeeded by accusing her of plagiarism.
