What I Think About Harvard and Claudine Gay
Y'all still out here pouring the good wine of Blackness into a worn-out racist system
Here’s the thing. I really don’t have much to say about Harvard’s not-so-secret board of filthy-rich, pro-imperialist, anti-Black, and misogynoirist white folk forcing Claudine Gay to resign as the first Black president of the institution on Wednesday. After all, the American Black literati and academician class has been weighing in with social media and op-eds for the past 48 hours, as if the issues of intersectionality, tokenism, and the rules of American racism somehow had disappeared for them as a group until this week.
This group of Black elites only infrequently weighs in on social justice issues, from Gaza and Israeli apartheid, to anti-queer bans in K-16 education, to the quest to make abortion in the US illegal, to what to do about a second Biden term. So much so, one would think racism is a slumbering system that only awakens to attack extremely accomplished Black folk once they reach the pinnacle of success on the public stage at an elite Ivy League institution.
But American racism is a system that is both flexible and yet unyielding for anyone Black, and doubly so for anyone a Black woman. Especially for anyone who seeks to benefit from educational privilege and from the socioeconomic privileges that comes coupled with a successful ride from doctorate to tenure-stream to tenured Harvard professor. So many of my Black colleagues believe massive aspirations and massive ambition combined with “twice-as-good” or ten-times-as-good” talent and hard work are all that matter in academia and can overcome the racist and misogynoirist politics of higher education. They keep their heads down and keep quiet about the -isms they see and hear every day, in the classroom, at faculty meetings, in hiring and promotion decisions, in the publishing of articles (scholarly and otherwise) and books, and in who gets what prestigious grants. Like the independent candidate Cornel West, they see themselves as second-class citizens at lily-white and white-adjacent institutions without sufficient power to change anything for themselves or for others less fortunate.
What they do not see is the truth. The Matrix of American racism, alive and well from Harvard to the University of Phoenix, benefits from their very frequent silence. Academia benefits from their labor, paid and free, and never has to change as part of a long-term commitment to diversity beyond tokenism. Rising in a system such as this only validates its existence — it does nothing to force any meaningful change.
To quote the late, great, Audre Lorde, circa 1984:
Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference — those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older — know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support.
Well, I guess I did have a few things to say. But what I have said, so many will find hard to accept — even now.