It is important that I am clear on my stance with regards to the resignation of Claudine Gay. Let me be clear. When I heard her on the stand I felt disgust. Whenever I witness forms of racism play out with any group, I have flashbacks to my own experience. Watching her, took me back to my own experience with racism in academia and how NONE of the Black professors or leaders in those non-HBCU spaces advocated for me. They were silent. They wrote about racism. They spoke about racism. They made appearances on news shows about racism. They were published for writing about racism, but NONE did anything to address the racism that was right there within their department and in front of their faces. So my conclusion about her was that she was choosing to keep her position as opposed to standing for what was right and just. She also felt like she was caught in the middle of the board of trustees, Jews, Whites, Blacks, Palestinians….Black people who are called to leadership in these spaces are not really equipped to stand, because standing often gets us silenced.
So why am I fussing about her resignation and making this about race? It is not because I think Harvard wants to remove Black people from leadership. My guess is that they will possibly choose another person of color to take her place to free themselves from that stigma. My issue is that Claudine Gay has been president for 2 seconds and all it took was a group of WHITE people (with some people of color sprinkled in there) to cry out about her being anti-semitic and with full force they got her removed. Black people cannot make a mistake. There is no grace for us. We all experience a daily fight against those just waiting for us to mess up so they can shame, silence and remove our presence when we surpass them with our success. I am also frustrated because I am one of MANY Black people who have studied and who work in academia that have repeatedly complained, reported and cried out about the blatant racism we go through regularly in these places and NOTHING is rarely done. I remember when I have had to work with and look at a woman who regularly was racist towards me and other people of color and no matter how many reports were filed, nothing was done to hold her accountable except she chose to go to a training (because leadership didn’t feel like they should make it required) and then was taken out to dinner to discuss what she learned. YET, when a group of White people cry out about Claudine Gay who has been in leadership for such a short time, the mountains move.
This resignation of Claudine Gay is not a sign of progress. It is a sign of the power of White supremacy. It is so strong, that a Black woman can now be the face of racism that has plagued universities long before she got there. It is strong enough so that none of us feel justice from this moment, but we feel even more fear because now those of us who have had to endure racism for decades in this space, can possibly be called out as the racist ones while those who put us through so much pain from their micro and macro aggressions and racially insensitive comments will not be held accountable. Claudine Gay and ANYONE who refuse to stand against hate towards ANY human being should be held accountable and prevented from progressing in academia, but yet they continue to be protected, when Claudine Gay and even the other women with her, were not. The men who led before them were protected, but they were not. Claudine Gay was even more shamed because there was a literal fight to keep her in position, and in that process she has literally had a public lynching of her career. When she did not resign at the first try, and hundreds of colleagues, even the board stood behind her, it wasn’t enough. That support enraged her dissenters even more. Someone had to go through her writings to find plagiarism (imagine the time it took to find plagiarism in her writings). So then, we saw weeks of public shaming of her work, and most people have not even read what she has plagiarized. Anti-Semitism was put on the back shelf and all of her work and reputation came into question. To help with her demise, one of those she plagiarized (another Black woman) has spoken up and joined forces with those seeking to have Claudine Gay removed. I wonder if all professors and leaders will now go through the same scrutiny about how they cite their work? Probably not. My goodness, this reminds me of the Black man who helped with the lynching of Emmitt Till and of how Whites would stand around a lynched body, picking it apart as it hung there in shame. Under NO circumstances would I EVER publicly shame another Black person. We might talk privately and work through it together, and I would hold them accountable with a leader, but I just cannot publicly try to destroy a fellow Black person. The memories of how my own people would tell the master when a slave was trying to escape or would be an overseer on the plantation so they could gain the favor of the master as they stood against their own people (even being the ones to beat their fellow slave) or would sell their fellow African to a European slave trader, have me on lock down when it comes to that. Claudine Gay was wrong for not standing against hate, and her own experiences should have given her the courage to stand, but all while this is going on and people are dancing in the streets that she has resigned, the rest of us are still struggling and will continue to be unheard while we struggle with racism daily in academia.
Dr. Anika T. Prather 