The so-called anti-black racism in contemporary America has been the centerpiece of the left’s political rhetoric for many years. No surprises then to see Harvard University’s disgraced former President Claudine Gay accuse her critics of racism, and a number of left-wing media people chiming in to defend her as a victim.
Claudine Gay, touted by liberals as Harvard’s first black president, was plagued with multiple scandals – two major ones that led to her resignation being antisemitism and plagiarism. Her refusal to condemn the anti-Israel activism by pro-Hamas students at Harvard landed her in hot water last fall after the horrific October 7 attack on Israel by Hamas militants. She made her case worse by refusing to call for punishing the anti-semites at the university in her congressional testimony last month.
Despite her obvious political leaning toward Islamists and anti-semites, Harvard stood by Gay and refused to suspend or fire her. But then her critics dug a little into her academic past and stepped on a minefield of plagiarized work. Media reported at least 50 instances of Gay’s plagiarism until she stepped down on Tuesday (January 2).
Unsurprisingly, instead of condemning Gay for her academic and political misconduct, the liberal political propaganda machinery jumped into action to defend her. And they, out the familiar defense for all their non-white favorites – played the race card.
Zaire Z. Dinzey-Flores, a sociologist at The State University of New Jersey, wrote an op-ed for the leftist website theGrio.com, which highlights issues of black culture, bemoaning Gay’s resignation and implying Gay as a victim of “excessive scrutiny” for being black.
“Academic leadership remains largely white and inhospitable to Black women,” wrote Dinzey-Flores, and went on to say:
“Her resignation is now a reminder of the irreconcilability of successful Black womanhood with powerful, wealthy and predominantly white institutions.”
MSNBC led Gay’s defense with the familiar darts of rhetoric: diversity, race, and multiculturalism.
Of course, the channel’s anchor Joy Reid had to tell her own little story to back up the racist-white narrative to slam Harvard.
Playing victim when caught in fraud or crime is nothing new to the liberal person-of-color narrative. When actor Jussie Smollet was caught red-handed in a hoax hate-crime act in 2019, his lawyers told the court that Smollet was a victim of racism and homophobia.
In his op-ed in The Washington Examiner (January 3), Christopher Tremoglie summed up the reaction of Gay and her supporters as:
“And with their anger, liberals, Democrats, and others on the political Left have done the second thing they know how to do best, after fake cries of racism: Call those they disagree with fascists.”
Gay’s attempt to play a victim of racism has fallen flat on its face as it met the reality check on her incompetence and academic fraud, the two fragile poles that held her little house of overrated and unethical academic achievements. But her case, while being seen as the tip of the iceberg, has offered a glimpse of how deeply corrupt the left-dominated higher education system in America and the west has become.
The question of why her plagiarism record remained unfound and unpunished by the university’s education board for so long says more about how liberal people of color are exempt from accountability. Gay is not a victim of racism but the privileged face of incompetence and corruption that plagues the academic environment to its core. As conservative author and columnist Douglas Murray put it in The Telegraph:
“Claudine Gay has exposed the rot at the heart of the woke establishment.”
https://twitter.com/DouglasKMurray/status/1742726105683968051