Hello friends, welcome to the new year. What better way to ring in 2024 than dipping into the deep and familiar well of the culture war?
Friend of the blog Chris Rufo put another one on the scoreboard recently with the resignation of Harvard President Claudine Gay. Gay was dragged into the fire over her testimony to Congress, along with the presidents of UPenn and MIT, about antisemitism on college campuses. The initial controversy stemmed from her and her colleagues' hesitancy to say that calls for violence against Jews went against university codes of conduct.
Immediately after the hearing, calls for Gay and her fellow university presidents to resign bellowed from both the right and center-left. Initially, she refused to step down, but this act of defiance prompted a deep dive into her academic career and pretty soon some significant accusations of plagiarism were unearthed. Again, Gay at first defended herself against these charges, claiming that there were a few instances where she copied technical language without proper citation. However, more examples of plagiarism came to light with each new one seemingly more damning than the last, and eventually, she was forced to hang up the old crimson towel.
Chris Rufo promptly did his victory lap.
But let’s not focus on Rufo right now. I don’t doubt we will have plenty of time and cause to talk about his project in this newly born election year, for now, let’s focus on a particular article written in response to Gay’s resignation. A response that was meant to call attention to the injustice in the former Harvard president's ouster, but instead served to demonstrate exactly why people like Chris Rufo have been so successful recently in turning the tide of the culture war.
The Crimson Comparison
In November of 2020, the previous sweaty presidential election year, we wrote about Afro-Pessimism and how this political framework has influenced mainstream Black political expression. Afro-Pessimism isn’t as popular of a political framework as CRT, or as explicitly woven into the pop culture fabric as wokeness, but I’d argue it’s been much more influential than those two ideas. After Pauline Gay’s resignation, Caron J. Phillips, writing for spon-con clearing house (and erstwhile sports website) Deadspin, published an article titled What’s going on at Harvard with Claudine Gay is similar to how the NFL, sports, and America operate.
The article makes the case that controversy and pressure for Gay to resign does not mainly stem from the contentious discourse around Israel’s assault on the people of Gaza, or the tenor of leftist rhetoric in support of Palestine. Nor did it come from the decades-long right-wing crusade against higher education and college students. According to Phillips, Gay was pressured to resign because she was an overqualified Black woman, and white America could not countenance her position of power at this country's most prestigious university.
My friends, this is perhaps the most pure distillation of Afro-Pessimism’s effect on mainstream Black politics I have ever come across. Let's dig in.
In his sub-head Phillips succinctly makes his case: “From education to athletics, the disqualification of overqualified Black people is part of this country’s fabric.” And if you were looking for some substantiation of the assertion that Gay was indeed overqualified for the job of Harvard’s president, this is all Phillips has to offer:
“After the fake racial awakening that occurred in 2020, a Black woman made “double history” by being the first Black person and Black woman to hold the most important position at the one university that this country has deemed as its best. And because of that, “the right” got pissed off that an overqualified Black woman — because your resume always has to be two and three times better than your white counterparts when you’re a person of color — held that much power.”
A quick trip to Google will reveal that Gay had a very productive and impressive academic career before becoming Harvard’s 30th president. But so did her white predecessor Lawrence Bacow. Bacow taught for 24 years at MIT before his first administrative appointment as department chair and chancellor, Gay taught for 9 years at Harvard before being named Dean of Social Sciences, and 3 years later was named Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Unlike Gay, Bacow had experience in the top position of a major university serving as Tufts University President for about 10 years, where he stepped down after student backlash to his opposition to unionization efforts by the school’s grad students and admin support staff.
For what it’s worth, after fighting against his employee's right to collectively bargain, Barack Obama appointed Bacow to the board of advisors for the White House Initiative on Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
None of this is to say that Gay didn’t deserve her appointment to succeed Bacow as Harvard President, or that she wasn’t as qualified as her predecessor. I didn’t read every paper that she or Bacow wrote, nor does an hour of googling constitute sufficient investigation to make a claim either way. But I will say with some confidence that my tiny bit of research serves this conversation much more than just assuming her overqualification based solely on her racial and gender identity.
Gay attended the famed Phillips Exeter Academy boarding school, before attending Princeton and Stanford for her undergraduate studies and earning her Ph.D. at Harvard. She is the platonic ideal of Black Excellence, enjoying a childhood and career path that was only relatively recently reserved for wealthy white people. In other words, she enjoyed a privilege that is still far beyond the reach of most Black people in America and most white Americans as well.
I also happen to be a Black person who enjoyed some social privilege and attended a good school, although nowhere near the level of Gay. I can say with some confidence that despite living a life most working-class white people couldn’t conceive of, much less hope of attaining, she most likely experienced a fair amount of racism on the path to Harvard's presidency. And I doubt that all of it came from the “right”.
Gay represents a broken deal between the political project of Black liberation and the American elite charged with representing the interests of capital. She was allowed to go to all of the right schools, earn all of the right credentials, and eventually earn the requisite position of power that all her achievements warranted. And yet, whether she was overqualified, underqualified, or just adequately qualified, all it took was a few dishonest white people with a political agenda to bring it all crashing down. No wonder people get pessimistic.
Disgrace, Race, and Copy/Paste
Phillips makes little mention of either the congressional hearing on college hate speech that began Gay’s downfall or the plagiarism accusations that ultimately sealed the deal. For him, the only thing to note about this story is Gay’s race and the comparisons that can be made between what she is experiencing and the obstacles faced by other wealthy and successful Black professionals in education, politics, and sports trying to achieve status and power.
Because his focus is squarely on defending Black excellence and positioning all other political concerns as subordinate to race, he neglects certain aspects of what actually happened and it serves to make his case look at best sloppy and at worst dishonest. Of course, the biggest problem of framing Gay’s resignation as a matter of existential American racism is that she wasn’t the first university president to step down after the congressional hearing on hate speech against Jewish people on college campuses. University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill was forced to resign on December 9th, almost a month before Gay did.
Liz Magill is white, in case you were wondering.
Magill was already facing controversy stemming from the Israel-Palestine conflict before the October 7th attacks due to UPenn hosting the annual literary festival Palestine Writes the previous month. Her refusal to cancel the event in the name of free speech and in defiance of many influential financial backers of the school was compounded by her legalese ass-covering responses to questions about antisemitic hate speech.
In the days following Gay’s resignation, conservative and pro-Zionist forces have signaled they intend to come for the third and final university official who spoke at that hearing, MIT president Sally Kornbluth. The fact that Kornbluth is Jewish and seems to have more institutional support than Gay or Magill did, may allow her to keep her job. However, the fact that the same outrage machine that claimed Gay’s job also claimed the job of a white woman and now has designs on the job of a white Jewish woman really seems to invalidate the claim that race was the primary factor in Gay’s ouster.
Given that the only university presidents who felt compelled to respond to conservative congressperson Elise Stefanik’s summons were women, where only 30 percent of elite university presidents are women, one could make the case that sexism was the most relevant prejudice at play.
Let’s be clear here, the reasons why Gay and Magill lost their jobs are bullshit, manufactured by a conservative outrage machine run by a consummate con man in Chris Rufo, powerful billionaires like Bill Ackman (remember that name for later), and abetted by a squishy liberal center afraid to upset a dogmatic and well organized Zionist political apparatus. Palestine Writes is not a hateful event. (I recently attended an event sponsored by the group). And while Magill, Gay and Kornbuth’s answers to Congress were frustrating, they were perfectly in line with conservatives' attitudes on free speech on college campuses. Much of the controversy revolved around the framing of the phrase “from the river to the sea” as exclusively a call for Jewish genocide and incidents of hateful rhetoric and brutal violence directed at Palestinians and Arabs were completely ignored.
There’s cognitive dissonance in arguing that students should be able to organize a speaking event for eugenicist Charles Murray to argue that Black people are genetically inferior without interference and then arguing that university presidents should be fired for allowing a pro-Palestinian literary festival.
Gay didn’t have the same previous Palestinian baggage on her as Magill did, so it was the plagiarism claims that eventually did the job. I get why Phillips doesn’t talk about those accusations in his piece, it’s because Gay did that shit. But even the fact that Gay at the very least engaged in some considerable academic malpractice doesn’t tell the whole story.
First, you have to understand that none of the people at the controls of this outrage machine nor their free laborers posting about academic standards on Elons personal masturbatory social media site give an honest shit about academic integrity. Especially not Chris Rufo who, besides having his own minor controversy over which Harvard he graduated from, is closely associated with the Claremont Institute and Hillsdale College. Hillsdale’s president Larry Arnn headed up former President Trump's 1776 commission and produced the 1776 report. A document that was fully intended by Arnn and others on the committee to be used as learning material in schools. In addition to the report being rife with historical accuracy, large chunks of the document were found to be self-plagiarized by its contributors without citation. That’s not really a big deal but it wasn’t that long ago that conservatives were defending Rand Paul, Ben Carson, and Melania Trump from accurate accusations of plagiarism.
And of course, we are now finding out that Bill Ackman’s wife Neri Oxman may have done some serious plagiarizing of her own.
The interesting thing isn't that Claudine Gay committed plagiarism, it’s why Rufo decided to look into plagiarism on Gay’s behalf in the first place. This is pure conjecture on my part, but I find it quite interesting that in the month or so before Gay’s plagiarism scandal broke, the popular leftist YouTuber H.Bomberguy released a nearly 4-hour video detailing instances of blatant plagiarism by other video essayists. Since its release the piece has been a consistent point of discourse within the online left.
Chris Rufo’s secret sauce in his recipe for upending social progress and restoring a traditional cultural hierarchy is his penchant for appropriating the language and discourse of movement liberalism and leftist populism for conservative regressive ends. Remember how grooming went from a term describing a tactic of sexual predators to a term describing the mere existence of queer people in public spaces? Or how CRT went from an obscure legal theory about racial inequities in the justice system to a catchall for everything that makes white people feel bad.
How about the word “woke”?
I would not be surprised at all if the impetus for Rufo looking into plagiarism to discredit Gay was the ongoing conversation within the online left about successful creators stealing the work of others. This is kind of an important thing to understand about how the conservative outrage machine operates.
Race to despair
I won't sit here and tell you that race played no factor in how all this went down. I think it's reasonable to assume that if one were to take a fine tooth comb to every notable academic’s work product, as Bill Ackman is now threatening to do in light of the accusations against his wife, you could find many other instances of insufficient citation or dubious claims about data (looking at you Murray and Pinker). Gay’s plagiarism isn’t just a reason for her to step down as president of Harvard, it's confirmation to racists that Black people aren’t earning their positions of power on merit but rather institutional commitments to the appearance of diversity. The simple fact that conservatives will view Gay’s problematic academic work as emblematic of a cultural rot and will ignore any and all indiscretions committed by their fellow right-wingers is important to take note of.
The problem with Phillips' take is that while maybe a white man could survive a plagiarism scandal (and go on to be President of the whole country), Hannah Nicole Jones’s 1619 project is still supported by the New York Times and the white liberal establishment despite its’ taking liberties with the historical record. Phillips mentions Jones’ contentious request for tenure at UNC (which she was ultimately granted and turned down) and brushes off the substantive critiques of her work just as conservatives brushed off the plagiarism and historical accuracy of the 1776 report.
Gay, along with Magill and Kornbluth, represent a conservative enemy that is quite frankly bigger than race. Gay wasn’t just a Black woman at the head of Harvard. She was a liberal Black woman whose scholarship was primarily concerned with racial justice and inequity. She chose careful discretion when asked to condemn student activists for Palestine instead of buying into the efforts to demonize them without nuance or context. The war against her was not a war against Black women, but a war against any left-of-center presence influencing the minds of young people.
But Phillips leaves out all the important context we just covered. A more useful thing to do would be to try and understand the specifics of the right-wing outrage machine and attempt to counteract it with a political formation built on solidarity with not just Black women in positions of power but also women in general, and Palestinian activists, and academics rightfully concerned about a new wave of McCarthyism (made possible in part by liberals zeal to remove odious right-wing figures from the public square and the age of cancel culture). But he’s not interested in any of that because this piece isn’t a call to action. It’s an appeal to the comforting nihilism of pessimism.
Afro-Pessimism can be described as a framework of analysis for American political economy that is centered around race. It’s a subset of critical race theory and has a substantial base of academic scholarship, drawing from the work of people like Franz Fanon and Dereck Bell. The defining idea of Afro-Pessimism is the concept of ontological Blackness. The idea that Blackness is not just a shared culture between peoples of African descent but a permanent identity that has been bonded to Black people through the institution of slavery. This identity has marked Black people as existentially inferior and worthy of perpetual exclusion. Most important to how this idea filters through the public discourse, is the notion that only Black people have this negative cultural distinction.
Afro-pessimism has a certain appeal to the Black Bourgeoisie; it explains why despite consistently proving the capability of Black people to exist and thrive within traditional American meritocratic systems, racism still persists. But it provides this explanation without meaningfully challenging the structure of those systems. Black people were able to prove their worthiness through those systems in the first place, so we shouldn’t question them. And we sure as shit shouldn’t question if a person like Oprah deserves to be a billionaire. After all, she didn’t become a billionaire for herself….she did it for the culture.
It also frames Black people as the main character of history. Much in the same way that reactionary conservatives view white Westerners as the main characters of history. The problems that other people face are either exaggerated and illegitimate or the potential solutions to those problems are seen as coming at the detriment of Black people. Because everything non-Black is to the detriment of Black people.
Are there people who were pissed at the idea of a Black woman (or any woman) rocketing to the highest heights of academia? Of that, there is no doubt. But to put the focus squarely on her, her prestigious career and precipitous downfall at the hands of an open grifter like Chris Rufo is not only unhelpful for understanding the vital contours of these current culture wars, but it's also to resign oneself to hopelessness as Phillips does at the end of his piece.
“If you made it to the end of this column expecting me to have an answer for how things need to change in academia and sports, or what the Black people at Harvard should do — I don’t have one for you. But, if you’ve made it to the end of this column and have a better understanding of how these things work and are all connected — then I’ve done my job.”
Except he didn’t really provide a useful understanding. This piece isn’t a cogent analysis of how race helps to drive a conservative grievance complex that is racking up wins against a creaky coalition of liberal meritocracy-loving wonks, student activists, and a marginalized/disorganized left, it's just cope. He uncritically defended the credentials of Black elites like Gay and Hannah Nicole Jones, without really dealing with any substantive critiques of their work. Thus leaving an opening for conservatives to dismiss racism as little more than an excuse for lazy Black people to get more than they’ve earned in the name of diversity.
He doesn’t have an answer, not because there isn’t one, but because the only solution he ever had for the project of Black liberation was uncritical representation. And when Black people start losing their purchase in spaces of power, there is nothing else to fall back on. There's no mass politics to appeal to that doesn’t primarily involve the veneration of Black elites. There’s no solidarity to be had with anyone else who might similarly oppose the efforts of Rufo and Ackman.
What we are left with is a pissing match between two sets of nerds over their academic merit badges. After the dust settles no Jewish or Arab kids on college campuses will be made safer, there will be no meaningful improvement in the material and social conditions of average Black people living in urban enclaves designed by racism, and academic integrity will have been reduced to the newest caliber of ammunition in the culture war.
When H.Bomberguy released his video on plagiarism, there was a palpable sense of schadenfreude for the people he exposed but the most important takeaway was how meritocratic competition driven by the raw number of views instead of the subjective merit of context, created a context where the ideas presented were much less important than figures presenting them. The plagiarists he named were talking about real issues with real substance, even if they didn’t bother to produce any of that substance on their own or give credit to those who did. However, they also believed that personal fame and status for them was the same thing as doing something about the issues they talked about in their fraudulent videos.
This is what Afro-pessimism has left the political project for Black liberation. A collection of Black elites and their fans in the Black PMC who believe their status is the same thing as meaningful political action, or worse that their status is the only meaningful political action. And so the chief concern of a project built around venerating the best and brightest feels the need to defend these elites from any criticism, whether justified or blatantly racist.
As Phillips makes clear, this is not only demoralizing, it's also demobilizing. And it's just what the reactionary right wants to hear. The thing that the reactionary right doesn’t want to hear:
Solidarity Forever.
Excellent writing as always. I think there's a deeper issue in that Elites will tolerate marginalized folks until a sacred cow like academia is damaged. Then the toleration ends abruptly, because that's the source of Elites' status. Without the prestige, the goofy ideas would be unable to justify themselves. We just watched a leftist institution bare their actions in spite of their proclaimed rhetoric, and making it quite clear who owns the house and who is just a guest living there...
i'm not sure how successfully i made my way through this essay packed with theories and critiques of them from multiple directions. but what i draw from it most powerfully is what you reiterate at the very end: it's not only the reactionary right who don't want to hear "solidarity forever", others who frame the obstacles to black success in limiting ways like afro pessimism also fail to broaden the lens enough to see the ultimate need for all of us to focus on the severe dangers that unchecked capitalism has exposed us to, meaning the way forward must include focusing on the root of that problem. (very long sentence.) not denying racism, and not reifying it as permanent.