From Plagiarism to Gaza: Khalil Gibran Muhammad on How a GOP Campaign Ousted Harvard’s Claudine Gay
quote:
KHALIL GIBRAN MUHAMMAD: OK. Well, let me start with the fact that Harvard is the oldest, wealthiest, most prestigious university in this country and globally. So, for almost 400 years, Harvard has systematically excluded white women and people of color, by and large, from its hallowed corridors, from entering its gates. That’s just an absolute fact, a fact that the university, under the previous president, Larry Bacow, admitted to in a report called the Harvard Legacy of Slavery report, that was issued just over a year ago, a report that points out precisely how not only did the university exclude people of color from getting an education, but in fact collected the bodies of Indigenous people and enslaved people for scientific research, and led, into the 20th century, calls for scientific racism that helped to construct the racial hierarchies that we still live with in this country today. That’s Harvard’s own history as a leader.
So the very university that finally arrived at a moment where it not only reckoned with its own history, but also recognized the talent is universal and that the best of us actually have the ability to move this country and world forward, in a time when the planet is literally on fire and most people who will suffer most from that will be people of color, that is the context that brought Claudine Gay to the presidency. And she was ably and excellently qualified for that role. She had proven herself in previous administrative roles as a dean of the largest school on Harvard’s campus.
So, when we put that in context, the affirmative action decision last June was the first victory for the conservative right in this country to dismantle the very possibility that people like Claudine Gay would have the qualifications, the Harvard and Stanford degrees, necessary to take on such positions. And so, within that political context, the attack on affirmative action is one example of what’s been going on, which is 30 years old, a battle. But additionally, and more proximate to this moment, people like Christopher Rufo in late 2020, in response to George Floyd’s killing, have initiated an effort, what we would call a whitelash or a backlash, forms of misinformation to essentially define a body of knowledge known as critical race theory, that is the intellectual basis for understanding how systemic and structural racism work, as anti-American, as Marxist, as a threat to American civilization. And that led to 24 states criminalizing the teaching of history in all its truth about race, about racism, about sex, about gender. That led to the banning of DEI in places like Florida and, to some degree, in Texas.
And what we saw happen here with this campaign against Claudine Gay, where plagiarism became the pretext, kind of like a Black motorist with tinted windows being stopped only to look for drugs so that they could be incarcerated as part of a war on Black people during mass incarceration, that is the context where Christopher Rufo, who initiated the critical race theory, anti-woke campaign, has now culminated in yet another victory with taking down Claudine Gay over a very, very minor offense within academic context......
