Eli Steele
Newsweek, Jan. 3, 2024
“How desperate were we for racial innocence? So desperate that we betrayed the American principles that enabled countless blacks to reach a place in life that was an improvement upon the world they were born into!”
After weeks of speculation about whether Harvard University’s president, Claudine Gay, would be forced to resign amid a plagiarism and antisemitism scandal, Gay announced that she was stepping down. In her resignation letter, Gay spoke of “personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus,” and made no mention of her failure to properly address antisemitism or the never-ending allegations of plagiarism against her rather limited record of scholarship.
Gay, who exploited race to reach the pinnacle of Harvard, chose to blame racism on her way out the door.
When I first learned of Gay’s fate, I thought back to one of the earliest lessons of my youth. The women and men that visited my parents at our Bay Area home always told me to never use race as an excuse. They said that the same attitude went for the profound hearing loss that I was born with. These adults had grown up under segregation and suffered grievous human indignities. They would not have been wrong in the eyes of many to blame racism for any unfair obstacles placed in their paths.
Yet my black elders knew on an instinctual level that to give in to race and racism was to give immutable characteristics power over individual identity and character. As one of my elders told me, “I’m not the n****r they call me. That’s all them.” They knew that giving in, identifying with the race that the racist saw, would have led them into the trap of endless victimization. And it is to their credit that these doctors, dentists, professors and filmmakers always insisted on finding the path of success somehow.
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