Joe Concha
The Messenger, Jan. 4, 2024
“instead of accepting responsibility, Gay made her exit about the color of her skin.”
MSNBC’s Joy Reid views the resignation of Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, as a case of racism and sexism. “There is this sort of open war on Black progress, Black history,” Reid said, and Gay “is now the latest casualty of that. … Why are these elite colleges capitulating to it and essentially making it so uncomfortable for these women leaders that they have to step down to be replaced by white men?”
Reid is not alone. Her take is just one of many examples of some media members portraying Gay as a victim of racism, while mostly dismissing her alleged acts of plagiarism as simply “copying other people’s writings without attribution” — which is,literally, plagiarism.
Throw into all that the hilarious narrative of how her resignation represents a “victory” for Republicans and their “new conservative weapon” of plagiarism — whatever that means — and you have the perfect story line for our perpetually polarized news cycle of the 21st century.
Even the BBC got into the act of attempting to defend Gay by arguing that her resignation was based on ideological grounds. “Gay’s resignation as president of Harvard University is being celebrated as a high-profile victory by conservatives who have objected to her on ideological grounds since shortly after she took the job in July 2023,” the BBC’s report reads.
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