Surf. This is probably the word that best describes the first media storm to rock the United States in 2024. Claudine Gay, the first black woman to become president of Harvard University, was forced to resign. It must also be said that by leaving his position after having held it for only six months, Gay also broke the record for the shortest presidency in the nearly 400-year history of the university. Could there be a link between the two “achievements”?
To ask the question is to understand why the term “undertow” has become established. Indeed, the conservative right has long been against what it believes to be an imposition of “EDI” (equity, diversity, inclusion) ideology and “wokism” on American campuses. Yet in a university system that is unaffordable for the majority of the population, and where many places are reserved for the children of graduates and donors, evidence of the racial and class homogeneity of the students and faculty of the Ivy League is a no-brainer.
Some scholarship programs targeting underrepresented groups on campus have been created in recent decades to correct some of the strong systemic selection bias toward America’s traditional elites. But for the American right, the pill never passed. We began to accuse some black students and professors of having been hired for their skin color and not for their skills… while refusing, of course, to name the role of whiteness and class privilege in the mode dominant selection. Basically, to see positive discrimination (“ affirmative action “) as a departure from meritocracy, we must live in the sweet illusion, easily refutable, that meritocracy exists.
Last June, the American Supreme Court, now controlled by a Republican majority, handed down a judgment which greatly weakens all university admission programs which attempted to correct the biases of the system by taking into account the racial origins of candidates, in particular. It was a few days after this shocking decision that Claudine Gay took office as president of Harvard University. The political climate surrounding his appointment could not be more tense. Or at least, that’s what we believed, until the attack on October 7 in Israel and the rain of bombs (largely American) that Netanyahu has been dropping on the Gaza Strip since.
Gay was caught in the vice, like many university leaders since the fall. On the one hand, she disappointed a good number of pro-Palestinian voices who would have liked her to do more to protect their speeches on the Harvard campus. On the other, she was accused of anti-Semitism when she was not sufficiently aligned with what the pro-Israeli right would have wanted from her leadership. Republican activists took advantage of the moment of tension to make Gay a symbol of “diversity drift” and attack her reputation as a researcher. Even if Gay and Harvard University wanted to defend themselves against accusations of plagiarism, the conservative right had already made Gay’s “case” such a “hot” affair, politically and media-speaking, that the situation had become untenable.
In mid-January, media reported that Jonatan Pallesen, the Danish researcher who had cast doubt on Claudine Gay’s research methods, had authored several works in collaboration with a group of academics who promote the eugenics and scientific racism. It was Pallesen who was mainly cited by Republican organizers who sought to discredit the Harvard president. The links of complicity between scientific racists, people who want to “put” black women “in their place” and critics of the “diversity ideology”, which would have taken “control” of American campuses.
If I return to Claudine Gay on this first day of Black History Month, it is because the affair allows us to put our finger on a set of phenomena which characterizes the state of the situation, both in Canada and abroad. in the United States, almost four years after the video of the death of George Floyd went around the world.
First, post-George Floyd reforms have largely focused on efforts to increase the representation and inclusion of a few high-profile faces in traditional places of power or privilege.
On the one hand, these visible changes have allowed institutions to appear on the “right side of history”, without addressing the roots of systemic inequalities that affect populations of African descent. In other words, there are a few more black professionals in decision-making places than before, but there are no fewer young black people from disadvantaged neighborhoods who are criminalized or incarcerated, no fewer asylum seekers. deported, no less poverty or precariousness. Post-George Floyd reforms primarily benefited people of African descent whose socioeconomic profile most closely matched that of the majority “middle class.” On the other hand, even for black professionals, this inclusion has in many cases come at a heavy price, and the visible roles in which they have been placed expose them to increasingly vicious attacks.
Here in Canada, the federal government has still not presented a reform of the criminal system that would correct anti-black racism in the system, and police forces are better funded and more present in our neighborhoods than ever. That said, there are also black personalities who are increasingly making their way, in often visible roles, in places that until recently were still closed. This visibility, however, also gives rise to its share of attacks here.
Still underrepresented, and still far from policies that would improve the lot of the most precarious among us, we already take up too much space.