Claudia Gay and "First Ones" in an Empire of Lies and Annihilation

[Pictured: Harvard University. Credit: BLOOMBERG]

By Kwaku Aurelien

The January 2nd announcement of Claudine Gay’s resignation from the position of President at Harvard University has caused quite a stir in American society, especially in the context of our current historical moment and the immense pressure under which Gay made her decision. Black Americans of prominence such as Jemele Hill took to social media in the short aftermath of the news coming out to defend Gay’s credentials against those who would label her an “Affirmative Action hire,” someone who made it to their position on the basis of their race rather than on merit. There are also tweets such as the one by Marc Lamont Hill below, reading, “The next president of Harvard University MUST be a Black woman.”

In response, I have a few questions for Professor Hill. For one, after all the publicized scrutiny Claudine Gay was subject to, why should a Black woman, or any Black person for that matter, want to be President of Harvard University? Is it because of the name brand value of Harvard University? How much should that matter to Black people given the hell we just saw one of our own go through in what is supposed to be a position of power? But more importantly, what does a Black woman being President of Harvard University do for Black people, or for the Black student population at Harvard, one member of which wrote in this astounding piece for the Harvard Political Review how they’ve been questioned on how they got into the university, and on how they’ve called for Harvard to stop its commemoration of slave owners and profiteers.

Malcolm X is famous for saying, “The White man will try to satisfy us with symbolic victories rather than economic equity and real justice.” My question to Marc Lamont Hill is, will a Black woman being the President of Harvard guarantee real justice for its Black students by making it more inclusive and benevolent towards them, or will that Black woman be nothing more than a symbol? 

The below clip is from a 1992 lecture delivered at Florida International University by Kwame Ture. If you don’t know him by that name, you may know him by his original name, Stokely Carmichael. In the clip, Ture — a member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and Black Panther Party, a founder of the Lowndes County Freedom Organization (LCFO) during the Civil Rights Movement, and a member of the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party (A-APRP) upon moving to Africa — points out a gross contradiction within the Black community which persists to this day. Black people, who historically protest and battle against injustice as a mass, advance in American society strictly as individuals. Ture is adamant that if Black people struggle as a mass, the way to measure the progress of Black people in America is to evaluate whether or not the Black masses have advanced.

Advancement is measured qualitatively, not quantitatively; it is measured by the quality of life enjoyed by the Black masses, not by how many Black people do X or do Y. If the masses have not advanced, there is no progress at all. As Ture sees it, the advancement of Black individuals to prestigious jobs and positions has caused wool to be pulled over the eyes of those individuals. They become big-headed, and come to believe that by virtue of them being in their prestigious position, they are advancing the entirety of Black America.

At first listen, you might hear Ture say that there has been no progress for Black people since the 60s and think it’s a gross exaggeration of where we are and how far we’ve come. But what if I told you that, in 2008, PBS released a four-hour series called Unnatural Causes and an accompanying Health Equity Quiz, which showed that Black males in Harlem, New York had a lower life expectancy than males in Bangladesh, one of the poorest nations in the world? Or what if I told you that the median wealth of Black Americans may fall to zero by 2053 assuming current trends continue?

Taking those, among other, things into consideration, was Ture really that far off? Even if he was, the individualist way of thinking he criticizes falls apart under close inspection, and it is a way of thinking we must collectively abandon in this new year. If Claudine Gay’s experience has taught us anything it is that, in 2024, Black people still have no institutional power in America. Gay took office as Harvard’s first Black President on July 1, 2023, and by the second day of 2024, she resigned amidst the internal and external scrutiny levied her way. No Black organization in this country has power comparable to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), which put its own tweet endorsing Gay’s departure from Harvard. With no institutional control, there is no way for Black people in positions of power to effectively own those positions. The position is not a right, but a privilege that can be yanked away at a whim. A good example I can provide is the wave of corporate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives which came about as a direct consequence of the racial justice protests in the summer of 2020. Those initiatives are largely getting rolled back, corporations’ alibi for their withdrawal being that they have come under economic and political pressure from the right wing. I say none of what I say as an indictment of Claudine Gay, but rather as a call to action for my Black readers to demand better alternatives for themselves. Or alternatively, to put our heads together so that we may create better alternatives for ourselves.

There are Black faces in high faces worth condemning; however, therein lies the meaning of the title of this article: “Claudine Gay and ‘First Ones’ in an Empire of Lies & Annihilation.” Amidst a genocide in Gaza armed and funded by the United States government, within that government are the First Black Woman Vice President; the First Black Secretary of Defense, a Raytheon board member supposed to have been recused from the company for four years; and the First Black White House Press Secretary.

Palestinians, who have demonstrated solidarity with Black Americans against police violence on numerous occasions amidst their ethnic cleansing, had to listen to Linda Thomas-Greenfield, a Black woman and President Biden’s Ambassador to the United Nations, say that Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions has no place at the UN, and more recently to veto a UN resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza with an unconditional release of all hostages on behalf of the United Empire. They have had to watch Karine Jean-Pierre attack Benjamin Netanyahu and AIPAC when it was convenient only to now be the one of the most visible spokespeople for an administration whose belligerence against them is finally making Americans pay attention to their plight.

It behooves us to care about the Palestinians’ plight, because the violence visited on them comes back to do us harm here at home. Black activists in Atlanta against the construction of “Cop City” have for years highlighted the relationship between the Atlanta Police Foundation and the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) program. GILEE is a policing exchange allowing for training between various sects of Georgia police and the IDF. One of the grosser tactics the IDF has exchanged with Georgia police under GILEE is firearm “racking.” To inspire fear, Israeli officers will draw the slide on their gun all the way back and then quickly release to send off a misfired round. This is what is being taught to Georgia officers, and you don’t have to be woke to know that Georgia’s Black residents are the ones who are going to be harassed the most with this behavior. Atlanta’s mayor, Andre Dickens, is a Black man, who identified as a progressive in the 2021 mayoral election, but who now pushes Cop City forward despite the sheer opposition to it from Weelaunee Forest communities, which are predominantly Black and/or low-income.

I tend to agree with the tweet below. The summer of 2020, which should have been an inflection point in this country’s history, became an opportunity upon which many Black people, middle class Black people especially, capitalized. “Black excellence,” which should have been a meaningful phrase illustrating the very best qualities of the Black community, became reason for Black individuals to perform acts they would nominally criticize White people for doing. These types will say that Black death has become commodified, and in the same vein become profiteers themselves.

“Black excellence” has become an effective tool in alienating Black individuals from the larger Black community. Take Claudine Gay; her role as university president effectively alienated her from the Black student population, members of which felt as though their right to free speech was unprotected and that they were easy targets of doxxing for their pro-Palestine advocacy. “Black excellence” has also made it exceedingly difficult for bourgeois Black folk to empathize with the plight of the Black poor and working class because they have developed opposing class interests and are unable or unwilling to put themselves in the shoes of those who don’t have what they have, and who bear the biggest burden of racism. I say this as a member of the Black middle class, mind you.

Too many of us have been or are all too eager to become Buffalo Soldiers for Empire, and we need to be called on it. Because if we intend on demonstrating true solidarity with Palestine, Congo, Sudan, Haiti and elsewhere, as so many are now claiming to do in their Instagram stories, it starts with us scrutinizing the role of Black faces in high places in perpetuating American imperial crimes.

We must acknowledge that our freedom fighters – which include names like Kwame Ture, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Huey P. Newton, Ida B. Wells, Ella Baker, Angela Davis, and Assata Shakur – never wanted this for us. These individuals opposed imperialism not only on the grounds that our struggle is interconnected with those the world over, but also on the grounds that making war is morally reprehensible. They understood that humanity is indivisible, and that one segment of humanity being discriminated against automatically diminished the rest. They fought to elevate us, so that we could elevate humanity. Proof of which, in his last book, Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? (1967), Martin Luther King stated, “The wealthy nations of the world must promptly initiate a massive, sustained Marshall Plan for Asia, Africa and South America. If they would allocate just 2 percent of their gross national product annually for a period of ten or twenty years for the development of the underdeveloped nations, mankind would go a long way toward conquering the ancient enemy, poverty.” This would represent a constructive use of the United States’ vast resources, and it is indicative of the type of work we should be fighting for in the modern day. It is up to us now to follow the path our ancestors laid out for us, but we can only do it by honoring what they truly stood for, rather than just paying lip service to it.

We have to have the courage to speak truth to power, without regard for the consequences we think it may have in our social and professional lives. After what just happened to Dr. Claudine Gay, President of Harvard University, what excuse do any of us have to be afraid?

Kwaku Aurelien is a student at UConn School of Law and an intern for Friends of the Congo (@congofriends on Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and Facebook), a Washington D.C. based advocacy organization for the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

Frantz Fanon: A Personal Tribute to the Philosopher of the Colossal Mass

By Alieu Bah

Originally published at Red Voice.

"The colonized intellectual you so much detest has come to become the so-called guardian of your name. I hope you come into the whirlwind and destroy that myth... But in the end, I guess that’s our battle to fight."

The wretched of the earth, the damned of humanity are still here. Still clamoring, still caught in a thousand many battles with themselves and the world built to keep them in their place. Their fate signed, sealed, and packaged for the consumption of the rich and wealthy few of the earth — buffets where the flesh, blood and tears of the poor are served to a greedy, barbaric, capitalist horde are even more sumptuous. Their feasting is the stuff of legend and their belch a recognition of a satisfied bunch of heartless thieves who rejoice more in their heist than any sort of remorse or regret thereof. The proverbial cocktail party list that was supposed to be changed at the dawn of decolonization remains the same even as it is inherited and one family name supplanted for another in a vicious circle of inheritance.

(Un)fortunately your book ‘The Wretched of the Earth’ is still relevant to us. It was supposed to be an artifact of history, forever to rest in the museums of liberated territories. But fact is, it remains this living, breathing, painful reminder to us the colonized of the earth. We still study it because it’s more relevant than ever in this colonial continuity. From the favelas of Brazil, the hoodlands of America, the jungles of Chiapas, from the townships of Johannesburg to the slums of Nairobi, this masterpiece continues to shine in the eyes of a new generation whose parents were sold nothing but dreams.

The shantytown, the medinas, the slums of the world still persist. The compartmentalization of the world continues unabated. However, the divide gets deeper and more cancerous, the line, the border isn’t in the same town or neighborhood anymore, but between the geography of the oppressed — the third world — and the center of the oppressor, the colonist. With the ever-increasing globalized configuration of capital, the choke hold of a staggering market to the expansion of “soft” imperialism in the form of intergovernmental organizations and NGOs from the colonizer, the metropolis has exceeded all expectations of a shared analysis between our generations; the chasm deepened as Hannibal crossed the alps. It all has gotten deeper since you've succumbed to the white claws of death in that hospital in Maryland. The rich neighborhood and the slums today are mostly populated by the same faces, the same race of men and women. When I was in Nairobi last year, it reminded me so much of your analysis on the divided, schizophrenic colonial society.

In more ways than one it’s as if your take was about the neocolonial state in those illuminating first chapters of The Wretched of the Earth. The naked violence of it and the wanton disregard for human life makes you a prophet in this secular tradition of progressive politics we share. But more searing and penetrating of your analysis was the scholar and intellectual who comes home from the west. They’re here after all this time, still concerned about particulars and false western moralisms. They do all kinds of gymnastics with the minds of the masses to divert them from the struggle for land, bread, and water.

They are being found out, though. Young and old progressive Africans have started studying and propagating your works and see their (colonized intellectuals') likeness once again. The objective conditions are also giving rise to a newer, more badass context that defies the pull and gravity of bourgeois intellection grown from those barren western soils. These new rebels, ghetto-grown intellectuals, unknown revolutionaries, are at once denouncing these puppets and concretely building again the old-but-known mass organizational model that led to our liberation in times gone by from the clutches of classic colonialism.

Your name, though, continues to raise colonial anxiety. It continues to sound like metal dropping on the silence and soothing sounds of the corporate world. From Palestine to Panama, it continues to liberate, to agitate, even, as it brings home sanity to a lost generation. Your righteous ghost keeps coming back to haunt the Towers of Babel. Even after all this time! It reminds one of the old saying that wickedness tarries but a little while, but the works of the righteous lives on forevermore. Your lives and afterlives have clearly shown the truth and precision of that good old saying. Year after year, you resurface in the most unlikeliest of places, but unbeknownst to bourgeois historians, so long as oppression exists and there is a demand for the objective material conditions to change, you, the philosopher of the colossal mass, will show face, heart, and mind, and guide the movement even from the grave.

But there is trouble now. Your name and your work continues to be appropriated by academe. You’ve become a career for the well-to-do, the ones who erase. They have complicated your legacy. The colonized intellectual you so much detest has come to become the so-called guardian of your name. I hope you come into the whirlwind and destroy that myth. I hope you come into the thunder, into the tsunami, into the catalytic force of nature. But in the end, I guess that’s our battle to fight. To honor your name by bringing it home to the oppressed and the wretched of the earth.

There is so much to enrich this letter with, but so little time and space. But we who inherited the disinherited, we who took the pledge to raise a billion-strong army, we who know liberation and freedom is a birthright, we who want to end the compartmentalization of the world — the Manichaeism of the land — we are here, in our many forms, subjectively and objectively honoring the call to “...shake off the great mantle of night which has enveloped us, and reach for the light. The new day which is dawning must find us determined, enlightened and resolute. We must abandon our dreams and say farewell to our old beliefs and former friendships. Let us not lose time in useless laments or sickening mimicry.”

Being Queer: Personal Reflections on Identity, Gender, and Relationships

By Marina Rose Martinez

The first time I had sex with my now husband, I told him roughly three things:

1. I am not really a girl, so don't expect me to act like one and don't treat me like one.

2. Don't ever touch my throat.

3. If we're going to fuck, I have to be in charge.

Actually, what I really said was something along the lines of "I don't want to be a man, but I really don't act like a woman, and that bothers most people eventually. It will probably bother you eventually. I'm never going to change." Genderqueer was barely even a Live Journal tag.

He told me he didn't think there were really women in the world like me, and that he'd wished for me. I told him that the qualities that attracted me to him were his gentleness, his shyness, and his artistic nature. I liked that he sewed and cooked, that he liked cute things, and that he could be silly. He liked that I was tough and loud, and that I could tell people to fuck off as easily as I could tell them how amazing they were. I didn't say this at the time, but I had wished for him, too.

I've written about this a dozen times, but in my house growing up there were two genders: abuser and victim. Men did what they wanted to your body so that you could do what you wanted with their money. Or drugs. Or property in general. It's a raw deal when you get older and realize that women can get jobs and have money of our own. It's an especially raw deal when you look back on a childhood of trading punches for shelter and realize that you were the only one getting hit while older women told you this was woman's lot.

Although I do remember the time my mom came home covered in blood. Head to toe. She was matted with it. She took a shower and then she left, pinkish white drops lazily drying on the plastic shower walls the only evidence she was even there.

But what does this have to do with me being queer? I know, right? That's what I thought. Of course I didn't identify with femaleness. Of course I'd rather act like a dude; I got the shit kicked out of me for being a little girl. Or that's what they said. But I know a ton of people who got their asses kicked for being girls. That didn't stop them at all.

I've never felt like a girl. What does a girl feel like when her mom's boyfriend is trying to choke her to death? What does a girl feel like when a random junky is running his finger up and down the back of her sun dress telling her he thinks her "peach fuzz" is sexy? What does a girl feel like when she wakes up with her grandpa licking her mouth in the middle of the night?

I've always had other priorities, survival being chief among them. Recovery following quick on the heels of survival. One of the smartest decisions I ever made was to keep going to 12 step meetings even after my mom dropped out. As a young atheist, I was told that "a God of my understanding" could be anything. I met people with AA chips as their gods. Trees, stuffed toys, philosophical concepts, sentences in books, laws of mechanics and everything in between. My own personal god is currently gravity coupled with a vague sense of not-knowing things. I think it's my longest lasting god and I really like this one.

When you tell a child, desperate and alone in the world, without perspective, without prospects; who is conditioned toward abuse, who has been used and gas-lit her entire life that God can be anything, you also tell her that she can be anything. I could be a me of my own understanding. When you live with abusers who are also mentally ill or addicted to something the only way to know the truth is to get quiet and go deep inside yourself for it. Addicts will tell you that this is your fault. They will tell you that you actually like what they do (to you, with you, without you, whatever.)

One time my mom grabbed me by the neck, shoved me against the wall and screamed "STOP HURTING ME!" Which is a great tactic, because instead of fighting back, I stopped to think about the last 30 minutes of our screaming match in order to make sure that I hadn't actually touched her at all (I hadn't). There's no such thing as the truth in a drug addict's home.

Nobody in the meeting tried to tell me what my problem was. First of all, we all knew. Second of all, that was mine to search, and work through and own. I think if I had gone to a therapist at that time, I would have been told a lot about what I looked like. A narcissistic hypomanic gender dysphoric codependent with attention deficit disorder and anorexia who practices self-harm and suffers from PTSD.

I did assume that as I got older, worked through some shit and matured in general, I would grow more comfortable or more natural in my femaleness. I didn't really want to. I didn't want to develop a sense of compassion for my abusers either, but when I did, it opened the world to me.

My resentment was so much a part of who I was that it felt like the only thing holding me up most days. Imagine my surprise when I finally saw my parents as children themselves, with abusive parents of their own. Whose resentments against their parents lead to a life so unexamined that they turned into abusers despite their best efforts not to. It was the resentment that had grown in them like an abscess, festering under the surface until it exploded in violence and selfishness and led them to become the one thing they said they would never be.

Resentment was more a part of me than my gender has ever been. Gender to me is just a vague sense of not speaking the same language as everyone else, but it's one of the few aspects of my personality I have loved and enjoyed for most of my life, even when I wasn't really sure how.

My grandmother used to say "You always have to be different." I think she was trying to admonish me, but it also felt like a tacit acknowledgement. Maybe I am different enough. Maybe if I have to be different, I won't be capable of getting the same results as everybody else.

My trans friends from high school and college didn't seem to have my experience. Gender was a truth they told and were imprisoned for. Gender was a trauma event that they survived. A girl tortured with boyhood, a boy forced into girlhood. I never felt like that. I still don't.

My wedding was a revelation in this regard. When we were still in college, I told my boyfriend (now husband), "you know we're queer, right?" He disagreed. It was a conversation that went on between us for a while. Liking to sew doesn't make a man queer. Obviously.

But doesn't it seem queer that I have no relationship to being a woman?

Why would you? The patriarchy makes womanhood a horrible fate.

Besides, we were graduating into the largest financial shitstorm in eighty years. Telling people your pronouns are zie and zier at that time was mostly a great way to never be able to pay your rent or your student loans. Singular 'they' was still reserved for sentences like 'someone left their umbrella in the lobby.' So we are not queer. We are feminists.

But the wedding was different. I've always had a love-hate relationship with weddings. Despite my best attempts to hide it, I'm a total sap. I love love. After I realized that not every marriage was an abusive farce, not every wedding a sales transaction, I felt free to enjoy the sentiment. And I do. But I never wanted to get married myself. It felt awkward to me. I could never see myself as a bride much less a wife. I still don't really get the whole wife thing. And don't act like there isn't a thing.

I am not the female half of this binary gender unit. Before we got married we were just us. Ben and Marina. One and the other.

After we announced our engagement, my inbox flooded with unsolicited advice, suggestions, and offers of help. I was dumbfounded. What about me and our long years of association would make my friends think I wanted to talk about wedding planning? Once again, it was like they were speaking a different language. All of a sudden my experience of myself and my partnership was being held into the light of gendered expectations and we were failing to deliver.

I was content in my decision to get married, it was a good time and a good plan based on our financial situation and our upcoming house purchase. It fit well in our 5-year plan to start the adoption process. I did not and still do not understand why that obligates me to get excited about flowers, a thing I have never done.

Usually when I'm not getting a gendered thing, it's just one thing. The day moves on and so do I. People who have gendered expectations of me get frustrated over time, but there's not that many of them around now that I'm an adult and can choose my own company.

Getting married was about six months of things I absolutely did not understand. People got frustrated with me not understanding, and I then misunderstood their frustration. One person finally asked me, exasperated, "why are you getting married if you don't want to?" Why does me not caring about flowers and dresses have anything to do with whether or not I want to move forward in my life plans with my partner?

But that stuff does matter to many smart women who are equally as feminist as I am. Does not going crazy for flowers or caring about wedding dresses make a person queer? No. But I think it is a symptom of what makes me queer. It's not that I have no relationship to dresses or flowers, I like them both. It's that there is some "female language" I do not speak and cannot learn.

Gender is a construct, but these arbitrary gender roles appeal to people because they communicate with a true part of the human experience as a man or a women. That doesn't happen for me. Up until recently, I didn't think it happened for anyone. I really believed that gender was completely performative; that, man or woman, you were trained for your role and how well you performed it had to do with how thorough your training was. Even as I had transgender friends and loved ones for whom that was obviously not true. I trusted their experience to be real and valid; I just considered it to be one of life's paradoxes.

Even after that, I didn't see much of a reason to be explicit in the way my experience of gender feels different from what I'm taught I should be feeling. Compared to my feelings as a trauma survivor, as a woman in poverty, as a Latinx person, a fat person, it didn't feel relevant. It was the least interesting thing about me.

This is easier now because times have changed. But it's also more necessary now because the people in power have not. President Trump initiated his plan to ban transgender people from the armed services. In Nazi controlled Europe, one of the first laws the Nazis passed was to ban Jews and the other groups they would go on to murder from civil service, like the military.

Up to this point it wasn't a hardship to let people see my clothes and my partner and make assumptions that I was at least part of their tribe in that way. It made more sense to be a straight woman who advocated for gay and trans rights and who tried to open the door for my brothers and sisters whenever possible. There was no tortured part of me, I never felt closeted. I did feel like I wasn't telling the whole truth when I identified as straight, as a woman, but I had larger points to make and getting into the weeds about gender felt unnecessary at the time.

Most people really and truly don't give a shit what your gender feelings are. They want to know if you can do the job they hire you to do, if you can pick up the phone when they need to talk to you, if you'll keep the noise down after 10pm.

They consider it to be none of their business, and they will continue to think of it as none of their business when you are discriminated against and attacked, and when you are dead they will think it was none of their business who killed you. Because they have nothing to do with that sort of thing. Certainly the thing that killed you has nothing to do with "regular people" like them.

So people don't ask. They assume you are like them, just like I assumed everyone else was like me, and they go on with their day. That's all well and good when things are peaceful, when progress is steady and predictable, and when there is such a thing as a good queer. Because a good queer can open the door for everyone else. But this is different. The president's campaign of hate is against all of us humans. Some of us just don't realize it yet.

It's time to be explicit. Not only is there language when there wasn't before, there's knowledge when there wasn't before and I have leverage I didn't have before. I am not straight, I am not a woman. I am not a man. If there is a word for me, it would be agender or genderqueer. Some people use the term non-binary, which I find to be weird since all of gender, being on a spectrum, is inherently non-binary.

Anyone who knows me will probably think this is not news. You won't be seeing any changes in my behavior. I'll continue to act the way I've always acted. I will continue to be completely unfazed by whichever pronoun you refer to me with (they're all equally meaningless as far as I'm concerned) and I will continue to be completely annoyed by the unnecessary gendering of agender things like #girlboss and guy-liner.

This was originally published at the author's blog .

The Hampton Institut