he way Dr Claudine Gay threw Palestine under the bus in this NY Times op-ed piece has my head and heart hurting. 

We give up so much in order to get access to and/or maintain proximity to Empire. 

For context: 

“Yes, I made mistakes. In my initial response to the atrocities of Oct. 7, I should have stated more forcefully what all people of good conscience know: Hummus is a terrorist organization that seeks to eradicate the J__ish state. And at a congressional hearing last month, I fell into a well-laid trap. I neglected to clearly articulate that calls for the genocide of Jewish people are abhorrent and unacceptable and that I would use every tool at my disposal to protect students from that kind of hate.”

This alone is not my issue. Besides the fact that we can and should have nuanced conversations around terrorism vs resistance I’m more disturbed by the fact that Dr Gay very conspicuously never mentions how the whole performance of the inquiry in and of itself was disingenuous and was in fact dressing up the attempts to quash calls for justice and the dismantling of settler colonialism as concerns about antisemitism. In this “admission”, her “mistake”, she concedes. She APOLOGIZES. 

Abeg. Mchew

That there was little concern for the safety of Arab students or the long history of harassment of Black students on these very same campuses. She does not dare question where these inquiries were under white leadership when students mobilized around Islamophobia or anti-blackness. 

She apologizes. 

And while I don’t expect most people to be able to have the spoons and language to concisely extract and flesh out such arguments, Dr Gay does. And the fact she doesn’t and instead spends more word count digging into why she isn’t a plagiarist and defending her scholarship leads me to believe either she just doesn’t want to or whoever edited her op-ed intentionally left it out. 

Either way, a large opportunity was missed. And maybe Dr Gay doesn’t owe us but like come the fuck on sis…they threw you to the wolves. 

Fight the fuck back and call a thing a goddamn thing because we’re never ever going to thrive in them institutions as they stand. Isn’t that the biggest damn lesson after all of this???

Because Baybeeee the Karens and Chads in the comments in the NYTimes feed are missing all the context calling her/you a plagiarist and saying she is a disgrace (to who I would ask them if I cared to argue with motherfuckers who are hellbent on missing the point). It’s from the Use a Black Person as a Scapegoat Handbook and none of us are surprised. I’m sure Dr Gay is not surprised. 

Which then begs the fucking question, sis what the fuck are you apologizing for? Why are you writing your op-ed in racist ass NYTimes who has continually covered this with barely veiled bias? Why are you still trying to have audience with these folks? 

I don’t know if Dr Gay is just trying to save what might be left of her Ivy League academic career or if she really needs/wants acceptance from white Ivy League Academia, it’s probably a little of both. Either way another Black Academic Girlie bites the dust and it seems no matter how many times this plays out we keep fighting to be seen as whole deserving humans in spaces that were built on the continual dehumanization of us. 

And back to my original point. The erasure of Palestine and global imperialism in the name of getting our bag. These degrees, the accolades, our “due”. I am not bing facetious, I am not undermining Black folks especially women wanting to be compensated and respected but I am asking us to interrogate at what cost. Because we’ll chase that shit so hard (and I don’t know if that’s what she’s doing. I’m speaking more broadly, now) that we’ll forget that no matter how obedient, how respectable, how degreed, how monied, how articulate and brilliant we’re always going to take the fall and that our ultimate loyalty should never ever be to these institutions that are the products of systems of oppression but to the greater and collective good. And that good has to be global and transnational.