That the Super-Racist and euphemistically labeled “Conservative” New York Post newspaper would both raveningly and ravishingly take up and deafeningly ramp up the decidedly lame and logically contorted call by Professor John McWhorter, the media-renowned Columbia University linguistics specialist – a remarkable authority on Ebonics or African American Vernacular Dialect, to be certain – for Harvard University’s newly appointed President, Dr. Claudine Gay, to resign her post, merely because the “Head Jews” of mainstream American political culture – my profound apologies to City College of New York’s Professor Leonard Jeffries – and their fawning flock of supplicants and prime beneficiaries were either utterly displeased or implacably disgusted by the perfectly sound, legitimate and academically flawless responses provided by a curiously Sanhedrinized President Gay on perceived on-campus Antisemitic hostility, is all the more to be pitied, roundly despised and unreservedly condemned in toto (See “New York Times Columnist Calls for Harvard President Claudine Gay to Resign: ‘A Tipping Point It Is” New York Post 12/22/23).
Professor McWhorter’s call may very well have been either provoked or inspired purely out of an officious desire to ingratiate himself with his captive audience of readers, students and even some heavyweight colleagues and administrators at the globally renowned New York City-based Ivy League Academy, the same august institutional establishment that this writer affectionately calls the Real University of Harlem, having himself attended and graduated at the very top of his class from nearby City College of the City University of New York (CCNY of CUNY), located scarcely a stone’s throw away, a little over 30 years ago. The plaintiff’s argument conspicuously lacks logical puissance or coherence because it is partly predicated on the sheer number of “academic articles” – approximately a dozen – that her venomous target of obloquy disdainfully claims has been published or produced by Dr. Gay, rather than a critical assessment of the professional or disciplinary and academic utility and/or the qualitative relevance of the same, vis-à-vis the magnitude or the significance of Dr. Gay’s contribution to both her discipline or specialty and contemporary academic knowledge and thought in general.
You see, the mere fact that the critic has published numerous articles and several fairly well-received book-length essays and/or textbooks does not necessarily make Professor McWhorter a better scholar or educator than Dr. Gay. True, it may be strikingly indicative of the fact of the former’s being a more prolific writer and a savvy or a lucky negotiator of the fraught politics of the book-publishing industry, not necessarily a better or a more knowledgeable teacher or lecturer. Plus, we also learn that the appointment of Dr. Gay as Harvard’s President was more heavily tilted towards her presumably sterling caliber as a College Administrator than as a member of Harvard’s Instructional Staff, which is fundamentally what most college presidents are recruited or hired to do, not to sit in the office and compose and publish reams of largely arcane and esoteric or unread and unreadable articles and highly specialized books. Which is also essentially why I find Professor McWhorter’s argument to be embarrassingly jejune and downright infantile, to speak much less about the inescapably preposterous. You see, in a vast institutional establishment like Harvard, there are dozens of faculty specialties or professorial lines or tracks, such research, instruction and administration, to name only the most obvious or conspicuous.
I also do not understand this at once patently mischievous and downright disingenuous assertion that, somehow, not calling for the prompt and the summary resignation of President Gay automatically implies that influential Black figures (whatever the latter terminology means) are making a flagrant special pleading on behalf of the First Black President of America’s oldest and arguably most prestigious tertiary academy that may very well be tantamount to holding the subject of the present debate to a different and, by implication, a much lower set of standards. What, really, could this gratuitous volleying of rancid porcine swill be about? Dear Reader, take the following McWhorter salvo or dig at elite African American community members, for only one striking example: “If it is mobbish to call on Black figures of influence to be held to the standards that others are held to, then we have arrived at a rather mysterious version of antiracism, and just in time for the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday in less than a month.” This sort of racial self-spiting sarcasm is very dangerous, especially knowing even what a 16-year-old Anne Frank perspicuously understood about the unspeakably abject mistreatment of “The Negroes of America,” which civilized and decent European Jews like herself and her people were being immitigably subjected to by the Nazi “Revolutionaries” in the Netherlands, Austria, Germany and elsewhere in Western and Central Europe.
Now, precisely what set of standards is Critic McWhorter talking about here? I suppose our Columbia University egghead is talking about the godforsaken “Black Codes,” which brought us to where we find ourselves presently or what else? Well, I have some really bad news for this half-white-looking and narcissistically Jewish-thinking “Stick-Around Nigger,” who may deliberately choose not to frankly and boldly confront the grim reality on the ground. Which, by the way, is all well and good, because Professor McWhorter is constitutionally and inalienably entitled to the same. Now, what the Honorable and Venerable Professor McWhorter is definitely not entitled to is to either naively and/or cavalierly pretend as if the rest of us bona fide African Americans and “naturalized” African Americans, that is, we relatively recent immigrants of Continental African Descent are, somehow, some pathological fools or clinical idiots sick beyond redemption to recognize what is very obvious to everybody else among our countrymen and women, including even former South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley.
Which is that as a long-enslaved and presently still wantonly exploited and indescribably despised species of humanity, we are still decades and, possibly, even centuries far from “The Mountain Top,” apologies to the Rev-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In the words of the famous and immortalized Nigerian novelist, thinker, essayist and educator, Professor Chinua Achebe, Professor McWhorter may very well have already arrived “On the Mountain Top.” Unfortunately, for the rest of us “Wretched of the Earth,” for the most part, that is, apologies to Dr. Frantz Fanon, those of us Latter-Day “Jigaboos” of Trumpianaland, it is “Yet Morning on Creation Day.”
*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
December 29, 2023
E-mail: [email protected]