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It’s a striking juxtaposition to celebrate the achievements of Martin Luther King, one of the greatest Americans in history, just weeks after the pitiful collapse of Harvard’s first Black president, Claudine Gay. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is now practically considered the property of conservatives; woke liberals view the idea of judging people by the content of their character, not the color of their skin, as woefully antiquated. Their obsession with skin color makes King more relevant than ever. As we celebrate the progress made by the African American community, it’s worth acknowledging how many of its modern-day luminaries fall short of previous Black leaders’ hopes and dreams.
In 1895, W.E.B. Du Bois became the first Black person to earn a Ph.D. from Harvard. He believed that Black intellectuals would play a central role in uplifting the African American community. In his famous essay, The Talented Tenth, Du Bois argued that the Black community’s educated class was uniquely responsible for asserting moral and intellectual leadership. He wrote: “The Talented Tenth of the Negro race must be made leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their people . . . The Negro race, like all other races, is going to be saved by its exceptional men.” That essay was written in 1903; more than a century later, the most prominent representatives of that educated class epitomize mediocrity and failure.
The most recent case study, of course, is Gay herself. With the shortest tenure in Harvard’s history, she squeezed a remarkable amount of failure into that time. Gay was unable to recognize that calls for Jewish genocide constituted hate speech, although Harvard has punished its professors for far more innocuous comments. She has also permanently stained Harvard’s reputation for academic integrity. Gay conscripted Harvard’s administration into defending her rampant plagiarism, including almost 50 instances across eight of her academic works. The Harvard Corporation justified this as “duplicative language without appropriate attribution”; the elites tell us this is totally different from plagiarism. Why should the public trust any scholarly work from Harvard again? Gay has made it clear that the university tolerates cheating by anyone with the right skin color.
Gay’s shoddy leadership and worse scholarship is just the tip of the iceberg—at least she’s faced some accountability1. Imagine publishing a work of journalism with numerous, obvious historical inaccuracies and winning a Pulitzer for it. I’m referring here, of course, to Nikole Hannah-Jones and the 1619 Project.
It is hard to overstate the scholarly failure of this endeavor. Hannah-Jones made the objectively false claim that protecting slavery was one of the primary motivations for the American Revolution. Inconveniently, one of the historians she hired to fact-check the 1619 Project told her otherwise, but who would let facts get in the way of effective propaganda? Hannah-Jones also made the dubious argument that America’s true founding was in 1619, not 1776; later on, she lied and ascribed this claim to her right-wing critics. The 1619 Project has been scathingly reviewed by renowned experts in American slavery and the Civil War, including academics on the left and right. Yet she still received the Pulitzer for her work, despite the reservations of historian Steven Hahn, co-chair of the Pulitzer Prize Board.
Instead of demanding talent from African American intellectuals, the most prestigious institutions in our country are openly celebrating Black mediocrity. Then they act surprised when the house of cards collapses. While Gay and Hannah-Jones are egregious, I believe there’s no greater example of this trend than Ibram X. Kendi.
Kendi became one of America’s most celebrated public intellectuals after George Floyd’s death. His book How to Be an Antiracist topped the New York Times Best Seller list in 2020, and he received a $625,000 MacArthur Genius grant in 2021. Just days after Floyd’s death, he founded the Center for Antiracist Research at Boston University and received millions of dollars in donations, including $10 million from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey. Woke liberals thrilled to his ideas, like an anti-racist constitutional amendment that would make “racist ideas” from public officials unconstitutional. Yes, this would end the 1st amendment, but these are just details! Anyway, would it shock you to find out that Kendi’s center didn’t produce any significant research over three years? And this despite receiving $43 million in funding. In September 2023, Kendi laid off over half his staff, and he received blistering criticism from academics who had worked with the Center for Antiracist Research.
From Du Bois’ idea of the “Talented Tenth” to the age of Gay, Hannah-Jones, and Kendi, there has been a radical shift in the discourse around Black identity. Hannah-Jones was criticized in 2020 for excusing President Biden’s statement on Charlamagne Tha God’s radio show: “[I]f you have a problem figuring out whether you’re for me or for Trump, then you ain’t black.” Hannah-Jones justified this by tweeting: “There is a difference between being politically black and being racially black.” Evidently, skin color isn’t enough to validate a Black person’s racial identity in this day and age. For Hannah-Jones and her class, a person’s Blackness is called into question if they don’t share the right politics. You see the same idea in this infamous statement from congresswoman and “Squad” member Ayanna Pressley: “We don’t need any more black faces that don’t want to be a black voice.”
Martin Luther King and W.E.B. Du Bois obviously cared about Black people being invested in their community’s fight for equality. But whereas Black leaders of previous eras emphasized merit - talent, the content of your character - the 21st century has replaced competence with conformity. Nothing in the academy or our most prestigious intellectual institutions incentivizes Black excellence. Instead, Black intellectuals are called excellent if they cloak their mediocrity in the shiny veneer of racial victimhood.
The funny thing is that all this is deeply racist, in the Kendi sense of the word. According to his philosophy, a phenomenon is racist if it disproportionately harms Black people. And I can’t imagine how else you’d describe this identity-obsessed ideology. Wokeness undermines the moral and intellectual leadership that earlier generations of Black people relied on to fight racial injustice. As a result, it systemically weakens the African American community2.
This toxicity also marginalizes Black scholars who are capable of that kind of leadership. Claudine Gay recognized her own mediocrity clearly enough to target brilliant Black scholars who might have overshadowed her. Take Harvard economist Roland Fryer, who published more in a year than Gay has in her whole career (and without plagiarizing his acknowledgements!). Fryer was accused of sexual harassment, but the charges were tenuous enough that Harvard’s Office for Dispute Resolution didn’t recommend anything more than “educational/counseling outreach.” As Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Gay chose to impose a far more severe punishment—suspending Fryer and revoking many of his academic privileges. It surely didn’t help that Fryer’s research challenged progressive orthodoxies on education and policing; he didn’t seem interested in being a stereotypical “Black voice.”
Gay’s mistreatment of Fryer was more than an exceptional case. She also helped defenestrate Ronald Sullivan, the first Black faculty dean of a house in Harvard’s history. Sullivan received an onslaught of criticism after announcing that he would represent Harvey Weinstein in court. The idea that everyone deserves a competent legal defense is a cornerstone of our justice system, but not for Claudine Gay. She criticized Sullivan in the Harvard Crimson and was involved in Harvard’s decision to terminate him as faculty dean of Winthrop House.
It would be disingenuous to pretend that this regime of incompetence is only enforced by Black intellectuals. Consider the case of Paul Rossi, a former teacher at Grace Church High School in New York. He wanted to teach the works of Glenn Loury to expose his students to a center-right perspective on racial politics. The head of the high school wouldn’t allow it, because he thought students would be triggered to hear these ideas from a Black academic; Rossi was only allowed to assign “mainstream white conservatives” instead. The recently released film American Fiction skewers White liberals like this, who believe that only trauma porn narratives represent “authentic” Blackness. These same dupes were the audience for race-baiting products like Kendi’s children’s books, Antiracist Baby and Goodnight Racism3.
The success of the “not-so-Talented Tenth” serves no purpose other than immediate gratification for woke liberals. They get to feel like they’ve done something for the Black community, even though the “progress” is merely symbolic. This kind of narcissism, from both mediocre Black intellectuals and their guilty White enablers, should have no place in the progressive movement. If racial equality matters to you, then promoting Black excellence should be a top priority. But you can’t do that without valuing excellence itself.
Gay will still be receiving an annual salary of over 800K a year, but let’s leave that aside for the moment.
For a deeper, big-picture take on this argument, I highly recommend John McWhorter’s Woke Racism.