Claudine Gay and America’s new class system

Ibram X. Kendi’s “anti-racist” pronouncements are pure grift, but his woke prestige makes them a good place to start in examining Claudine Gay’s belated exit as Harvard’s first black president. In her long-overdue resignation letter Tuesday, Gay played the race card — of course she did — decrying “racial animus” rather than acknowledging her hypocrisy and academic malfeasance. Kendi echoed this on X, formerly known as Twitter, describing her ouster as an “anti-black racist attack” to which a white president would not have been subjected.

The usual parade of race hustlers chimed in. The Rev. Al Sharpton, a career demagogue who once stoked a black riot against Jews in New York, complained that Gay’s long goodbye was “an attack on every black woman in this country who’s put a crack in the glass ceiling.” Princeton’s Cornel West denounced it as “undeniable and despicable” racism. He also took a significant swipe at Jewish donors to Harvard and linked Gay’s supposed persecution to racism against Palestinians. Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), as shameless a race demagogue as Capitol Hill has to offer, said Gay’s denouement was “about racism and intimidation” and the winners were fascists. There was much more such guff from the people you’d expect. But the facts don’t fit the outrage.