The Problem With DEI Is White-Supremacist Perpetration and Perpetuation of Enforced Black Inferiority - Part 5

Between 1996 and 1997, when this writer was hired, initially, as a Temporary English Composition and Literature Instructor at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City, Long Island, or SUNY-Nassau, a soon-to-be a colleague and a good friend by the name of O. Bruni (not his real name) called this author, who had been invited for a job interview and had been wait-listed at least three times - that is, another diplomatic manner of saying that this candidate had not really qualified for the the job opening that he was seeking had, nevertheless, somehow, impressed at least a remarkable number of the College’s Department of English’s Personnel and Budgetary Committee - it was really called and very likely is still called “The Personnel and Budget Committee” or the P & B Committee, although Standard English Grammar Protocol, as many of us had been taught or instructed in both elementary and secondary school, dictated that it be more appropriately called the “Personnel and Budgetary Committee,” instead of the less contextually appropriate use of the noun “Budget,” as was being obviously incongruously used in place of the more appropriate adjectival form of “Budgetary.” But it all did not matter because, after all, wasn’t Yours Truly just another nonentity “Nigger” and an African, to boot, who had been way darn lucky to have been “affirmatively tolerated” by the predominantly Aryan power structure of the College?

Anyway, O. Bruni had called Yours Truly anonymously and absolutely without any prior knowledge or solicitation and spoken passionately one the phone early one morning, shortly after my second or third interview, if memory serves this author accurately, to inform him that, in fact, he had been adjudged as the best qualified among the dozen, or so, candidates who had been selected and been interviewed by the aforesaid Departmental P&B Committee. After he had briefly and rather earnestly introduced himself to be, O. Bruni went on to wax animated about some two years that he had spent in Ghana, my country of birth, with an Al-Shabbat-slain famous Ghanaian poet and scholar in the late 1970s, while this “Whistle Blower,” as he clearly appeared to Yours Truly, was still in secondary school and O. Bruni, a stereotypical “Southern Gentleman,” not necessarily in the pejorative connotation of the term, was in the process of completing his doctoral dissertation at the same State University of New York as the slain Ghanaian poet a couple, or so, years later. And by the way, the slaying of the aforesaid Ghanaian poet by the Al-Shabbat, Somali-originated “terrorist” group, lay at least some 30 years into the future. But that O. Bruni cut a strikingly admirable profile of the proverbial “Southern Gentleman” would become clear to Yours Truly after he and O. Bruni had established their mutual bona fides with one another.

O. Bruni had his doctoral dissertation in some aspects of African and African American History, Culture and Literature, under the tutelage of both the slain Ghanaian poet and later the holder of a multiplicity of diplomatic appointments, and an equally famous African American scholar and literary artist of even more versatility and largely autodidact. But the foregoing narrative is not the real story. Rather, O. Bruni would proceed to angrily and bitterly complain to Yours Truly about the fact that there was one Asian faculty member on the department’s Personnel and Budgetary Committee who appeared to be dead-set against the hiring of Yours Truly and, instead, avidly in favor of having the job slot that O. Bruni was undoubtedly certain belonged to Yours Truly being ceded to one or another countryman or woman of the Asian Representative on the P&B Committee’s nationality or region of ethno-national descent.

Now, I have decided to highlight this aspect of my phone conversation with O. Bruni because oftentimes when we talk about “Affirmative Action Hires,” the spotlight or the target of the barely veiled expression of visceral resentment and withering contempt has almost invariably been focused on Black and African-descended job candidates when, in reality, the focus could easily and more credibly be focused on those heavily accented Southern and Western Asian candidates who, though, may appear to be highly qualified for any particular job on the market, as it were, could barely and/or scarcely acquit themselves creditably by way of rhetorical delivery, as some Ghanaian professionals are wont to characterize the same.

You see, Dear Reader, when I started to put my chaotic thoughts on the present subject on paper, the first name and image vis-a-vis the most recent incident or event that came to mind was the unspeakably horrific case of that one anonymous juror who exasperatingly bogged down the otherwise cut-and-dried verdict in the Lindsay Clancy Multiple Murder or Infanticide and Botched-Suicide Attampt that rocked both Roxbury, Massachusetts, and the rest of the United States of America, and ended up forcing the presiding judge, by the name of Mr. William F. Sullivan, to reluctantly declare a mistrial after six protracted weeks of drawnout jury deliberation.

In what may be aptly described as a similar manner of impatience, a passionately implacable O. Bruni earnestly urged Yours Truly to file a complaint with the College’s Affirmative Action Office, with the rather weird, if also zany, promise by O. Bruni that he was willing to promptly and staunchly back up his “proxy grievance” with forensically foolproof evidence. It sounded weird and completely absurd and strategically off-key to Yours Truly because woefully lacking an insider’s perspective on the subject at hand, that is, not being intimately familiar with Nassau Community College’s campus political culture or goings-on, Yours Truly could simply not envisage himself achieving anything meaningful other than further complicating any positive chances of him securing a direly needed job offer in the offing. You see, not only did O. Bruni’s proposition sound absolutely and logically bankrupt, that is, if not clinically retarded, the entire proposition seemed to be another white-supremacist plot to prove the pathological primitivity of the mindset and the temperament of the Indigenous Continental African, in the manner imperiously delineated by such French Structuralist Theorists as Claude Levi-Strauss and Claude Levy-Bruhl, if memory serves Yours Truly accurately. If such a quixotic proposition was not downright retarded, one did not know what else it was.

And true to his character and demeanor, Yours Truly did not waste any time to let O. Bruni understand precisely this much. Not in exactly in the same words and language as the preceding but at least close enough. When we hung, I turned to my presently deceased mother and related to her as tersely and precisely as I could what O. Bruni had just told me; and just as I had expected, the Old Lady advised me never to entertain such crank calls henceforth, as she was surefire convinced that I was likely being set up for something professionally catastrophic in the offing. I never heard from O. Bruni again until one day, I unexpectedly received a call from the extant Chairperson of the College’s Department of English, heartily congratulating Yours Truly. At least so it seemed and sounded at the time.

The practical reality later on, that is, well after this author had officially been hired and settled in with the rest of his colleagues, would be predictably different. I suppose what I am trying to convey here is that the academic workplace is absolutely and brazenly a treacherous terrain, a veritable minefield where absolutely nothing, whatsoever, can be taken for granted, except at one’s deadly peril. There is an unwritten but palpable tcontempt that comes with being hired as an “Affirmative Action Quota Candidate,” as Dr. Austin Tyler Harper, the former Bates College professor and, presently, a staff writer for The Atlantic magazine, told a BBC-Television Current Affairs Program Host recently. The newly hired “Affirmative Action Employee” is almost invariably at crosspurposes with the White Master-Boss who engaged their services.

As may already be widely known, the unspoken sole criterion for the hiring of an “Affirmative Action Candidate” is “Sheer Tolerance to a Fault” verging on what the historically and academically immortalized Dr. W. E. B. DuBois would have bitterly and sarcastically characterized as “Amused Contempt,” while the “Affirmative Action Hire/Recruit” would have fooled themselves into seriously believing that they were hired precisely because they had been deemed to be the Best-Qualified Nigger on the Block or in Town. Years later, a Singaporean American woman who had been hired in Nassau Community College’s English Department by the direct and the personal instrumentality of this author would cynically, virulently and intemperately tell her sometime benefactor that he was one of the major reasons and/or key factors scandalously militating against the maintenance of high academic and pedagogical integrity at the College’s English Department.

Guess what, Dear Reader? It was the same recently divorced lady - she had been married to her fellow Singaporean American husband - who had euphorically invited Yours Truly on the same day that she had been delivered her congratulatory message by the extant Chairperson of Nassau Community College’s English Department, to come over and have what clearly appeared to be a sleepover wassail with Yours Truly which the latter had promptly declined, and amicably advised Comfort Miao (not her real name), who was also having extreme difficulty getting her dissertation defense in Elizabethan Drama and Theater date promptly scheduled, because two members of her dissertation committee could see eye-to-eye, as the jaded cliche goes. As she bitterly told Yours Truly, several Tel-Aviv and Jerusalem of dubious academic competence and well down the graduation ladder behind Comfort Miao were being graduated by a snap of the fingers.

And by the way, this dirty “Yamulke” closed-door dealings have been known in the academy for decades, if not generations and ages. In the early 1980s, for example, this author’s elder brother, then a doctoral student in Nuclear Physics at Columbia University, would bitterly complain about the same “Yamulke Shenanigans” at Morningside Heights, as the official location of Columbia University is also popularly known. Anyway, Yours Truly would sternly advise a visibly diffident and trepidatious Comfort Miao to engage the services of some crackerjack legal experts - possibly some Yamulke-wearing high-powered legal lights, in pretty much the same way that virologists tell us one can only “annihilate” a malignant virus with their own kind.

Now, the foregoing incident occurred at the same New York University (NYU) that this writer’s late father attended and undertook some uncompleted doctoral coursework in Theater Arts, having completed his Master of Arts Degree in Theatrical Lighting Technology at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison, in the early 1970s. Interestingly, when Yours Truly applied to NYU for the Fall Semester of 1990, he would receive a Netanyahu-Gazafied rejection letter “genocidally” informing the Summa Cum Laude and Ford Foundation Fellow graduate of the City College of The City University of New York that he was too intellectually bankrupt and blasphemously presumptuous to aim for the Master of Arts Degree in English from NYU. My advice to Comfort Miao worked to magical effect; in absolutely no time, the erudite Shakespearian scholar would earn her three arm stripes. And by the way, two of this author’s sisters would later receive degrees from NYU from the College of Dental Hygiene and the globally renowned and prestigious Stern School of Business. Now, let’s talk about the real beneficiaries of Affirmative Action and DEI Policies.

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]