The Problem With DEI Is White-Supremacist Perpetration and Perpetuation of Enforced Black Inferiority - Part 6

Oftentimes, the grievances advanced against Affirmative Action (AA) Hires, unlike the stereotypically pedestrian tragic case of Professor Jason Arday, late, of Cambridge University, UK. have come from elements of the prime-target community, namely, Black and African-Descended Scholars and Academics. Of course, we all know, and at least my enquiry, based on my spontaneous curiosity, that the widely alleged “snitch” or complainant against the purported or the supposed academic lack of competence and integrity of the victim, namely, Mr. Jason Arday, in retrospect, is of White-Jewish Ethnicity and Background with American citizenship.

We are informed that the plaintiff was born in one of the suburbs of Chicago, Illinois, as has almost invariably been the case - that is, regarding the ethnicity of the plaintiff - in the little more than the 40 years of this author’s domiciliary here in the United States of America as both a Permanent Resident and, subsequently or shortly thereafter, a bona fide Citizen of the latter country. And ironically, though not surprisingly, it has almost always been the dons and the senior administrators of the proverbial Academy, predominantly Jewish at both the publicly sponsored City and State University of New York - that is, both the CUNY and the SUNY - systems, who have often been virulently accused of fostering and entrenching a toxic and an unsanitary culture of deliberately and perhaps, even strategically, perpetrating and perpetuating this bizarre regime of Black and African American Inferiority.

During the 1980s, for example, when the then fast-rising star in the academic firmaments and the author of the well-publicized and the highly controversial scholarly work, grounded in the Black Civil Rights Revolution, so-called, of the late 1950s and through much of the 1960s and well into the 1970s, titled “Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman” (1979), was a Senior Faculty Member on the Staff of the English Department at the City College of New York, with a joint appointment at the nationally reputed and internationally renowned and prestigious Graduate Center of the City University of New York, a considerable albeit a quiet groundswell of contemptuous protest arose arose among the relatively minuscule covey of Black and African American membership on the faculty of CCNY’s Department of English against Ms. Michele Wallace, who had also been hired with her then-husband at the time.

As this author vividly recalls, Professor Michele Faith Wallace’s husband was nowhere nearly as distinguished as his wife, although he was reputed to be quite an artistic force to be reckoned with in his own right. Eugene Nesmith “Wallace,” as the joke went around the hallways or the corridors of City College’s sixth-floor English Department in the North Academic Center Building (or NAC Hall), a playwright and a theater director, was virtually an unknown quantity in the Ivory Tower, at least so we were some of us students made to believe. And some of us students, very likely based on the sullen expressions of contempt gleaned from the backdoor remarks from several of our African American male professors (for there was absolutely no tenured Black-Female Faculty on staff), joked about “Mr. Wallace” having married into cheap “Academic Wealth and Fame.”

It also significantly did not help or matter that Ms. Wallace’s mother, presently deceased, Ms. Faith Ringgold, was a nationally renowned and celebrated artist and a prominent and influential figure in the CUNY System. It was almost as if Ms. Wallace’s clearly legitimate claim to any respectable standing in the Academy was largely and primarily or purely based on the remarkable achievements of her mother and that one highly controversial book of hers, namely, “Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman.”

Now, the point being made here is that instead of turning the proverbial lemon into a vintage lemonade, Black and African American intellectuals and scholars, both male and female, to be certain, have tended to inadvisably allowed themselves to be “played” by the CUNY “Sanhedrin” perpetrators and perpetuators of this seemingly indelible culture of Enforced Inferiority, an inescapable element of which clearly and brazenly appears to have both informed and inflected the highly successful attempt by Mr. Nathan Cofnas to not only resonantly sabotage the career and the professorial ambition of the late Ghanaian-descended Cambridge University academic who, until his recent tragic death by suicide, was described and publicly celebrated as the Youngets Black Professor in the 800-plus-year history of the second oldest flagship academy in the United Kingdom of Great Britain.

And on the latter score and/or count must also be equally painfully be recalled the brazen and strategically flagrant and unspeakably inadvisable attempt by Ms. Wallace to morally and academically irresponsibly and inexcusably discredit and to irreparably destroy the hard-won and well-deserved, enviable and the emulative reputation and career of the late Professor Gloria Jean Watkins (1952-2021) - aka bell hooks - who deliberately lowercased the initial two letters of her pseudonym, in celebration of her genius maternal great-grandmother and guardian angel, Bell Blair Hooks, who never had the fecund and surfeit opportunities temporally afforded her great-granddaughter.

Well, the real story here is that at the time of the hard-sought and academically fetching hiring of Professor Gloria Jean Watkins by the City College of the City University of New York, as a Distinguished Professor of English, with a Joint-Appointment in City College’s Department of African American Studies, she appears to have touched the nerve of the hitherto “Lone Black Star” in CCNY’s English Department in ways that Ms. Wallace might not have initially fully understood. The latter would later for reasons that may seen to be patently personal - for none of this author’s old professors in the English Department at City College at the time had expressed any knowledge about the reason or reasons behind Ms. Wallace’s decision to take a sledgehammer to the person, the image and the reputation of Ms. bell hooks. The author of “Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman” would so obstreperously brutally and savagely attack Professor hooks as to promptly force Yours Truly to write and publish a highly charged opinion piece in the New York Amsterdam, the oldest continuously published and largest African American weekly in New York State, where this writer was also the Book Review Editor, earnestly and passionately calling for a solemn recognition of the Historically Tragic and the Apocalyptic Place of the African American within Existentially Tenuous and the Experientially Tentative Context of a Seemingly Perpetual September 11(9/11) Nightmare of Inscrutable Proportions.

You see, not very long before the preceding incident, another “Sanhedrin”-orchestrated attempt to perpetrate and perpetuate “Enforced Black Inferiority” in the Academy, right here in New York City, at the City College of New York, to be precise,would be disconsolately grieved to this writer by one of his Most Beloved Professors, namely, the recently deceased Distinguished Scholar of Afro-Caribbean History and Culture, Dr. James DeJongh, regarding what the Half-Asian and Half-African-Descended Playwright and Literary Theorist termed as a “Genocidal Attempt” by the City College Sanhedrin to systematically scuttle the fast-rising tide of emulative African American erudition and scholarship.

This other bizarre incident actually occurred just about the time that Yours Truly was in the process of departing CCNY for Temple University’s Graduate School or College for the Arts and the Sciences in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. That would be about the late summer of 1990, when a former African American graduate of CCNY’s English Department, freshly minted with an impressive chain of advanced degrees from Yale University, another of the highly selective Ivory League academies, including the Doctoral Degree in American and African American Studies was invited for an interview and the possibility of being offered a tenure-track position on the faculty of his alma mater. According to My Beloved Recently Deceased Professor, Dr. James DeJongh (New York Times Obituaries, “James de Jongh, Who Put Stories of Slavery Onstage, Dies at 80” May 20, 2023; See also, “Dr. James de Jongh, Actor, Playwright and Academic” Amsterdam News, June 1, 2023 and Numerous Other Sources), when “Our Homeboy” was asked to name at least one major African American novelist or literary artist, John Thomas (Not his real name) scandalously blurted out the name of the globally venerated and celebrated African American Muslim Leader and Human and Civil Rights Spearhead, El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz - aka Malcolm Little and, subsequently, Malcolm X.

You could see the tears of pain from implacable mortification well up in the eye of “Jim Dee,” as Professor DeJongh was affectionately known and called by those of us who knew him well - this writer lived on the same cluster of cooperative apartment complex with Dr. DeJongh, and had several occasions of informal conversations with the US Virgin Islands-born native. His father had been the equivalent of the US Secretary of the Treasury and his Afro-Caribbean mother, a senior officer of that country’s civil service. In one of our last conversations, Professor DeJongh was almost euphoric to break the news of him having, finally, touched bases with his Continental and Indigenous African Brothers and Sisters, something he always wistfully told this writer was on his metaphorical bucket list of “To Dos.” He had also been the first and only CCNY former professor to discuss the Michele Wallace and the Gloria Jean Watkins (bell hooks) Controversy. He had read my New York Amsterdam’s opinion piece on this matter and thought it was spot on target and opportune, and even heartily congratulated Yours Truly for letting Ms. Wallace know the generally horrified reaction of both the On-Campus African American Community and the larger Extra- or Non-Academic Black Community as well.

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