The Problem With DEI Is White-Supremacist Perpetration and Perpetuation of Enforced Black Inferiority - Part 7

In the stereotypical case of Dr. John Thomas, already alluded to in the previous segment of our series, the intellectual and the professional competence of the eventual candidate selected and appointed to teach African American Literature in the English Department by the flagrantly condescending “Sanhedrin” dons at the City College of the City University of New York (CCNY of CUNY) was not the prime aim or the objective here. Rather, it was primarily and doggedly about the religious pursuit of the canonical mantra of “Just About Any Nigger Will Do.”

Which, of course, simply meant that the foremost objective was the mere or the sheer objective of just having an African American hire or employee on the faculty of CCNY’s Department of English as a means of these “Killer-Benefactors” having something politically or policywise to brag about. Which was why at the City College of New York of the late 1980s and the early 2000s, as Dr. Austin Tyler Harper so poignantly, even if also so bitterly but masterfully, nonetheless, adumbrated in his recent BBC-TV interview, in the wake of the tragic suicide-death of Cambridge University’s Ghanaian/African-descended Professor in the Sociology of Education, Dr. Jason Arday, just this past mid-August.

Which is also clearly why it did not matter a whit that the Jewish-dominated City College’s Department of English Sanhedrin or administrative shot-callers did not seem to have been in the least bit bothered that a “Nigger” fully armed to the hilt with a panoply of degrees ranging from Two Master’s Degrees in African American and American Studies, respectively, and the Doctor of Philosophy Degree to boot or for good measure, as well as a Foundational Baccalaureate in African Studies and English from CCNY would not be flustered or worried by the psychically cringing inability of a recently graduated Yalie/Eli or an Ivy-Festooned “Harlem Hero” to name just one-single Major African American Novelist of Author during a highly politically charged and a historically epochal interview for a job that was apt to make or crown Dr. John Thomas a Clarence Thomas-like fixture and the Go-To-Person in not only City College’s Department of English, but also a formidable force and a bulwark to reckon with, in much the same manner that a hard-driving Columbia University and Lafayette College-educated Dr. Leonard Jeffries had been at CCNY for some two highly racially and politically charged decades.

About the only “beef” or qualm that Yours Truly had with Dr. Austin Tyler Harper’s interview with the BBC, in the wake of the veritable Academic Martyrdom of Professor Jason Arday had to do with the fact that during the course of the interview, that is, the former Bates College’s Assistant Professor of Climate and Environmental Studies, if memory serves Yours Truly accurately, appeared to have promptly and facilely bought into the widespread allegation of plagiarism and blatant academic dishonesty on the part of the deceased, almost as if Dr. Austin Tyler Harper found the imperative need to conduct his own independent critical investigation and assaying of these firestorms of as yet unascertained and largely media-driven allegations to be patently irrelevant or completely unnecessary.

Which willfully or inadvertently made the Arday critic and the BBC interviewee appear to be inadvisably and nihilistically complicit in this age-old and jaded “Game of Hi-Tech Lynching,” as late-career Associate US Supreme Court Judge, Clarence Thomas, had a “Moment-of-Truth” turnaround occasion to characterize this “Jason Arday Syndrome” during the Georgia native’s Supreme Court Confirmation Hearings in 1991. In other words, his one great albeit quite understandable, even if not readily excusable faux pas, was to have allowed his utter frustration with the status-quo administration of Affirmative Action and DEI programs get the best of his otherwise unimpeachable sense of judgment.

In short, making a “Bête-Noir” or a stereotypical scapegoat out of the “Passion” or the “Crucifixion” of Jason Arday was not apt to stand up to scrutiny or pass muster, especially when what was critically and inescapably at issue here was to ensure that AA-DEI policy initiatives were implemented precisely in the manner in which it had been intended by the extant WOKE-dominated and controlled United States Congress. Even so, what is of utmost significance to highlight here, as Charles Moore, the former UK Daily Telegraph’s Editor, noted in the wake of the Jason Arday “forced resignation” and apparent suicide-death, was the imperative need for the late former University of Cambridge Professor of the Sociology of Education to have been afforded the necessary professionally supportive incentives before so hastily and, it also well appears to be exuberantly, trotted out as the Youngest Indigenous Continental African-Descended Professor to be hired by Cambridge University, thereby virulently provoking or roiling up the toxic and the acidic aire of the ideological progeny of the Traditional European and Eurocentric Nationalists and, in this particular instance, the Zionist Lynchmob.

Now, we raise this question because it well appears that in the equally scandalous case of Yale University’s Dr. John Thomas, the end result was absolutely not in the least bit regrettable, in view of the fact that as of this writing, to-day, the “Punitively Hired” or “Nosethumbingly Recruited” Dr. John Thomas, a la Clarence Thomas’ George Bush Senior’s Gimmickry, has gone on to laudably acquit himself by also establishing his bona fides as the renowned and the celebrated Long-Time Host of City College’s Annual Langston Hughes Festival, originally founded and Hosted by My Beloved Professor Raymond Richard Patterson (1929-2001), a poet, a librettist and a consummate and an unimpeachably accomplished educator and author of the award-winning anthology titled “26 Ways of Looking at a Black Man and Other Poems” Award Books, 1969).

Regrettably, however, Professor Patterson who had been born in the same year as Yours Truly late father and died in exactly the same year, both of them having been predeceased by their wives and sweethearts of more than four decades, was never asked by this author precisely how it came about that the City College Sanhedrin would so obdurately and adamantly hire as a full-time faculty, a candidate with Two Master of Arts Degrees, gloriously capped or topped up by a Yale University-minted Doctor of Philosophy Degree who, from some inexplicably curious reason or reasons, could not name at least one Major African American Novelist “Besides Malcom X.”

Needless to say, ours is perfectly a world of insurable fallibility. Which, in effect, takes the preceding argument neither here nor there, when the critically thinking observer stops to reckon the same.

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