Memo to Claudine Gay and Her Champions: Being Black Is Not a Handicap

I never thought I had to explicitly say this but here we are: Being Black is not a handicap. It’s become clear that many of the people who are the supposed allies of Black Americans are nothing more than individuals who are nefariously paternalistic when it comes to our existence.

These people—most of them progressives—feel authorized to speak for all of us, even though no one asked them to, and whenever they open their mouths, they use phraseology that drips with their low expectations of our capability to keep up with everyone else without their assistance.

This impulse on the progressive Left has been in overdrive throughout the scandal surrounding former Harvard president Claudine Gay. Gay resigned earlier this week due to the backlash she faced for her failure to adequately prove to Congress that she could protect Jewish students at Harvard, after which a history of plagiarism in her academic career was exposed. Yet the reaction to her resignation has conjured up a swarm of Leftist ideological framings.

Boston Univeristy’s Ibram X. Kendi jumped onto Twitter to make his usual declaration that anything negative that happens to a Black person is due to racism: “Racist mobs won’t stop until they topple all Black people from positions of power and influence who are not reinforcing the structure of racism,” he wrote.

Really? It’s racist to point out a person’s shortcomings just because they are Black?

But even worse, they’ve managed to transform words like merit, aptitude, and competency into terms that are only applicable to people without color. That’s the conclusion one must draw when they tell us that it’s racist to expect Black people to be measured by the same standards as everyone else without mentioning every possible historical reference of oppression.

“Using ‘merit’ as the benchmark/weapon to undermine people of color who rarely, barely, attain positions of influence without mentioning the history of white supremacy, wealth, legacy admissions and influence is an example of why we need history and critical race theory,” Wajahat Ali wrote on Twitter.

What fascinates me about successful and wealthy Leftist minorities like Kendi and Ali is whenever they want to plead to the public about how every system is rigged against us, they never explain how they were able to make it despite these alleged obstacles. They want us to buy that they’re the exception to the rule, but the truth is that they believe they are far too exceptional to abide by any rule. They don’t encourage Black people to strive despite obstacles because then there would be more competition for their spot at the top of the economic ladder.

These people—people like Claudine Gay—are the special ones with pigmentation who rose above the dark cloud of American white supremacy but coincidentally offer you no rope to climb up to their elevation nor inspire you to even want to begin climbing.

By having us hyper-focus on group failures, they can remain the shining stars amongst oppressed people and avoid being questioned about their elevated tax bracket. And to protect their fragile image, they must use their identity as a shield from accountability.

“It is not lost on me that I make an ideal canvas for projecting every anxiety about the generational and demographic changes unfolding on American campuses: a Black woman selected to lead a storied institution,” Gay lamented in a New York Times Op-Ed she published after resigning.

Black people like me who have been homeless multiple times and financially struggled for years are not supposed to believe we are capable of overcoming our circumstances, and we’re for damn sure not supposed to believe we can earn our way in success without the benevolence of a white savior or the government. The working class and poor Black American is supposed to remain stagnant until our white saviors, who are simultaneously our oppressors, save us from ourselves. We’re supposed to wait idly by as the government, which is also our oppressor, prepares to rescue us from our destitute existence.

Even more important to their Leftist cause, the average Black person is supposed to embrace being outraged that the president of Harvard resigned from her position only to take another position at the same institution making nearly $900,000 a year, and see this as an attack on all of us.

It is a racial sleight of hand perpetrated by upper-class Leftists to have us see ourselves as perpetual victims who are socially wounded by being Black.

I was raised by a Black mother who exemplified how you must earn what you want in life, and the idea of waiting for my supposed oppressor to save me goes against everything my mother taught me.

Being Black is not a handicap. But listening to Leftist elitists sure is.

Adam B. Coleman is an author, and founder of Wrong Speak Publishing. Find his writing at Adambcoleman.substack.com.

All views expressed in this article are the author’s own.