Will It Ever Be Acceptable to Simply Expect a Professional WOC to Be Accountable for Her Actions?

There are protected classes, and then there are protected classes. 

One of the first tells that a person feels they belong to a special group who deserve privileges not normally afforded to the peasants milling in everyday life around their feet occurs when questions arise concerning something that same person allegedly either did or said.

A “something” has taken place which, for whatever reason, has caused people to look in a certain direction for answers to any one – or all – of the who, why, how, what, etc. interrogatives. Or simply looking for clarification.

Oftentimes, the answer is simple, direct, and to the point. “Yes, I did,” “No, I didn’t,” or “I’ve never heard of that. Why would you think I had,” which is a perfectly legitimate response. Clarity and honesty, after all, are two-way streets.

What’s been happening more and more lately is that an answer that might not be entirely truthful to begin with gets spun out almost to its bitter end. But instead of the anticipated resolution or mea culpa as obfuscations are stripped away, a feigned sense…well, let me change. Maybe it’s real.

Maybe a sense of entitled frustration that breaks through with a waspish, “And how dare you ask me as a [insert skin hue] woman!” As if that very person was of a status deemed beyond questioning by virtue of a physical feature obtained by genetics alone.

“You’re only doing this because I’m this color.” ~ Former President of Harvard. 

Not because of what I may have done.

…“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,” she wrote. “Someone who views diversity as a source of institutional strength and dynamism. Someone who has advocated a modern curriculum that spans from the frontier of quantum science to the long-neglected history of Asian Americans. Someone who believes that a daughter of Haitian immigrants has something to offer to the nation’s oldest university.”

I thought that was racist. I must be new here.

If anyone protests, “How is this about skin color – we’re talking about a specific instance of ethics/academic standards/exaggerations/insert subject of your choice…” oft times, there’s either a doubling down on plausible deniability or a retreat into stubborn, victimized silence.

Waiting for reinforcements to arrive seems to be part of the calculations, and do they ever.

There seems to be a veritable army ready to rush to the defense of any WOC who finds herself in the – granted – uncomfortable position of publicly having to account for her actions. Maybe even take responsibility for them if they were ill-considered or what’s commonly known as “wrong.”

In one aspect, it could well be a good thing, because it’s quite clear you’d best not go into an argument with a high-profile WOC without all your ducks in a row, or you will be swarmed by a mob out for blood, screaming “racist” and “white supremacist.” 

Well, let’s be fair, you’re going to regardless. Ask anyone who had anything to do with exposing Claudine Gay’s lackluster and partially pilfered scholarship.

It wasn’t exposing the rot at the heart of the highest levels of our supposedly premier universities.

It was an attack on a black woman, black women professionals specifically, and an outright assault on the gains they’d made in those higher echelons of learning. It wasn’t that Gay was exposed as a middling to mediocre scholar. 

It was that Chris Rufo was a rampaging racist.

…In the Harvard case, activists tapped into existing fears in the center-left coalition about diversity and the ascension of people of color to power, said Hertel-Fernandez. Some of them latched on to the “great replacement theory” – a racist ideology that asserts people of color will replace white people. (Notably, the theory was the motivation behind the 2022 murder of 10 Black people at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket.)

“We’re seeing a more emboldened and expressed approach to eradicating spaces for Bipoc people,” the ACLU’s Watson said. “Racist ideology isn’t new; extreme rightwing conservatives are using the same tools repeatedly, and publicizing their playbook so it can be used to attack anything from evidence-based public health advice to election results, and equal opportunity and access.”

Conservative activists have signaled that the Harvard case is only the beginning of their quest to take down institutions with opposing agendas. According to Watson, the courts may serve as the only protection against the further erosion of educational and racial justice advancements in the future.

Right-wing extremists didn’t bring Claudine Gay down. Her own sense of hubris, entitlement, and the world of special privilege she inhabits left her unprepared for real life.

Legendary WNBA star Sheryl Swoopes stepped into it in much the same fashion last week, and to what end? No one can say, but they can say she’s yet to apologize. Not for her own opinion to which everyone is entitled (and she IS basketball), but for her own facts, to which they are not. That the entire episode had an ugly racist tinge to it doesn’t help the situation, either, but as it was Swoopes being the aggressive party, I won’t expect a “my bad.”

Iowa star Caitlin Clark is now just 39 points away from breaking the all-time scoring record in NCAA women’s basketball history. Her success and popularity have elicited jealousy from former players.

Like Sheryl Swoopes.

Last week, Swoopes tried to undermine Clark’s legacy with a series of inaccuracies and lies. She claimed we must take Clark’s record-breaking career with a grain of salt because she played five years of collegiate basketball, is not a true senior, shoots 40 times a game, and is 25 years old playing against teenagers.

None of that is true.

Clark has played only four seasons of college basketball. She is a true senior. She shoots around 20 times per game. And just turned 22 years old.

Swoopes went 0 for 4.

Her rant reeked of racial hostility, uttering her dismissals while wearing a “Female, Fearless, and Black” T-shirt on Gilbert Arenas’ podcast, where inflammatory rhetoric toward white basketball players is commonplace. Arenas recently complained that white Euro players were coming for “our league,” as in the black people’s league.

And this morning?

There’s a Valentine in the NY Times for Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis – complete with sultry glamour shot.

The refrain is so familiar. It’s not that Ms Willis has been unethical, mind you. She’s a hella lawyer,

It’s *sigh* always the skin color.

Why the Case Against Fani Willis Feels familiar to Black Women

In interviews, professional women were dismayed by the personal attacks on the Georgia prosecutor, but not surprised.

Tangala L. Hollis-Palmer felt asense of pride when she learned that Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., and one of the nation’s few elected Black female prosecutors, would lead the election interference case against former President Donald J. Trump.

But that pride would be tempered by dismay as news emerged of Ms. Willis’s personal relationship with a fellow prosecutor, Nathan J. Wade, an outside lawyer she hired to help run the case. Ms. Hollis-Palmer, a Black, 40-year-old attorney from Mississippi, is mostly upset at critics trying, she said, to discredit Ms. Willis. At first, she was skeptical of the allegations. But when Ms. Willis herself conceded the relationship, Ms. Hollis reserved some disappointment for the prosecutor who should have used a “little more discretion and a little better judgment,” she said.

Mr. Trump and several co-defendants are calling Ms. Willis’s hiring of Mr. Wade a conflict of interest and want Ms. Willis and Mr. Wade disqualified, potentially upending a critical case against the former president and doing grievous damage to Ms. Willis’s reputation.

“We just have to be so careful when we are in these positions to not give people the ammunition to come after us,” Ms. Hollis-Palmer said.

Hollis-Palmer, the lawyer they interview, is mostly upset at “critics…trying to discredit” Willis.

You’re a lawyer and cannot see Willis discredited herself and her office? 

The NYT moans that “potentially…upending the case” through disqualification solely due to Williis’ unethical behavior boinking the help while also living large on the big tax dollars she was paying him – a well-established standard and nothing the Trump defendants invented – would be seen as doing “grievous damage to Ms Willlis’s reputation“?

Dudes – “doing”? That ship has sailed.

Ms Willis is all about schmearing goo on her “reputation,” and is continuing even as I write.

“…The issue with that is that Ms Willis made statements she paid them the same amount of money. The contracts we have from Mr. Flloyd show that is an incorrect statement…”

Looks like Fani Willis is about to learn the hard way that you don’t have to tell the truth… you just can’t lie.

And it seems she did it from the pulpit of a church, abusing of the name of God. pic.twitter.com/VPgse54boJ

— Viva Frei (@thevivafrei) February 13, 2024

Fani Willis is a mess. As a DA, she’s turning out to be an unmitigated disaster and a grievous embarrassment. 

She also happens to be black.

What’s more important?

I don’t care if she is green. She needs to go. 

This defaulting to skin hue defense is just another brick in the racial divide wall that needs to come down. 

Bad judgment, incompetence, malfeasance, mendacity, and grift have no color preference.

They are equal opportunity vices.