Nikole Hannah-Jones Slams Attacks on Claudine Gay as ‘Racist’

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and 1619 creator Nikole Hannah-Jones rushed to the defense of Harvard President Claudine Gay earlier this week. Hannah-Jones slammed critics who claimed that Gay, the university’s first Black President, was a diversity hire.

“When you think about the fact that Harvard, this nation’s oldest university, had about a 370-year explicit racial quota of only hiring white men to be the president, it’s laughable to think that the first ever Black woman following that unbroken line of white racial quotas is the one who’s unqualified,” said Hannah-Jones on CNN.

Attacks on Gay’s qualifications emerged after a contentious congressional hearing where she and other prominent university presidents were questioned about antisemitism by Trump ally, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY).

University of Pennsylvania President M. Elizabeth Magill resigned shortly after the hearing. However, Harvard’s Board has announced that they will be standing with Gay against calls for her ouster.

Many of the attacks against Gay have circled around the idea that she is a diversity hire and was only selected to be president because of her race. Billionaire Bill Ackman tweeted last week that if “not for a fat finger on the scale,” she would not have been made president. And City Journal writer Christopher Rufo, who accused Gay of plagiarism, called her a “DEI totem.”

Hannah-Jones said that people like Rufo are trying to make this about antisemitism when they’re really mad about something else. “Chris Rufo is not a serious person,” she told CNN Host Abby Phillip. “He is a person who has been trying to attack what he calls DEI, but really any efforts to address racial inequality. He has explicitly said that he does propaganda work. And the fact that we’re all talking about it means that he’s being successful.”

Hannah-Jones says the critique that Gay is unqualified is entirely baseless. “It’s racist. I mean, we have, no one has produced a shred of evidence that shows that the sole qualification that President Gay had was that she is a Black woman,” she says. “That’s insulting. It defies logic. And the fact that, of those presidents, who all came under intense scrutiny, that only one has been called out as a so-called diversity or affirmative action hire just speaks of a Black woman of this country have gone through historically and continue to go through every day.”