UNC Profs React to Claudine Gays Resignation: When You're Black You Have to be "Two toThree Times Better"

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Dr. Deborah Stroman thought Harvard President Claudine Gay would survive the fallout since the war started in the Middle East.
On Tuesday, she was proven wrong.
"Leadership is lonely and then when you're there and by yourself," said Stroman, a woman of color herself at UNC's Gillings School of Public Health. "When you have a Ph.D. and you are a senior leader at a university, there's little room for small mistakes in public."
She is also a racial equity trainer.
"There's a saying in the Black community that your ice has to be colder," she said. "Just the sense that wherever we show up in spaces as leaders, we have to be two to three times better. How do you inspire people to want to go into higher ed, to be administrators too when you see this time and time again."

False.

Gay was held to one of the minimal standards of academia--a standard to which everyone else is scrupulously held. A standard to which whites are scrupulously held...since that's the real issue here.

I'm perfectly willing to accept that blacks in academia face certain challenges that e.g. whites don't face. Though the evidence is mixed, I, personally, believe that stereotype threat is a real phenomenon. 

But the prohibition on plagiarism is not one of them.

Nor are publication requirements. 

The fact is that, in academia, a reasonably competent person who is black has enormous advantages over a merely-reasonably-competent person who is white. A merely-pretty-good white candidate is not even going to get an interview for a faculty position in Harvard. Many merely-reasonably-good white candidates get no jobs at all upon completing graduate school--at least in philosophy. 

Consider: when my cohort hit the job market, the males were getting a handful of interviews each. I think I got 1.5 interviews my first year on the market. (One job was, believe it or not, in some way that I never really understood, half full-time and half adjunct. (So I guess I got 1.75 interviews.) I did an on-campus for the experience, and to see the PNW, and because I had nothing better to do. But when asked whether I'd accept the job, I said "I don't know.") The women in my cohort got a torrent of interviews. One got so many interviews at the APA that she had to turn several down--she simply didn't have enough time-slots at the three-day conference to do them all... And they were certainly not better than the male candidates.

Anyway.

This isn't just about blacks. The whole "progressive stack" comes into play. Comparable straight white dudes basically go to the bottom of the stack of applications. (It might help if you're non-straight...but I've seen at least one case in which it didn't seem to help at all.) Women and other "diversity candidates" go toward the top. A black woman, for example--or a "queer" black woman!--is going to go to the top of the list. 

Bottom line in the present case:

A white, male Claudine Gay has approximately no chance whatsoever of becoming president of Harvard. Or becoming a full professor at Harvard. Or getting tenure at Harvard. Or maybe of getting hired by Harvard at all.

So this nonsense about "needing to be two to three times better" is...well...just that. Nonsense. In fact, the very opposite is true. Black candidates currently have enormous advantages in academia.

Of course not only will no one say this in academia, most people will not even allow themselves to see it. Such is the power of the cult.