'Woke' is about power

Crawl like a dog.

Comedian Bill Maher had the "woke" crowd pegged when he said their chief aim is to exert power over others.

“People are going to have to stand up to these bullies,” the HBO host said, “because that’s what it is, bullying. It’s ‘I can make you crawl like a dog, and I enjoy it.’”

This is exactly what New York Times Magazine’s Nikole Hannah-Jones, a high priestess of the Church of Woke, did to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She made it crawl like a dog because she enjoys it.

As you may recall, the university offered Hannah-Jones tenure. This did not sit well with the board of trustees, some of whom voiced objections. She is, after all, a conspiracy theorist whose chief claim to fame, the 1619 Project, is as flawed as it is divisive. As a compromise, the university offered Hannah-Jones a five-year fixed term, with the option to apply for tenure review at the end, at UNC’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media as chairwoman in race and investigative journalism.

She declined, demanding her alma mater grant her full tenure or nothing.

After a sustained campaign of targeted protests from Hannah-Jones and her fans in journalism, media, and even UNC’s student body and faculty, the board caved to her demands, voting last week to grant her tenure, even though she lacks both the qualifications and temperament for the role.

Then, on Tuesday, Hannah-Jones made a surprise announcement. She revealed she has declined the tenured position at UNC to accept a similar gig at Howard University.

“To be denied it and to only have that vote occur on the last possible day,” Hannah-Jones said, “at the last possible moment, after threat of legal action, after weeks of protest, after it became a national scandal, it’s just not something I want anymore.”

With this, the humiliation of her alma mater is complete.

After all that, all the protesting, complaining, self-pity, shows of solidarity, scolding, and after Hannah-Jones even got her legal team involved, the New York Times Magazine staffer didn’t even take the position.

Of her decision to decline UNC’s offer of tenure, she explained in an interview with the Associated Press, “I wanted to send a powerful message, or what I hope to be a powerful message, that we’re often treated like we should be lucky that these institutions let us in. But we don’t have to go to those institutions if we don’t want to.”

“If there is a legitimate reason for why someone who has worked in the field as long as I have, who has the credentials, the awards, or the status that I have, should be treated different than every other white professor who came before me, outside of race, I would love to hear that explanation. I haven’t heard it yet,” she added.

In case she's genuinely curious, she can read this.

Even more humiliating for UNC, more so than Hannah-Jones rejecting the tenured position even after bending the university to her will, is that its faculty, which largely approved of her proposed appointment, continues its self-flagellation, prostrating itself before the queen as mortified supplicants.

“Today,” reads a public statement signed by more than 40 Hussman faculty members, “we learned that Ms. Nikole Hannah-Jones has declined a tenured appointment as the Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism at the Hussman School of Journalism and Media.”

It adds, “While disappointed, we are not surprised. We support Ms. Hannah-Jones’s choice. The appalling treatment of one of our nation’s most-decorated journalists by her own alma mater was humiliating, inappropriate, and unjust.”

“We will be frank,” the letter adds. “It was racist.”

It’s racist now to question whether an unqualified person deserves tenure. Noted.

The letter goes on for a bit longer, but you get the gist of it. It’s a confession written by a broken inmate.

Meanwhile, on the student side of things, UNC Student Body President Lamar Richards celebrated Hannah-Jones’s Howard University announcement, saying, “The fight was never for her to come to UNC, it was always bigger than that. History will remember this as the beginning of a revolution.”

The New York Times Magazine staffer responded, “You have lead where more powerful people cowered. In awe of you.”

You know, as an aside, moments such as this suggest we’re actually doing pretty well as a society. If questioning whether a sloppy journalist deserves to be a tenured professor counts now as a civil rights struggle, then perhaps we’re not really as inequitable as the racialists say.

And with that, Hannah-Jones moves on now to her shiny new career-long appointment at Howard, UNC thoroughly humiliated.

Let’s be honest: For Hannah-Jones, the fight was not about serving UNC’s community. It was not about academic freedom. It was not about journalistic integrity. After members of the board dared question whether she “deserves” a plush lifetime appointment in academia, her goal became the embarrassment of the university.

Her goal was to make UNC crawl like a dog.