I’ve posted several times that I don’t think Harvard President Claudine Gay should be fired, as she is new and should be given the chance to reform the University along free-speech lines, even after her less than sterling performance at the House hearings. Then I became aware that she was subject to accusations of plagiarism in her Ph.D. thesis and published papers. Here are are some examples of purported plagiarism. I’m not questioning that the text is okay, and I have no idea what standards Harvard has for plagiarism, but these are at least somewhat disturbing.
Here are two examples from her Ph.D. thesis as reported by the Washington Free Beacon.
In four papers published between 1993 and 2017, including her doctoral dissertation, Gay, a political scientist, paraphrased or quoted nearly 20 authors—including two of her colleagues in Harvard University’s department of government—without proper attribution, according to a Washington Free Beacon analysis. Other examples of possible plagiarism, all from Gay’s dissertation, were publicized Sunday by the Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo and Karlstack’s Chris Brunet.
The Free Beacon worked with nearly a dozen scholars to analyze 29 potential cases of plagiarism. Most of them said that Gay had violated a core principle of academic integrity as well as Harvard’s own anti-plagiarism policies, which state that “it’s not enough to change a few words here and there.”
. . . In her 1997 thesis, for example, she borrowed a full paragraph from a paper by the scholars Bradley Palmquist, then a political science professor at Harvard, and Stephen Voss, one of Gay’s classmates in her Ph.D. program at Harvard, while making only a couple alterations, including changing their “decrease” to “increase” because she was studying a different set of data.
The sections said to have been lifted by Gay are (as below) given in red:
More from the article:
Some of the most clear-cut cases come in Gay’s 1997 dissertation, “Taking Charge: Black Electoral Success and the Redefinition of American Politics,” which copied two paragraphs almost verbatim from Palmquist and Voss.
The paragraphs—from a paper Palmquist and Voss had presented a year earlier, in 1996—do not appear in quotation marks. One is unmodified but for a handful of words, and Gay does not cite Palmquist or Voss anywhere in her dissertation
. . .”This is definitely plagiarism,” said Lee Jussim, a social psychologist at Rutgers University, who reviewed 10 side-by-side comparisons provided by the Free Beacon, including the paragraphs from Gay’s dissertation, which received a prize from Harvard for “exceptional merit.”
“The longer passages are the most egregious,” he added.
Gay’s 1993 essay, “Between Black and White: The Complexity of Brazilian Race Relations,” lifts sentences and historical details from two scholars, David Covin and George Reid Andrews, with just a few words dropped or modified. Covin is not cited anywhere in the essay.
The 1993 essay “concerns me less,” [Bucknell sociologist Alexander] Riley said, given how early it was in Gay’s career. “However, it shows a quantity of plagiarism so egregious that minimally Dr. Gay should stop putting it on her CV.”
The two peer-reviewed papers, by contrast, are “much more serious,” Riley said.
In “Moving To Opportunity: the Political Effects of a Housing Mobility Experiment,” Gay borrowed language from a 2003 report by eight researchers—three of them Harvard economists—prepared for the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
There are more examples an article from the City Journal (click headling to read):
From the article:
Gay published her dissertation, “Taking Charge: Black Electoral Success and the Redefinition of American Politics,” in 1997, as part of her doctorate in political science from Harvard. The paper deals with white-black political representation and racial attitudes. As evaluated under the university’s plagiarism policy, the paper contains at least three problematic patterns of usage and citation.
First, Gay lifts an entire paragraph nearly verbatim from Lawrence Bobo and Franklin Gilliam’s paper, “Race, Sociopolitical Participation, and Black Empowerment,” while passing it off as her own paraphrase and language. Here is the original, from Bobo and Gilliam:
Using 1987 national sample survey data . . . the results show that blacks in high-black-empowerment areas—as indicated by control of the mayor’s office—are more active than either blacks living in low-empowerment areas or their white counterparts of comparable socioeconomic status. Furthermore, the results show that empowerment influences black participation by contributing to a more trusting and efficacious orientation to politics and by greatly increasing black attentiveness to political affairs.
And here is the language from Gay’s work:
Using 1987 survey data, Bobo and Gilliam found that African-Americans in “high black-empowerment” areas—as indicated by control of the mayor’s office—are more active than either African-Americans in low empowerment areas or their white counterparts of comparable socioeconomic status. Empowerment, they conclude, influences black participation by contributing to a more trusting and efficacious orientation towards politics and by greatly increasing black attentiveness to political affairs.
Though Gay does provide a reference to the original authors, she uses their verbatim language, with a few trivial synonym substitutions, without providing quotation marks. This constitutes a clear violation of Harvard’s policy, which states: “When you paraphrase, your task is to distill the source’s ideas in your own words. It’s not enough to change a few words here and there and leave the rest; instead, you must completely restate the ideas in the passage in your own words. If your own language is too close to the original, then you are plagiarizing, even if you do provide a citation.”
. . .Second, Gay appears to lift material from scholar Carol Swain in at least two instances. In one passage, summarizing the distinction between “descriptive representation” and “substantive representation,” she copies the phrasing and language nearly verbatim from Swain’s book Black Faces, Black Interests, without providing a citation of any kind. Swain writes:
phic characteristics . . . and more “substantive representation,” the correspondence between representatives’ goals and those of their constituents.
Gay’s version is virtually the same, with slight modifications to the diction and punctuation:
Social scientists have concentrated . . . between descriptive representation (the statistical correspondence of demographic characteristics) and substantive representation (the correspondence of legislative goals and priorities).
Gay’s use of Swain’s material is a straightforward violation of the university’s rule on “verbatim plagiarism,” which states that one “must give credit to the author of the source material, either by placing the source material in quotation marks and providing a clear citation, or by paraphrasing the source material and providing a clear citation”—neither of which Gay followed.
Later in the paper, Gay also uses identical language to Swain, without adding quotation marks, as required.
Now these are in her thesis, but a thesis, considered a publication of sorts, is subject to the same standards of plagiarism as is a term paper—or perhaps even higher standards. And there are accusations of plagiarism in other essays and published papers. To me, these rise to a level of plagiarism that, if true, would merit a sanction or downgrading in an undergraduate paper. In a graduate thesis or published scholarly paper, the copying is more serious. And both articles say that Gay’s copying violates Harvard’s standards of plagiarism. The Harvard Board of Overseers, however, feels differently (see below).
The matter is reported in today’s Harvard Crimson.
The Harvard Corporation expressed concerns about allegations of plagiarism in University President Claudine Gay’s academic work Tuesday morning, even as the board declared its unanimous support for Harvard’s embattled president, providing Gay with a path forward to remain in office.
“As members of the Harvard Corporation, we today reaffirm our support for President Gay’s continued leadership of Harvard University,” the board wrote in a University-wide statement on Tuesday. “In this tumultuous and difficult time, we unanimously stand in support of President Gay.”
The Corporation — the University’s highest governing body — finally broke its silence one week after Gay’s controversial congressional testimony, giving Gay some immediate job security while raising new questions about the integrity of her scholarly work and bringing into doubt whether her tenure will be safe in the long term.
While the Corporation said it did not believe that the allegations amount to misconduct, it announced that Gay agreed to amend two publications.
“On December 9, the Fellows reviewed the results, which revealed a few instances of inadequate citation,” the Fellows wrote. “While the analysis found no violation of Harvard’s standards for research misconduct, President Gay is proactively requesting four corrections in two articles to insert citations and quotation marks that were omitted from the original publications.”
These accusations, given with examples, make the case for Gay’s retention less certain, and moved me from s “don’t fire her” stand to being on the fence. However, as noted above, the Harvard board of overseers, even considering the plagiarism, dismissed it in a letter today shown below (the highlighting was added by a colleague). That letter, affirming that Gay will stay on, does note that Gay is going to correct four instances of accused plagiarism. This is a tacit admission that she did vi0late academic publishing rules, but also says that her copying doesn’t rise to Harvard’s standards of plagiarism. But Gay’s promise to correct four instances of what looks like plagiarism is not to repent for any accademic sin, but presumably to quiet the accusers. Finally, although the accusations appeared this month, Harvard says that it’s known about them since October.
Note as well that the letter below takes Gay’s administration to task asserting that the University should have immediately condemned Hamas’s attack instead of waffling about it. They wouldn’t have had to make such a statement if Harvard had a Kalven-esque policy of institutional neutrality. (The University of Chicago, which pioneered institutional neutrality of colleges, didn’t condemn Hamas’s attack, or say anything judgmental about the war.)
Of course it would be very difficult to fire Harvard’s first black woman President since the “optics” of that would cause a huge uproar, but we don’t know what role, if any, the question of identity played in this decision.
I have no strong feelings one way or another about whether Gay stays on. However, she absolutely must reform the free-speech ethos of Harvard University so that First-Amendment speech becomes the norm, that Harvard becomes institutionally neutral, and that any student code of conduct does not infringe on speech while preventing physical violence. There must be no double standards in which things like “microaggressions” are punished but saying “kill the Jews” is acceptable (I’m on the side of allowing both).
Today’s letter:
I have no idea how President Gay is going to bring about an atmosphere of comity at Harvard while at the same time allowing freedom of speech. The overseers above, by arguing that the administration should have condemned Hamas’s attack, is implicitly saying that it does not favor a policy of institutional neutrality on political or ideological issues. That seems to mean that the Board of Overseers is not favorably disposed to such a policy, and that bodes poorly for Harvard. The letter implies that Harvard should be issuing official statements about egregious political issues.
Suppose a Harvard student has lifted entire paragraphs from other authors and presented it as their own work. What authority does Harvard have now to punish that student when their own President has gotten away with it?
At a minimum, if Gay remains there is now a huge double standard at Harvard with regard to plagiarism!
I think it’s even worse because Claudine Gay *was* a Harvard PhD student when she plagiarized passages in her dissertation.
I don’t often disagree with our host but I think it would be fine (maybe even bracing) for Penny Pritzker and other Harvard leaders to decide they made a mistake in hiring Gay and promoting her to Dean and then President.
Gay is clearly not a great scholar as evidenced by her plagiarism. The full extent of her plagiarism was easy to check because there is so little of it: I had published more and better research by the time I got my first faculty job than Gay has published over her whole academic career (yes different disciplines, no it’s not impossible to make these comparisons). Lots of academic administrators do the same: one of my department chairs published a book while he was chair; one of my former provosts published dozens of articles and book chapters while he was provost.
None of this is personal criticism of Claudine Gay herself (setting aside the criticism of her decision to plagiarize and her denial of the plagiarism). She was smart and energetic enough to get into Stanford as an undergraduate, and into Harvard for a PhD, and leverage that experience into a junior faculty job back at Stanford. But it’s clear that’s where her career should have stopped. Gay couldn’t get tenure at Stanford except through a corrupt process (her former PhD advisor at Harvard offered her a job at Harvard, and she used this to leverage tenure at Stanford where she had only 5 articles and no book published). She’s just obviously not qualified to be a professor at a top university, let alone Dean or President (just as it’s obvious I’m not qualified to be those things either). It’s embarrassing but not tragic for both Gay and Harvard to realize this at last, correct the mistake in a way that’s as humane as possible for Gay, and put a more talented and accomplished scholar in place at Harvard.
But Dr. Gay works in the field of Disparate Impact Studies, a subdivision of DEI Studies. In this field, standards of scholarship, originality, productivity, and even the absence of plagiarism do not apply, and are rejected as parts of the system of oppression. It is also apparent at Harvard, and in many lesser parishes, that a degree and a few publications (plagiarized or not) in these fields fully qualifies any practitioner for leadership offices of Dean, Vice Pres, Pres, etc. The situation is exactly comparable to the career pathway in Holy Mother Church—which, as we well know, has made such vast contributions to human welfare.
Harvard needs a new motto !
I suggest, pace Nietzsche, ‘What doesn’t kill us, makes us Stronger. Or more Gay.’
Two decades ago, L Tribe and C Ogletree of Harvard Law were both credibly accused of the misuse of sources; neither suffered any real consequences for such egregious misbehavior, which would not have been tolerated in the work of a student.
One or or two instances of copying others’ written work can be forgiven, but so many instances tends to imply plagiarism.
And they know it, too. That nonsense about standing by her at this difficult time means she’s getting a pass for political reasons. And now all Harvard grads may be assumed to be cheats who graduated from an institution that does not punish plagiarism. Shame on them.
Perhaps we might expect a follow up paper: “Taking Charge: Black Academic Success and the Redefinition of Plagarism.” After all, both “Worship of the Written Word” and “Perfectionism” have been identified as “characteristics of white supremacy culture.”*
* From Dismantling Racism: A Workbook for Social Change Groups, by Kenneth Jones and Tema Okun, ChangeWork, 2001
That paper practically writes itself now that you’ve crafted the title.
At first I thought this post about Gay’s plagiarism was irrelevant to your usual warnings in re. free speech and woke ideology. But I notice one point of relevance: this is what you get, when you select your academics or administrators based on their identity vs. based on merit. At least, it looks that way… You reap what you sow.
Yes, the efforts to introduce diversity at all costs and for its own sake predictably lead to installing mediocre and dishonest people at the top of the food chain.
The plagiarism stuff – while necessary to examine in this day and age, and a thesis is a necessary step in career progress – is independent of the institutional ideological capture. That is, a plagiarist might not have abused power.
It also will devolve into a competition of whose thesis sucks the least …
… or which one has the $20 bill in it.
By the way:
Am I the only one who just reminded themselves of how to spell “plagiarism”?
“…Am I the only one who just reminded themselves of how to spell “plagiarism”?…”
You could’ve just copied it from somewhere else…
Nailed it!
I just got conscientized, attaining critical consciousness, of the mystification of plagiarism.
To me, plagiarism proves total lack of integrity of the person doing it, making it unlikely that they wouldn’t abuse power, given the opportunity.
Yep – that occurred to me – after the edit timer ran out. One of those moments, when in articulating a false statement proves the opposite to be true, somehow.
… it’s funny, debating how much plagiarism is acceptable, what plagiarism actually is,… like we’re getting manipulated…
[ snaps out of it ]
But I digress.
Gonna be tricky to fix a problem that is a design feature of critical pedagogy and DEI. When ‘de-centering whiteness’ across all fields is the mission, preferred speech is the outcome. And the scales must be tipped by the thumb of admin and profs. A solid first step to demonstrate understanding of the issue and good faith in addressing it would be elimination of DEI statements/requirements in hiring. The smirking, robotic answers at the hearing leave doubt that sincerity is forthcoming.
Plagiarism is not okay. In high school in the 60s I would have been given an F on such a paper.
But may I say that you would not fail for such plagiarism today: probably a tsk-tsk and a B-.
A senior kid in my high school English class really did get a zero for a plagiarized essay. I saw the paper. The stricken girl, in tears, showed it around. The “sea lawyers” who protested on her behalf said she should have got 50% just for putting the work together. 🙂 Knowing the teacher, I’m sure he stood his ground.
Anecdote: Years after I graduated from high school, I saw his name in the guest book of a restaurant a few lines above us in another city. It was an usual name in Canada especially at the time (but perhaps not so much in his home country.) I like to think I recognized his handwriting from a whole year of his blackboard notes and comments on marked papers but of course I have no way of knowing. So all of you high school teachers out there, your former students do think of you.
In her written statement to the Committee, she said: “We encourage the vigorous exchange of ideas but we will not, under any circumstances, permit speech that incites violence, threatens safety, or violates Harvard’s policies against bullying and harassment. My administration has repeatedly made crystal clear that antisemitism and other forms of hate have no place at Harvard. Threats and intimidation have no place at Harvard.” Too bad she didn’t stick to that language. Does her clumsy response to the question at the hearing only indicate that she is not a politician, skilled in avoiding verbal traps, rather than an academic, used to extended discussion, considering all the exceptions and resistant to simple statements?
Isn’t this what “equity” promises? I’m glad to have her do my brain surgery next month.
This is one hot mess. I’m concerned that a Gay resignation (if one occurs) will be blamed on the “Jewish power” trope lifted from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Even if she survives, I have the same concern.
I’m also concerned that the Harvard Board of Overseers knew about the plagiarism allegations in October and that President Gay is taking steps to correct them retroactively. If her request to correct her work is new, Harvard is doing it in the hope that they can keep their president and limit the damage. If her request to correct the work was already in progress before the allegations became public, Harvard was attempting to protect itself preemptively. Either way, the plagiarism charge adds fuel to this fire, and it remains to be seen what will ultimately happen.
Wait a minute! The Harvard Board needs a President fluent in the required DEI-speak and who represents an oppressed minority. What about Ward Churchill? Remember him? Out of the news for 15 years, but he checks all the boxes, including plagiarism. Is he still looking for a job? Of course, I realize he is male (by assignment at birth), but he could
transition.
Bill Ackman had made a compelling case in his public letters for ousting Claudine PRIOR to signal-boosting Rufo and friends. While it’s unlikely that the Board would have fired her, Ackman misread the tea leaves in bringing in strongman Rufo, whose petty trawling through Claudine’s dissertation and papers (along with an Epstein smear!), would be quite easily recognized as weaponized propaganda and ad-hominem everything by the faculty and Board. I agree with their decision, even though I was sad to see that she had a pattern of failed attributions. I’m sure she’s embarrassed. But the errors in the papers can be corrected, which is the right thing to do. Scholarship isn’t her strength, despite the awards she’s received for it. Leadership is. She’s been largely an administrator for some time. The challenge moving forward will be whether Steve Pinker and Jeffrey Flier have gained her rapport enough to persuade her to adopt Steve’s 5-point plan that would implement institutional neutrality, correct the wayward DEI ways, and end the heckler’s veto and actions that disrupt classroom learning. If she doesn’t self-correct beyond apologies to the “hurting,” if she doubles down on speech restrictions (e.g., increasingly pairing antisemitism with Islamophobia, making any speech that offends on these matters forbidden), and fails to dismantle DEI, Harvard’s reputation will continue to tank. This can’t be blamed on Republican power grabs, unlike scholarly character attacks and dirty Epstein smears. While Ackman erred in entangling himself with Rufo’s “own the elite libs” egomaniacal moment, the world is waking up. I can’t say I disagree with the calls to defund my employer. I support a loss of federal funding to Harvard if we continue to breach title VI and continue to discriminate in admissions. I support donors pulling out if we do not formally adopt institutional neutrality and ditch DEI.
“While it’s unlikely that the Board would have fired her, Ackman misread the tea leaves…”
Yes spot on. Ackman himself said the same last night, and admitted if he had stopped tweeting about it they might have fired Gay. https://twitter.com/BillAckman/status/1734401275142291640
I don’t think so. I suspect they are too thrilled to have for President a person of the right color assigned female at birth. To me, she will be fired only if caught holding a murder weapon over the victim’s body.
Ackman’s role in the fiasco should be irrelevant to the board’s decisions. The board’s decision should rest solely on the facts before them. An extraneous party’s behavior -trolling- should not be a factor governing the suitability-criteria of the person occupying the president’s office. Confusing the messenger with the message is fatuous.
Are they adults?
“Bill trolled us, so we need to keep Claudine”? Surely not.
Gay is a weakened and crippled administrator.
How can she be effective?
I agree with you that she has a moral duty to resign. My sense is that she and the Board see her as a victim, attacked because she’s a black female (and because people at Harvard are attacked all the time for the prestige of being here), which means it doesn’t matter that she has failed thus far as President to meet one of the biggest moments of the century. Thus, Ackman’s attempts to convey what so many of us see just got fed back into their brains as a justification for DEI. Claudine Gay is the apotheosis of all-things woke. She was the perfect DEI hire because she is black from an educated family and dissertated on things that help get universities funding. Her career is wokeness. It is DEI. Gay is what the Board wanted. I suspect the only way forward from this from a ousting standpoint is for governmental funding and donor money to dry up, which might lead to the Board being replaced. I don’t know how that happens (if even possible), but unless they go, Gay won’t. Short of this, we are back to trying to persuade internally.
Part of me hopes that the Board put Gay on notice, as in, one more catastrophic fail and you are out. Maybe they did but won’t say so publicly.
The fact that the Board knew about the plagiarism and tried proactively to make it go away is reprehensible. Rather than trying to sweep it under the rug, they should have reported the problem and put Gay’s appointment on probation. Maybe they did that. Who knows? Now, even the Board looks complicit. What a mess.
“Now, even the Board looks complicit.”
They are.
Prior to the allegations of plagiarism and the availability of documentation amply substantiating the veracity of the allegations, I was of the mind that Gay should remain president and be given a chance to reform/learn.
I must add that I don’t appreciate the mob mentality on X(twitter) and elsewhere vilifying Gay and piling it on. Still, none of that matters in the light of Harvard’s reputation and the future of the school.
She must resign.
“A few instances of inadequate citation”? What happened to Veritas?
The board must cut the BS. When a hire is made based on gender and skin color, SHIT happens. Everything “other than veritas” happens. It’s inevitable.
She must resign. It’s simply the right thing to do.
The collective lack of moral clarity is mind-numbing.
Rosemary, did you see this tweet? https://x.com/MonicaCrowley/status/1734596443493519852?s=20
For those who aren’t on X(Twitter):
by @MonicaCrowley:
“Hi @Harvard
Keeping Claudine Gay as President means you condone anti-Semitism, racism and plagiarism.
“Elite” institution, my ass.
You are nothing more than a corrupt Marxist indoctrination factory that traffics in evil.”
I don’t think this is going to go away. The external optics among everyone who isn’t also at a university under the fear or spell of DEI increasingly matter, though will it all just feed back into polarization?
Even if there had been proper citations given, the piece does not seem to contribute anything useful.
I get that the entire grievance studies industry mostly repeats the same language and phraseology in order to claim different things are racist, but this reads like a high school research paper rather than a Harvard dissertation.
Once again, I never obtained my PHD, so I speak from a less than expert position. However, it seems like there are two very different standards of scholarship at play. The rigorous traditional sort, and an alternate scholarship with much lower standards for research, reasoning, and even proofreading.
I have always assumed the goal of allowing these two different sets of standards was to provide opportunities to enroll and retain people who do not meet the traditional standards of literacy, study habits, and self discipline. Which allows diversity goals to be met.
That and turning good kids into entitled and angry revolutionaries, who lack any useful skills.
Putting people from the lower tier of scholarship into powerful administrative positions seems likely to spell doom for the more rigorous programs. They will never grasp the importance of that rigor, and probably see it as a form of oppression.
A lot of these alternative scholarship disciplines do seem like the nerf versions of the real thing…
I was thinking the same thing without having studied he whole piece. The best I managed was an honors degree, but had I handed in a paper with anything like that level of plagiarism, at any point, I would not have said degree.
It might not have been a Harvard or other super high-level institution, but the philosophy department back then at La Trobe was world class with names on the faculty like Peter Singer, Frank Jackson, JJC Smart, and many others.
I would have liked to try a PHD and ‘add another brick to wall of knowledge’ as my adviser said but stuff happens, point being I couldn’t bear handing anything so dodgy let alone accepting any reward as a consequence. And as I said, they wouldn’t have allowed it. Thankfully.
But that was a very long time ago.
Your descriptor of “grievance studies industry” is perfect!
But Gay doesn’t have to be held to the usual standard when it comes to plagiarism, of course…
“Anti-plagiarism policies ‘harm Black and Latinx students,’ professor argues” https://archive.ph/5AVCo
Plagiarism is such a bourgeois “crime.” All these petty people, worried about their individual concerns: Did he give me credit? Did she let people know that she used MY wonderful turn of phrase, benefited from MY brilliant insight? It fits hand-in-glove with the money-grubbing concerns of capitalism and copyright, a holdover from a time when every “accomplished” white man wanted public credit for everything he thought or did. Real scholars care about community. Real scholars share the wealth. Real scholars recognize that they didn’t build this, they didn’t think this, they didn’t do this on their own. It was accomplished through a thousand unpredictable influences of friends and family; colleagues, teachers, and mentors; artifacts of place and time. Whatever “you” did, we did. It is the product of us all—and the credit belongs to us all.
This is so good I fell for it. Well done!
+1
Good example of mystification.
Dr.Gay’s thesis, and much else in her field of scholarship, resembles the qualities found in the work of Ward Churchill by a University of Colorado investigating committee; i.e.,
“nearly all works of synthesis and reinterpretation, drawing upon studies by other scholars, not monographs describing new research based on primary sources.” Hence my nomination of Ward Churchill to succeed her as President of Harvard. Mr. Churchill could be called the grandfather of this entire line of scholarship—except, of course, that the word “grandfather” is disapproved on current lists of “problematic” words.
I bring, from eXtwitter:
“I opposed @Harvard firing their president, Claudine Gay. Having a plagiarist at the helm of our most prestigious academic institution is the perfect symbol for an utterly corrupt system.”
-Peter Boghossian
https://x.com/peterboghossian/status/1734717608375820406?s=46
Plagiarism is fraud plus power, so it can’t be committed by a member of an oppressed group.