With one infelicitous phrase, a professor’s career can spiral toward destruction. This is not new, but it often feels like it’s getting worse.
Witness the fate of the psychiatrist Jeffrey Lieberman, who was suspended last month by Columbia University and terminated from his post as chief of psychiatric services at New York-Presbyterian Hospital. His transgression was a single imprudent tweet about a minor celebrity. “Whether a work of art or a freak of nature she’s a beautiful sight to behold,” Lieberman wrote, extolling the South Sudanese model Nyakim Gatwech. Lieberman was commenting on a tweet that described Gatwech as the darkest-skinned person on the planet, according to Guinness World Records. In fact, there is no such measurement, from Guinness or anyone else. Even an Ivy League professor can be duped by bad information.
Amid a tsunami of social media outrage, a familiar ritual played out. Lieberman issued an apology. His tweet was “sexist and racist,” Lieberman wrote, reflecting “prejudices and stereotypical assumptions.” But in our current moment, saying you’re sorry is rarely enough.
Writing in The New York Times, Lieberman’s Columbia colleague John McWhorter, a linguistics professor, noted that “freak of nature”—the part of the tweet causing the most fury—was offered in praise and that the term is not always used as a pejorative. Yes, the phrase conjures a hateful history of objectifying and reviling Black female bodies, and Lieberman shouldn’t have used it, as McWhorter, who is Black, acknowledged. As is often the case when there’s a racial imbroglio of this type, McWhorter used his considerable platform to urge calm and reflection rather than dismissal and ostracism. I agree. Given the laudatory tone of the tweet, it’s absurd to imagine that Lieberman was demeaning Gatwech. Instead, he seemed to be saying that she’s hot.