The newsletter seemed innocuous. In January, the chief diversity officer at Johns Hopkins Medicine kicked off her “Monthly Diversity Digest” with a list of nearby events for Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
Then Sherita Hill Golden outlined a “diversity word of the month”: privilege.
“Privilege is a set of unearned benefits given to people who are in a specific social group,” Golden wrote. “Privilege operates on personal, interpersonal, cultural and institutional levels, and it provides advantages and favors to members of dominant groups at the expense of members of other groups.” Privileged groups, she continued, included white people, people without physical disabilities, men, Christians, and English-speaking people.
Administrators and faculty members have been parroting similar definitions for years. This time, however, it struck a nerve online.
“John Hopkins just sent out this hit list of people automatically guilty of ‘privilege’ whether they know it or not,” wrote an account on X called End Wokeness, which has over two million followers. The post included screenshots of Golden’s newsletter. Powerful voices soon chimed in, such as Elon Musk and Donald Trump Jr.
A Republican congressman even called on the university to fire her, saying her behavior was “not expected from an institution that receives hundreds of millions of dollars in funding from the federal government — including dollars to fund that office of Chief Diversity Officer.”
Last week, Golden resigned as chief diversity officer. She remains at Johns Hopkins as a professor of endocrinology and metabolism.
As politicians and activists on the right continue to lob attacks against diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts — invigorated by the fallout from colleges’ responses to the war in the Middle East — Golden has become the latest in a series of Black college administrators and faculty to face vitriol. In one way, the Johns Hopkins incident stands out: It is a private university in a state where political leadership is dominated by Democrats.
What happened to Golden also highlights just how much the DEI landscape has shifted: Understandings of power and privilege that have dominated campus discourse for years are now coming under a microscope.
For the scholars who believe DEI has been politically weaponized to disproportionately target administrators of color, the moment calls for colleges to stand firm by the frameworks that have long guided diversity work. But some wonder whether concepts like privilege — which asserts that society is built on systems of oppression that benefit some identity groups at the expense of others — remain viable as a core part of how colleges try to promote inclusion.
“I would like to say that these frameworks are here to stay,” said Jennifer C. Mueller, an associate professor of sociology at Skidmore College who studies how ignorance reinforces racism. “The question is: Will we be able to do so in a way that we can institutionalize them in the efforts we make to try and address the problems that we care about?”
In the aftermath of the viral post, Golden apologized in a follow-up email about how she’d described privilege. “I retract and disavow the definition I shared,” she wrote. Golden said her words did not “inform and support an inclusive community.”
“In fact,” she continued, “because it was overly simplistic and poorly worded, it had the opposite effect of being exclusionary and hurtful to members of our community.” Golden didn’t respond to The Chronicle’s request for comment.
Leadership from Johns Hopkins Medicine apologized, too. According to The Baltimore Banner, Theodore L. DeWeese, dean of the medical faculty and chief executive of Johns Hopkins Medicine, and Kevin W. Sowers, president of Johns Hopkins Health System and executive vice president of Johns Hopkins Medicine, wrote in a January email that Golden’s definition of privilege “runs counter to the values of our institution, and our mission and commitment to serve everyone equally.” Their message said Golden’s apology was a response to “feedback from our community.”
“We fully support and appreciate her decision to do so,” the pair said of her retraction, “and as leaders of Johns Hopkins Medicine, we, too, repudiate this language.”
A spokesperson from Johns Hopkins Medicine wrote in an email that institutional leaders “do not dispute the concepts of advantage or power differentials.” However, Golden’s definition of privilege “gave the wrong impression that it was an institutional position,” the spokesperson said.
Hundreds of students and faculty backed Golden in a letter to institutional leaders, arguing that Golden’s newsletter “reflects the well-known concept of privilege,” The Baltimore Banner reported.
Several scholars who spoke with The Chronicle agreed. “The definition that she gave was the same type of definition that I would have given under similar circumstances,” said Sharon D. Wright Austin, a professor of political science at the University of Florida who studies political behavior and activism among African Americans.
Researchers use the framework of power and privilege to look at asymmetries in who benefits from certain decisions and policies, said Charles H.F. Davis III, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor who studies race and policing in higher education.
“When I look at it also in relation to the scholarship that exists on this topic, it is deeply and mentally well-founded,” Davis said of Golden’s definition.
Mueller, the Skidmore sociology professor, said the framework of power and privilege rose to prominence because of its focus on how systems and structures ultimately grant certain groups greater access to opportunity. That produced some “aha!” moments, she said. Racism, for instance, could be examined systemically instead of as an individual act.
We are expected to discuss things like power and privilege and race, and when we give an answer, regardless of what answer we give, someone is going to be offended.
Over time, however, Mueller said people didn’t talk as much about the systemic aspect of privilege. In that sense, while Golden’s definition was “routine,” Mueller said it’s easy to see how the idea of privilege has generated criticism — because it runs contrary to the individualistic way that many Americans think. People tend to resist stereotypes, known in scholarly terms as essentializing, that they believe “flatten” their personal experiences or prescribe them certain characteristics based on their identity, Mueller said.
“That’s not to say that the folks using a definition like [Golden’s] are responsible for conservative attacks,” she said, “but that is to say that conservatives are running with them and pointing to definitions like these and saying that they essentialize groups in a way that is, I guess to some people’s minds, unconstitutional.”
Following the surge in racial-justice activism in 2020, terms like power and privilege became mainstream as DEI-related work entered the public consciousness in a new way.
Now, Mueller and the other scholars said, the country appears to be in a moment of retrenchment. They pointed to the widespread efforts to curtail critical race theory, which some argue became a misnomer for debates over how to teach about race. More recently, DEI advocates have argued that their work has been taken out of context — and used as a proxy for anything that has to do with race, gender, or other marginalized identities.
“Part of the challenge is that when these terms get deployed as Dr. Golden used them, as many people in institutions use them, they’re doing so to a public that often has little appreciation for the mountains and mountains of evidence and analysis that have gone into validating the veracity and utility of these concepts,” Mueller said.
The evolution of privilege into a taboo topic reflects the perilous environment for campus diversity leaders and those seen as advocates for it. As they do what their institutions have directed them to do, they risk stepping on political landmines.
That’s the context in which Claudine Gay stepped down as Harvard’s first Black president following a tidal wave of criticism sparked by her ill-fated congressional testimony on antisemitism and allegations of plagiarism. At Texas A&M University, Kathleen O. McElroy became a target of conservative critics who viewed her as a DEI advocate; it derailed her hiring. Nikole Hannah-Jones faced similar blowback at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
For Black academics, who are more likely to lead diversity offices, the latest incident with Golden reinforces the feeling that “it could happen to any of us,” said Austin, the University of Florida political science professor.
A lot of diversity work right now is demonize, demean, divide.
“We’re in the position where we are expected to discuss things like power and privilege and race, and when we give an answer, regardless of what answer we give, someone is going to be offended,” she said.
The Black Faculty and Staff Association at Johns Hopkins said in an open letter that the university’s leadership should have done more to support Golden by “offering context about Johns Hopkins’ values and the hard histories from which they are drawn.”
“When institutions do nothing, they become not only culpable and complicit, but actively participatory,” said Davis, of the University of Michigan. “We need to think about what institutions can and should do in these instances that would not allow for those things to be possible.”
In the email announcing Golden’s resignation, provided by a spokesperson, Johns Hopkins Medicine leaders said they would “continue to address health disparities and increase retention and recruitment of diverse talent, all in service of the richly diverse communities we serve.”
To Eboo Patel, the founder of Interfaith America, an advocacy group that promotes dialogue across differences, the debate around DEI was “bound to blow up.”
“A lot of diversity work right now is demonize, demean, divide. Find people who you want to call the oppressed, demean them, constantly encourage them to tell a victim story, rather than a story of power, and then divide everybody into oppressor [or] oppressed,” Patel told The Chronicle. “That’s not the right way to go about this.”
Colleges’ responses to the war in the Middle East have further fueled such critiques. From the December congressional hearing on antisemitism to a hearing last week in which Republicans made their case against DEI, conservative lawmakers have argued that diversity offices’ endorsement of oppressed-and-oppressor frameworks has created a breeding ground for antisemitism on campuses.
Patel doesn’t support the recent campaign against DEI and believes colleges should explore the forces behind racism and other forms of discrimination. But he has argued that in order for colleges to continue diversity work, they must embrace other frameworks that seek to uplift individuals’ identities.
“When the challenges you might face with external forces are taken to be the most important thing, that’s wrong, because you are effectively missing the point of diversity, which is the pride and strength and inspiration that people get from their identities,” Patel said. “That is the point of diversity.”
As attacks on DEI work and the people behind it rise in tandem, it’s clear that conservative activists and a subset of the general public don’t see privilege in the same way that higher ed does. Colleges will have to contend with their questions and criticisms.
