Al Sharpton, the original racial grievance merchant, has chimed in on the Claudine Gay firing — and is getting slapped for his trouble by sports media legend Sage Steele. 

“This is an attack on every Black woman in this country who’s put a crack in the glass ceiling,” blathered Sharpton.

He blatantly ignored the fact that Gay was caught red-handed engaged in serial plagiarism, including of an acknowledgments section. 

And of course Sharpton, who infamously led an antisemitic march during the Crown Heights pogrom of 1991, couldn’t spare a word for Gay’s passive and cowardly backing of antisemitic thugs at Harvard and elsewhere. 

Steele, who is biracial, slammed the Rev: “I just wish he would go away. … Al Sharpton pretends that he knows what every single person of color in this country thinks, believes how they should live, how they should act, how they should vote.”

Her justified outrage echoes that of ex-prof Carol Swain, one of the victims of Gay’s plagiarism: “Stop listening to the racist mob of whites and blacks who cry racism while being among the worst offenders.”

To be clear: There was no racism involved in Gay’s ouster. 

She broke the trust placed in her by students and parents and embarrassed herself, her employer and her profession. 

The scandal is that she hung on as long as she did and that she is merely getting pushed off into a cushy faculty job, still receiving her vast and unmerited salary.

That’s when the penalties for a student caught engaging in that level of plagiarism would be severe and swift. 

Sharpton latched on, as ever, because he smelled free publicity in the Gay affair.

Not for any high moral reason. 

But the pushback against fake racism claims is a welcome sign that maybe, just maybe, America’s getting sick of sociopathic race hustlers like Sharpton (and his heirs Nikole Hannah-Jones, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibram X. Kendi and others).

The sooner they go away — or are made to go away, by ending the huge institutional support they enjoy — the better off we’ll all be.