By Claudia Sanchez
On 14 August, Professor Jason Arday was found dead. He was 41.
Nine days earlier, he had resigned from Cambridge after weeks of relentless media scrutiny, saying it had reached “the limits of what any person should reasonably be expected to endure.”
News Cord
The disproportionate hounding of Jason Arday was racialised from the beginning.
What started with questions about plagiarism became something else. Something all too familiar to black people everywhere. The media dissected every part of this man’s life: his academic work, fundraising, running, childhood, whether he had really been non-verbal, whether he was really autistic. Former classmates were dug up. His whole life was turned into content.
I am not saying that black academics should be exempt from scrutiny. But don’t pretend what we witnessed was some noble commitment to honesty and academic standards.
Britain does not care about integrity like that.
Cambridge historian William O’Reilly was found by a university tribunal to have published work containing substantial passages taken from a student’s essays. He kept his position.
Nobody decided he represented white academia. Nobody asked whether white professors were being handed jobs they weren’t intellectually capable of doing. He got to be one man who did something wrong.
Black people are never afforded that luxury.
Tony Blair took this country into a catastrophic war in Iraq on the basis of claims about weapons of mass destruction that did not exist. Government failure at Grenfell killed 72 people. Successive governments imposed austerity with devastating consequences. White powerful people fail, lie and destroy lives, and somehow they always manage to fail upwards.
But look at the energy poured into investigating whether Jason Arday really ran the distances he said he ran.
Be serious.
Jason was a working-class black man from an estate in South London who became Cambridge’s youngest black professor. And that is why this became much bigger than plagiarism.
The right has spent years attacking diversity, anti-racism and the idea that structural racism shapes who gets ahead in Britain. Jason Arday became perfect material for that project: Black, working class, autistic, excelling.
Every disputed citation became evidence against DEI. Every exaggeration became evidence against black advancement. Every inconsistency became proof that attempts to remove structural barriers mean promoting black people who aren’t good enough.
They weren’t only prosecuting Jason. They were prosecuting us.
A white person’s failure belongs to them. A Black person’s alleged failure becomes evidence about black people.
And who helped drive this story: a self-described “race realist” who has argued that Black people are less intellectually capable and that under a genuine meritocracy there would be virtually no black people in elite positions outside sport and entertainment.
Someone starts from the position that black people are biologically less intelligent, looks at a black Cambridge professor, and becomes a major source in a campaign about whether that black professor deserved to be there.
And the mainstream press treated this as a debate about whether black people deserve to advance at all.
It’s open season on black people.
This week, black A Level students at Brampton got top grades, the way they do every year, and suddenly people ask whether they are being marked more leniently. Labour’s deputy leader, Lucy Powell posted a picture congratulating a student who did work experience in her office for excellent A Level results. The comments are predictable and yet still stomach churning. Black people get senior jobs and suddenly DEI must have helped them. Black academics progress and suddenly “standards” are under threat.
Do badly and racism is an excuse. Do well and diversity must have helped you.
There is literally no way to win.
Even his autism had to be put on trial. The same people constantly telling us autism does not really impact your life suddenly seemed desperate to prove Jason wasn’t really autistic as it would have prevented his accomplishments.
Why?
They need structural barriers to be imaginary. Racism can’t affect your outcomes. Poverty can’t affect your outcomes. Disability can’t affect your outcomes. But if a black, poor, disabled person succeeds, apparently that can’t be real either.
Britain loves meritocracy because it makes the class system look fair. Private schools, inherited wealth, networks and family connections disappear and become “merit”. But when somebody climbs up from the bottom, suddenly everybody wants to inspect the ladder.
How did you get here? Who helped you? Were the standards lowered? Did you really deserve it?
Jason did not have to be perfect for the campaign against him to be racist. He did not have to be innocent of every accusation. He was allowed to be complicated. He was allowed to have flaws. He was allowed to fuck up.
He was allowed to be human.
I don’t know what exactly caused Jason Arday’s death, and none of us should pretend we do.
But I know what happened before it.
We watched his childhood questioned. His autism questioned. His achievements questioned.
So no, I am not going to pretend this wasn’t political.
The hounding of Jason Arday was political. The attempt to turn him into the poster boy for “Woke 1” (AOC voice) was political. The obsession with whether Black people have really earned our positions is political.
Everything involving us always is.
They do not care about integrity equally.
They care about hierarchy. They care about who is allowed to fail privately and who gets turned into an example.
But beneath the headlines, the culture war and everything they tried to make him represent, there was still a human being at the centre of it all.
Jason.
In the words of his family, a “gentle man” who “always wanted to see the best in everyone”. An amazing father, partner, brother, and son.
Rest in power ✊🏾
Image: Jason Arday in 2024; Author ConiferousForest19; Licenced under the Creative CommonsCC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication Licence.
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The above article was originally published here on the For Liberation, Against Racism blog.