Jason Arday – a modern day lynching

Professor Jason Arday, who was found dead just days after being driven out of his post at Cambridge University, was subjected to what can only be described as a brutal psychological assault, which ended in tragedy.

Arday’s family described him as a gentle man who sought the best in others, saying that “Jason was subjected to a campaign of sustained abuse for more than three years since he accepted the role of professor at Cambridge University” and that it had become too much for him to bear. They condemned the public cruelty and misinformation directed at him.

The vitriol continued after his death with desperate justifications for the unrestrained campaign against him. “He deserved it”, is their argument, claiming it was all about plagiarism and academic rigour, not race. Who on earth believes that? They don’t even believe it themselves!

The university authorities should be thoroughly ashamed. Instead of promptly launching an internal review as soon as issues were raised, they postponed and prevaricated and issued pompous statements about race, which in the end were a dagger in Arday’s heart.  They then did a noisy about-turn when disgraced academic and self-described “race realist” Nathan Cofnas started getting massive coverage for his totally extreme version of events.

As The Guardian journalist Jason Okundaye commented, Cambridge treated Arday “not as a scholar but as a mascot, one who was particularly expedient for an institution that had been regularly embarrassed” by its low numbers of Black students and staff. In Okundaye’s view, Arday was used as “a vehicle for Cambridge to signal its institutional progress”.

They loudly trumpeted their investigation after receiving what they claimed was “new information” – but it wasn’t new, they knew it all already. They cashed in on Professor Arday’s celebrity, using him to suggest they are now inclusive and diverse (they are not) and then weakly failed him when the hyenas began to circle.

Universities and truth, humanity, principles – have virtually no overlap these days. Overall, they are self-serving, grubby institutions, desperate for money and almost without exception entirely subsumed into capitalist hegemony.

Why was this tale of a young, Black academic such a huge story? Certainly not because of its world significance – just look around you! The issue is not whether something should be investigated. It is why this story was pursued with such ferocity, who was driving it, and what purpose the resulting spectacle served.

It became a weapon in the wider attack on the whole idea of equality, diversity and inclusion, which is official policy in the United States and now taken up enthusiastically by the right in the UK. In the end Arday’s minor academic misdemeanours were weaponised.

Charles Moore, writing in the Telegraph, asserted that: “The basic job of the press is to find out the truth”. But there is academic scrutiny, there is media interest and then there is the vicious, racist British right-wing press which is something else entirely. They are driven, wicked and hate any Black person who dares to step into the establishment – or maybe it would be simpler to say any Black person who comes to their notice.

Moore’s invocation of “the truth” is particularly nauseating, given his own history. In a 1992 article about America he wrote the following: “The Korean sets up the grocery store which the Black then robs, that is the caricature that America recognises”, and he said Americans privately believe “that there really is something different about Blacks, or at least about young Black men” and “If it is true, as it surely is that some races – the Jews are the obvious example – are highly enterprising and talented, it may also be true that some are the opposite.”

And don’t think Moore is doing Jews any favours. We all know that it is only a short step from the trope about the clever Jew to the cunning Jew, the enterprising Jew to the money-grubbing Jew, to outright anti-Semitism and conspiracy thinking.

Cofnas, the so-called whistleblower in the Jason Arday case, is regarded as a “scientific racist”. He was forced to resign from his post-doctoral post at Cambridge when he wrote a blog post asserting that Black people have low intelligence and that in a true meritocracy the number of Black professors at Harvard University would approach zero.

An article by Romain Mohammed reminds us that in February 2024, Cofnas published a piece titled A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution. Its thesis was that any realistic path to victory over what he calls “wokeism” requires élites to accept hereditarianism: the belief that racial gaps in achievement are substantially genetic.

There is a concerted attempt to drive Black people out of leading positions; to deny the reality of racism; for Black people, this is a frightening reality. The journalist and author Nesrine Malik told the Guardian that it is hard “not to feel this is about all of us”. But you have to ask the question: why is that the case? Why is there still such backwardness in social discourse? Why does any of it really have to do with his being Black?

There is no such thing as racial difference in the human race, except at the most superficial level. It is a made-up category reflecting imperialism, colonialism and all the worst tendencies of greedy humans, seeking justification for conquest and superiority through imagined difference. This is the central argument of critical race theory, and it is absolutely correct, whatever other nonsense has been subsequently woven into this primary argument.

On the other side of the coin, the neoliberal institution has set about turning diversity itself into a commodity. The individual Black success story is useful because it requires no actual change. Cambridge could use Arday to promote their brand but failed when confronted with a real person rather than a cypher. And Black people living in Europe or the USA are squeezed between both sides of this dehumanising infrastructure every day.

In some ways, Arday was a product of the post-truth era – “what is fact, what is fiction, who can say, does it matter – probably not”. Personally, I wouldn’t turn to academia in general for answers to those questions. Clearly, this sparkling but confused individual had lost some of his connection to reality. But from my experience, I think that could be said about many (most?) academics!

The response to his death was immediate. Arday’s postdoctoral students organised a vigil in Cambridge, and thousands of people attended a Stand Up to Racism rally in Trafalgar Square. They were not just remembering Professor Jason Arday; they were also protesting against the vicious racism of the British media that singled out this young man and set out to destroy him and the failure of the anti-racism of institutions that are, in the end, complicit with the enemy. Perhaps we should say, with the Black Panthers, they are complicit with “the Man” – a description of hegemony as eloquent as Gramsci’s.

As Gramsci argued, to overthrow an unjust system, the mass of people must build their own independent culture, philosophy, a “counter-hegemony” to wrest intellectual leadership from the ruling class and their puppy-dog institutions. In such a counter-hegemonic culture, there would be a clear explanation of the whole concept of race, where it came from, who invented it, and why – and how to defeat it.