The men who wore white hoods looked like ordinary people because they were ordinary people. They were neighbours and colleagues and churchgoers who, in the lull between one era of Black progress and the next, would select a person and make a spectacle of destroying them. This was not because that person had done something unforgivable but because it told every other Black person watching to remember their place.
The hoods are gone (for the most part) but the ideology is not. Today it does not need a burning cross but a byline, a media with an agenda and a comment section that is an echo-chamber for racist tropes.
The vilification of Jason Arday was not simply the work of race supremacists or the far-right press, though they were more than willing to light the match. It was also the work of ordinary people, people so disoriented by the fiction that equity initiatives are somehow eroding their entitlement that they joined the pile-on without stopping to ask what they were actually participating in. Social media has made content creators of us all, and every controversy is just another thought piece or an opportunity to virtue-signal. How inhuman this has made us!
There was a more decent way to handle this. Institutions and regulatory bodies exist precisely for situations like these, and investigations could have been conducted as they routinely are for academics across this country, carefully, proportionately and with due process. Liverpool John Moores University did investigate allegations concerning Arday’s PhD and did not uphold them. Cambridge itself had previously defended him, describing the scrutiny as a “vile campaign to undermine his credibility.” Then, as the media pressure intensified, Cambridge reversed course and announced another investigation. Whatever the eventual findings might have been, it’s troubling to watch an institution first defend a person against a public campaign and then become part of the machinery tearing him apart.
If for you this was simply content, ask yourself: where are the names of other academics across the UK who have faced serious, confirmed, longstanding allegations of plagiarism?
If for you this was simply content, ask yourself: Where are the names of other academics across the UK who have faced serious, confirmed, longstanding allegations of plagiarism, some stretching across decades of their careers? Where were the hundreds of articles for them? Where were the childhood friends and former classmates being sought out for interviews? Where were the national conversations about their character, their entire biography, their mental state, their right to exist in the profession? We have seen serious cases of academic misconduct before. There are findings about academics who appropriated the work of others. We have seen careers survive allegations and even confirmed misconduct. A Cambridge tribunal once upheld a plagiarism complaint against one of its own professors, found he had published a student’s work under his own name, and he kept his job. There were no front pages or excavation of his childhood. Yet somehow Jason Arday became a national spectacle!
If you justify your participation by saying he told lies, I would ask you to be honest about the standard you are applying. How many professionals in any field have never embellished, overstated, or misrepresented a single thing on a CV, in a funding application, or in a public biography? How many people have lived a life that would survive the forensic examination Jason was subjected to? Where was the room for grace? What part of an academic dispute warranted journalists contacting classmates from decades ago? What editorial standard produced more sustained coverage of a sociology professor than the British press has ever directed at the many powerful people accused of sexual offences against minors?
Yes, allegations went beyond plagiarism. There were questions about charity figures, about athletic achievements, about the details of a biography that had become central to his public profile. While none of that should be beyond scrutiny, scrutiny is not what happened. What happened was a feeding frenzy where every discrepancy became evidence of total fraud, and every unverified claim became permission for 10 more articles. He resigned, and the coverage did not slow down for a single day.
At some point we have to stop pretending this is what accountability looks like. Accountability has an endpoint. It leads to a finding or a professional consequence. What we witnessed was the transformation of a human being into a spectacle.
The mark they intended to leave
The KKK intended to leave a mark, not only on the person they destroyed but on every Black person forced to witness it. The mark that the media, the commentators, and every person who turned this man’s unravelling into entertainment is the same. They expect Black professionals to watch their backs, to realise that reaching any height means being held to standards that are not applied to anyone else. They hope Black professionals realise that the system may celebrate your rise for as long as your success is useful but will participate enthusiastically in your destruction.
There’s nothing new about this. People of colour have always been expected to know their place, to perform flawlessness as the price of entry into spaces that embrace mediocrity in others. The demand is success without ever being human. There is no room for exaggeration or mistake. No bad judgement, imperfect memory or any ordinary human frailty. If we fail that impossible test, our humanity becomes negotiable and everything is scrutinised through a magnifying glass.
Again, it’s nothing new, but it makes no difference to spirits that have endured this long. It’s another scar, but it is not defeat.
What Black professionals must take from this
The lesson Black professionals should take from this is not that we must make ourselves smaller. It is that we must become even more unwilling to accept a world in which some people are granted grace as a matter of course while others are subjected to public examination until there is nothing left of them.
Jason Arday was a person before he was a professor, and long before he became a symbol in the culture war, and I am so angry he is dead. So gutted that another family has lost their son, partner and father this way.
If you participated in this frenzy, you helped create the conditions in which a human being could be reduced to an object of macabre scrutiny and collective bullying, and now he is dead.
If you participated in this frenzy, you helped create the conditions in which a human being could be reduced to an object of macabre scrutiny and collective bullying, and now he is dead. I hope, at the very least, you can be honest with yourselves about what you did, and I hope you understand the mark you have left.