I will not contribute to the disquieting narrative surrounding his story because there is information that I do not and will never have. I also acknowledge that Jason Arday was, like all of us, a complicated, nuanced and flawed human being. What I do know is that the aftermath of his death and the circumstances leading to it have brought into bold focus the deep fissure in matters of race that separate black and white people and transcend national borders.
Jason Arday was born in South London of Ghanaian parents and was raised in England. In 2023 his appointment as Professor of Sociology of Education in the Faculty of Education, at 37 years old made him the youngest black person appointed to that prestigious position at the elite University of Cambridge. His selection was a source of great celebration at the time, especially as Cambridge was under scrutiny for its lack of diversity. What followed and what eventually led to his public humiliation and the response to it provides an example of how race and the lived experiences of black and white people shape our perceptions and interrogation of reality.
Two things can exist concurrently. A blemished black scholar whose work appears questionable, can exist alongside the credenda of white supremacy. On a recent episode of her show, Meghan Kelly and her guest, Nathan Cofnas, could barely contain their glee at the undoing of Jason Arday because it confirmed for them the well-worn white supremacist trope of black inferiority. Cofnas’s views which are well documented in his writings termed hereditarianism or race realism posits that genetics and not systemic racism or discrimination accounts for the marginalization of black people. In fact, he has stated that if his theories were widely accepted and informed public policy, “blacks would largely disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside sports or entertainment.” His views have made him a pariah at Cambridge and Emmauel College where he held academic appointments, but he appears to have found a home at Ghent University in Belgium.
Clearly, Cofnas’s views were incongruent with the appointment of a young black scholar to a faculty position at an institution as prestigious as Cambridge. Subsequently, he set about to resolve the cognitive dissonance Jason Arday’s appointment stirred in him. Jason Arday’s embellished life story and apparently undisciplined scholarship gave Cofnas the ammunition he needed to confirm his racist views. That is one of the more troubling aspects of this lamentable tale. Jason Arday should have known better and behaved accordingly. At the time of his resignation, he spoke of the “unrelenting level of public scrutiny” he experienced.
The acuity of the black mind has always been questioned. Knowing this is part of the early inculcation of black children preparing to begin their academic journey. Thus, the time-honored admonition from black parents to always be twice as good in white spaces in order to be taken seriously. Every black person in rarified, elite intellectual spaces confronts, at some point, the uncomfortable reality that white people, even the seemingly well meaning, fundamentally and secretly, agree with Cofnas, believing that their black colleagues are not their intellectual equals. I can write without equivocation or the need for an empirical study that every black person, student, or professional, who has worked or studied at an elite college or university, or other highly intellectual spaces, can recount at least one instance of microaggression where their intelligence and legitimate right to occupy that space was questioned.
Despite my tenure as a university president and an earned Harvard doctorate, I had an experience which punctuates my point! In 2023, following my retirement from the presidency at Wilberforce University, I was appointed the Inaugural HBCU Presidential Fellow at Brown University. During my time at Brown, the President never bothered to learn my name, publicly mispronouncing it at a significant University event. Notably, in a conversation, when I noted that I was her peer, she was visibly taken aback. I was not equally considered. What I can almost guarantee is that white people and black people reading this will interpret what I have described from radically different perceptual lenses shaped by race.
The ongoing investigation at Cambridge of the circumstances of Jason Arday’s hiring indicates that there may have been stronger black candidates for the position that ultimately went to Dr. Arday. If true, in this current socio-political moment, the missteps in the hiring of a black scholar by an elite university has resulted in a messy public spectacle which ultimately maligned both the scholar and the university. It has also become a cause célèbre for virulent racists and anti-DEI devotees and the defenders of a black scholar whose work, it might turn out, was not extraordinary after all.
If true, I do not excuse or justify Jason Arday’s actions, and I readily admit that his story has indirectly cast aspersions on the validity and value of the work of every black scholar in academic spaces, especially elite ones. But I will not ignore the pernicious, odious and persistence of racism which informs every aspect of life for black people on this planet.
Most black academics and scholars have developed an immunity to needing the approving white gaze of validation. Confronting racism, however, is exhausting and as James Baldwin once noted, “to be a Negro in this country [America] and to be relatively conscious is to be in a state of rage almost all of the time-and in one’s work.” Against the current, constant barrage of anti-blackness in this contemporary zeitgeist, as black folks, we would do well to remember from where we’ve come and to whom we belong. We have the lived history and achievement of our progenitors which holds an intellectual tradition that is unassailable to anchor and affirm us.
Unfortunately, that truth could not save our brother, Jason Arday.
