Brendan O’Neill in the Spectator:
Behold the human wreckage of the cult of diversity. The tragedy of Jason Arday is that he was both built up and destroyed by the ruthless machinery of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). The academy made him into the golden boy of its philistine project of ‘decolonisation’ and gave not one thought to what the consequences might be if his thin story unravelled, as it inevitably would. No one can deny it now: wokeness makes false gods and real tragedies.
The death of Arday is not only dreadful – it is enraging. It feels like a catastrophe foretold. Indeed, some of us wondered out loud if Arday had friends around him as the media storm over his alleged fabulism grew and went global. It was reckless in the extreme for the intellectual elites to fashion a new ‘black genius’ and then say ‘Oops’ when his carefully curated legend started to fray at the seams. They condemned him with their fawning.
This is the poison chalice of the state religion of diversity. It lays traps for the very people it celebrates. It handpicks members of ‘the oppressed’ for moral anointment and institutional gushing while leaving them open to exposure as others start to query their credentials. That’s the toxic bargain of identity politics: it builds teetering pedestals for ethnic-minority thinkers, meaning their fall from grace is often twice as fatal.
And what a pedestal they made for Arday. They worshipped him as ‘the best in the world’. They beatified him as a black wunderkind whose very presence in a place like Cambridge might help to wash away its sins of whiteness. They canonised him as a living monument to ‘decolonisation’. It was precisely this, their giddy, narcissistic desire to manufacture a kind of black saviour, that made them turn a blind eye to the questionable elements of Arday’s CV and life story. They sacrificed their due diligence to the god of decolonisation….
Already, leftists are blaming the media for Arday’s death. Hacks hounded him into despair, they say. I’m not having this. The media is the only institution in this entire tragic scandal that did its job properly. Journalists found a story and they told it. It was the academy and Arday’s colleagues who failed to do their jobs. Who failed to prize merit over identity, and failed to foresee the public embarrassment that would befall their falsely promoted friend. They ignored the truth – the media found it.
He was a victim, Arday, but he was of course complicit. He called the police on an investigative journalist. He used attack-dog solicitors Carter-Ruck to intimidate those querying his fabulations. He was so used to being believed without being checked after his experiences in academia as a rising young black star – “I thought you’d just believe me” – that it came as a huge shock when people, journalists, started asking questions.
If we just pass this off as a racist campaign by the right-wing press (including the Guardian!) then we’ll completely miss the whole point of this tragedy – and cement in place even more firmly the exact problems that caused it, setting ourselves up for more repeats in the future.
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