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The Machine That Came for Jason Arday

It wasn’t a scandal but a machine—funded, transatlantic, and still running.

A photo of late Cambridge professor Jason Arday is pictured along with floral tributes that are attached to the fencing around the Senate House at the University of Cambridge on August 18, following his death at age 41 on August 14.

I never met Jason Arday. He is still beloved; my people claim our dead. We do not wait to be introduced before we grieve them, or before the all-too-familiar rage. I will mourn him the way Black people have always mourned in public—telling the truth, correcting the record, and admonishing the sinner. There should be nowhere for them to hide. And there is still time for some of us to do better.

Look at what has been laid out for you, dear reader. A man of 41 found in a flat in Battersea, and a police service that calls the death “unexpected, but not suspicious,” as if this shock is, at once, no one’s doing. Before this, a self-described hereditarian trained software on a Black man’s 11-year-old dissertation. It is all arranged, waiting for you to lean in and assess, to weigh—like some Anubis with a mobile phone with all the news apps and socials—whether Jason Arday earned his ruin.

And while you are bent over it, counting his citations, the thing that put him there keeps running on. Isaac Sanders, a doctoral student, already put it plainly on Instagram: “Jason Arday’s research explains exactly what happened to Jason Arday.” Fifteen years “describing his and many others’ lived experience.” “Fighting the tide,” on Black doctoral students trying to enter the profession. “No one can see me cry,” on the mental-health toll carried by Black staff in the university. “Forget the headlines,” Sanders said: “Read the bibliography.” I will leave you to it. Likewise, here I want to reorient us to what has been running in the background, unwatched, constructing and reconstructing sturdy institutions out of the stuff of pseudoscience. From a doctoral thesis 11 years old to a man dead nine days after he resigned. From “questions about his qualifications” to a family begging the press to stop. From who plagiarized, to who is fit to profess at all. From one Black scholar at Cambridge to every one of us reading this, feeling the floor tilting. Do you feel it?

This is not an event. It is a mode—a dynamic, durable apparatus of subjection and disposability that never runs out of supply.

Fuck Them. They Really Are Trying to Destroy Us.

The them is multiple. First, those who make racial hereditarianism their jobs. Second, those who merely use this batshit view—which exhumes the discredited 19th-century canard that Black people are innately, heritably inferior—to win convenient populist political ballast, or monetizable attention. What they share is a false racial grievance: the insistence that the inclusion of Black people steals what should belong to white folks by right. But also the they who built the pedestal and sold tickets to the toppling; focusing intensely, all along, precisely on what matters least, while ignoring the harder, critical questions. Fuck all of them.

I will say the quiet part out loud and plainly, since they count on our being too ashamed to say it. Most of us came in through the door that affirmative action pried open, and there is no shame in it. It was put in place only a very short time ago, as a corrective for violently enforced legal exclusion that is even older than Cambridge—and which is yet still unpaid-for and yet unrepaired.

To arrive through a remedy is not to arrive on sufferance. Once inside, we do the work. It is well documented that........

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