Liberals and Conservatives Need a New Relationship with Minorities Like Jason Arday

Both sides of the political spectrum have an unhealthy relationship with minorities.

The late British academic Jason Arday.

I don’t know what makes an otherwise healthy-looking person commit suicide, but I have had a close brush with it.

When I was still working in Washington, D.C., I was at a Metro (that’s the subway system in the nation’s capital) stop when a man hurled himself onto the tracks in front of a train. I was lucky enough to not be looking directly at him at the time; but I could hear the screaming of onlookers.

To this day, I wonder if there was something I or someone else could’ve told that man to prevent him from taking his own life.

Suicide isn’t a well-understood phenomena, although we know enough about it to dismiss libertarian theories about how people just choose out of their autonomous free will to selfishly end their lives.

We know that ecological factors can increase or decrease suicides; one of the most interesting facts about suicide, to me, is that during and after society-wide catastrophes like the 9/11 attacks or the London Blitz, suicide rates actually went down. Social cohesion went up, and people felt a greater sense of solidarity. They were in this together.

Likewise, we know that certain pharmaceutical drugs increase suicidal ideation. They make people more likely to harm themselves.

So if factors outside of one’s own soul can impact their risk of suicide, what factors led to the suicide of Cambridge academic Jason Arday? Arday, if you’re not familiar with him, was a British scholar who was recently exposed for committing plagiarism and other fabrications. This led to his resignation from Cambridge and a massive deluge of media coverage

Suicide is too complicated of an issue to come to a definitive conclusion; we don’t understand it well enough to provide a forensic analysis of this case. I didn’t personally know Arday, and I don’t know what was going through his mind when he took his life.

But I do know that Arday’s tragic end and the behavior that led up to it is a microcosm of the pathologies of both sides of the political spectrum.

Conservatives obsessed with Arday’s case because they saw him as representative of negative trends in academia. Here was a black academic who specialized in racial theory who fudged his research. A story like that is crack-cocaine for the modern day British and American right. And where there’s demand, there’s coverage. There were hundreds of articles written in the British press about a singular academic and his misdeeds. While Arday’s behavior as an academic was clearly inappropriate, it’s hard to justify the disproportionate coverage of it. The man was being treated as if he was a supervillain. From his perspective, not only was his career finished but he was basically the Worst Man In the World.

But for conservatives, he was more than a man. He was a symbol of everything they’ve come to hate about Western culture. So he had to be made an example of. The fact he was clearly mentally unwell — we know, for instance, that he was on the autism spectrum — was not a consideration in the endless pile-on. Because for those who were crucifying Arday, the larger mission of winning the culture war was the ultimate goal.

(I don’t think it’s relevant to the accuracy of the charges against Arday, but an openly racist theorist, Nathan Cofnas, led the crusade against him.)

Yet we can’t let liberals off the hook here. Questions about the veracity of Arday’s work and his life story arose as early as 2023, shortly after his appointment to Cambridge as the university’s youngest black scholar ever. They were not taken seriously.

I don’t know exactly how Arday rose to the prestigious position he was in, but I do know that progressive culture in spaces like nonprofits, universities, political campaigns, and other progressive-dominated institutions practices a sort of paternalistic racism towards minority groups.

While conservatives like those who make up the ranks of what’s left of the Make America Great Again movement constantly proclaim that minorities come from sub-human cultures — witness Stephen Miller’s constant refrain that if we import the “Third World” we will “become the Third World” — progressives seem to affirm some of the very same underlying views with their own low standards for minorities.

Whether it’s demanding that schools get rid of testing in order to boost their black and Latino numbers or smearing anyone who points out the deficiencies in a female or minority political candidate or lawmaker as racist or sexist, progressives have more or less argued that minorities can’t be asked to uphold the same standards of behavior and achievement as white men can.

I have witnessed progressive organizations time and time again being willing to elevate people who were clearly not qualified for their positions solely because they were lowering standards for their demographic characteristics. Progressives think they are helping minorities by doing this, but what they’re really doing is setting up more cases like Arday’s. And when you build a house of cards like that, it’s eventually going to come falling down.

Then the racist conservatives can point to those cases and say, “Ha, I told you. Of course the black man was a DEI hire. People from their culture can’t be accomplished all on their own.”

So I propose that we end this toxic symbiotic relationship between progressives lowering standards for minorities and conservatives freely generalizing about entire cultures and peoples as inferior. Instead, we should do what my friend Tyler Austin Harper suggests from his latest piece in The Atlantic:

What I propose is that the public give Arday a courtesy in death that he was often denied in life: Let’s treat him like a person. Not like Cambridge’s magical negro, or like Simon & Schuster’s golden goose, or like the fetish object of internet racists, but like a flawed human being who should still be alive but is not. That requires being honest about who Arday was, not despite his tragic death but because of it. After all, it was systemic, ritualized dishonesty—his own and others’—that undid him.