M’kay Y’all, so let’s recap . . .
For three whole weeks, legions of people around the world watched former Cambridge sociology professor Jason Arday get hunted, humiliated, and dragged through the digital streets. Those bloodthirsty, racist right-wing ghouls gleefully watched his fall and destruction like serialized entertainment and they absolutely enjoyed using a young Black man as proof that DEI policies produce academic fraudsters.
They were frothing at the mouth, “See, see . . . SEE! We told you Black scholarship is boolshit! We told you the Blacks who get into exclusive white institutions are unqualified and they can only get in when the standards are lowered for them.” The punditocracy, academics, and the online mob all pretended like this vicious pile-on was a principled concern for or defense of “academic standards.”
Everything about the man’s life was obsessively dissected and consumed. His scholarship, childhood, disabilities, athletic life, medical history, and relationships. All of it. Twenty-two days before his death, the UK press published 249 articles about Arday, and 188 of those came after he announced his resignation. The scale of media attacks, an average of 11 articles a day, was not about ordinary scrutiny and the goal was not about accountability. If so, when Arday finally resigned the attacks would have subsided or stopped.
It wasn’t enough that he was humiliated. Or that he resigned. They wanted a Black body to punish. They wanted a corpse. That’s what white grievance politics demands in this racial moment. They want Jason Arday’s dead body to serve as a warning to every aspirational Black person who has the gall to enter white spaces.
We still don’t know the official cause of Arday’s death. But what we do know from his family is that the intense period of public harassment and cruelty had become “unbearable.”
And now this week, the same bloodthirsty culture is trying to stage a solemn seminar about compassion, humanity, care, ableism, proportionality, institutional responsibility, and media ethics. Thousands gathered in Trafalgar Square with flowers, photographs and “Rest in Power” signs to mourn Arday as a communal loss, especially for Black, autistic, and other neurodivergent folks who imagined that they too could belong in elite institutions.
This week, folks are also admitting they didn’t do enough to protect him and others trying to restore Arday’s humanity. Black British leaders, antiracist groups and disability advocates have proposed legislation against racist digital harassment called “Arday’s Law.”
I’m not saying that all the outpouring and memorializing and protesting has been insincere. But I think some of this grief can is coming from folks doing reputational laundering because they failed to defend and protect Arday. They didn’t condemn the media frenzy they helped sustain, and so now they’re engaged in self-exonerating performance and trying to convert their belated discomfort into evidence of their own compassion and humanity. But much of this care and protest has come after Arday’s death.
Listen, I refuse to accept all this posthumous compassion as a substitute for courage while Jason Arday was still alive. We’re seeing all this public grieving now but no real reckoning with how folks either participated in or silently consumed the spectacle for 22 days. Twenty-two days!!! Because you and I both know that what happened to him was EXACTLY the kind of predictable ending the right-wing harassment is built to produce. So folks need to stop acting like those couple hundred articles didn’t create the conditions in which catastrophe was foreseeable.
I know all too well the racist machinery that broke Arday because I’ve been through cycles of it myself for more than a decade now as a journalist and academic. It ain’t designed to just troll or criticize Black scholars, journalists, writers, and truth-tellers. They want to frighten and silence us with their hate mail and threats. They call our university PR departments, chairs, deans, provosts, presidents, and board of trustees. These strangers, who are sometimes funded by right-wing think tanks, will come digging through our professional lives, hit us with dozens of public information act requests trying to find something, anything, they can weaponize us against us.
Their end game is to destroy our reputations and make us unemployable. They want us to get fired from our jobs. They want us to lose our money. They want to see us homeless. They want to see us broken, isolated, ruined. They don’t give a fuck about the families we have to feed. They want our lives to be unlivable. They want to lynch us.
While these assholes come for us, too often we are expected to remain calm, go high, keep it classy, and be superhumanly resilient. And if you break or die, then suddenly everybody and they mama discovers compassion, folks act like no one could have anticipated that such prolonged cruelty could end in tragedy.
And no, I’m not being casually hyperbolic when I call what happened to Arday a lynching. What happened to him was public theater. It was spectacle and the goal was to destroy one Black man to terrorize an entire Black academic community, as small as it already is. No, a rope wasn’t used for Arday or other academics who’ve been targeted similarly. This time it is the hostile headlines, social-media algorithms, doxxing, public-records requests and transparency laws, and people demanding employers fire their targets.
So what now, Y’all?
Well, we can’t just leave targeted scholars at the scene of the violence. And I gotta be honest as someone who fights back against the racist degenerates who come for me . . . at the end of the day individual resilience will not defeat this kind of vicious, organized, and well-funded harassment. We must find a way to build our own systems of collective defense and we cannot rely on institutions to do that work because they are about protecting their money and reputation.
We need to build rapid-response networks. That means bringing together academics across disciplines and campuses, to include faculty, students, and administrators, along with investigative reporters, attorneys, mental health professionals, and digital-security experts who can mobilize around a target as soon as a harassment campaign begins.
We gotta clap back. I do it all the time. But I’m gonna keep it real and just say that individual resilience is not enough, and it is not sustainable against these well-funded coordinated demons. So we can’t let folks be out here facing a whole organized political machine alone. And when I say we need to clap back, I mean organize campaigns against them. That’s right. Expose their networks. Find out whose funding them. Dissect their tactics.
We also must demand that universities stop hiding when one of their own gets attacked. Schools need to establish some written protocols for handling racist harassment campaigns. What does that look like? Okay, that means protecting employees’ personal information. It means screening, documenting, and reporting abusive emails, voicemails, and letters to law enforcement.
Colleges need to also push for legislation to protect professors and schools against these right-wing assholes who like to weaponize public-records requests. Those coordinated complaints are not independent expressions of public concern. They are harassment campaigns that are designed to waste time and exhaust the fuck out of you. Trust me, I’ve been through it.
Lastly, as uncomfortable as this might sound, we must also refuse the demand that a targeted person has to be a paragon of respectability before we defend their humanity from annihilation.
Fuck going high when they go low. These people want our corpses! So, when they go low, we gotta go to hell and sit right next to the devil. When these degenerates come for us, show some damn courage! Don’t just sit there and wait for the vigil, flowers, photos, and hashtags, and cry about how we let him or her down. Defend scholars while they’re still ALIVE ffs!
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