deliciously delirious death

For anyone not in the know, a Black university of Cambridge professor was accused of plagiarism--multiple times, in previous cases the accusations were unfounded, and his most recent accusation was still being investigated. Since 2023 he has been harassed, accused of lying and plagiarizing and falsifying documentation. He has had to respond to multiple periods of smear campaigns where police were involved because he was being hounded so severely.

Given that this man taught sociology and specialized in Critical Race Theory and adjacent social concepts, it's not the least bit shocking that he had everything possible thrown at him. Damn near every academic in that field has been. Where this man is peerless is in where he taught. Prestigious elite academia. He was the youngest Black academic to ever teach at Cambridge.

He spoke a few years ago about how right-wingers will levy plagiarism and academic integrity accusations at socially-progressive academics to hide their underlying bigotry behind language of "fairness." This apparently was "suspicious" to attendees, who began to investigate him for plagiarism again. A man says "hey racists have a tendency to accuse you of things like fraud because it's a softer way to remove you than just being openly racist" and a room full of listeners said "hey what a great strategy."

His most recent investigation was covered extensively and exhaustively by British press. He was being talked about EVERYWHERE. And the potential of his academic fraud did not just reflect on him, but was explicitly declared by countless papers to reflect poorly on the field of Critical Race Theory (as if he is remotely the only large-platformed academic in the world or in the UK) and that it reflects poorly on Black people as a whole.

White academic fraud is a lone wolf outlier mistake. Black academic fraud is an inherent flaw of Black people. This is the base we are operating from.

Ultimately the abusive and repulsive dogpiling resulted in Arday's resignation before the investigation was ever completed, and about a week after his resignation, he was found dead in his home. He was 41.

This entire process is of course appalling if the accusations are false, but there is nothing redemptive about it if the accusations were true.

People who are not still navigating academic spheres maybe don't know how common plagiarism accusations are. There are sooo many cases that are falsely flagged, especially in the age of AI. And there are sooo many cases that are found to be true that not only do not become the center of a nation(and western world)-wide harassment campaign, but do not result in major punishment either. A lot of plagiarism is "solved" with corrections. A slap on the wrist. Nothing that he was accused of lying about resulted in harm, it did not cause death, it did not heavily impact legislation, it did not put anyone in danger. The accusations were primarily about embellishment.

There are scammers who get people killed, who ruin people's health, there are falsified scientific studies that change how society operates, that change how care is standardized--none of these things are the scale of harm accused of this man, and many people accused of those things remain in their posts, at their jobs, in the sphere of influence after a simple correction, but Arday is driven with pitch forks and racist tirades into an early grave.

It simply cannot be overstated how much his accusers wanted him lynched and in an indirect way they got their wish.

His treatment was utterly appalling before his death, but certainly now that he is dead. Papers are issuing retractions, posts are getting deleted, because rather than quietly remove him from public life, remove his public conversations about the relationships between people to each other and people to systems, he is dead visibly, and that makes people uncomfortable. If he disappears out of shame, that's one thing, if he's dead, well now you start to feel a little complicit. Not guilty enough to stop being a racist death mob, but guilty enough that you know it makes you look like less of a Good Guy.

Helio and Joris both make it clear that Arday is not an outlier in the way academia can mobilize to push out undesirables. It is not remotely lost on me that a professor in a highly controversial (unnecessarily but yknow white supremacy) field is the subject of this, because the field dissects the complicity of the establishment in the barriers that minorities--in this particular case people of color--are subjected to that bars them from accessing necessities. How it affects housing, healthcare, education, jobs--everything.

A man said "the system will work very hard to keep people like me out" and the system said "we'll kill you for that."

Jason Arday is going to become such a political cornerstone because if you still cannot see the way the system converged to make him dead, you will continue to be blind to the things the system is trying to prevent you from seeing. Arday was pulling back the curtain and the establishment said "you lied about how high up the curtain was raised" to shift conversation away from the very forces that drove him and countless others to death.

I have a friend I know from when we were both 6. She is the only person living nearby and so she saw me go from walking through limping to wheelchair on a daily basis. I keep her updated on my health even tho we rarely hang out anymore. She was gonna come over yesterday and I had to cancel. She asked if I can’t hang out later that day. When I said i won’t feel better later, that if I feel that bad in the morning later will only get worse she got annoyed and “joked” that I’m just finding excuses. And I was surprised, she knows all about me being disabled after all? So, a bit taken aback, I told her it’s a normal thing for me.

“But you got the diagnosis now, aren’t you better?? I thought you’ll get better now”

My OH gets upset sometimes because I try to not talk about being sick to their parents and I rarely take up their parents’ offers of help, but it just involves so much ongoing Not Getting It that it uses far more spoons than it could ever save.

We travelled a long way to their cousin’s wedding a few months ago and the hotel turned out to be monumentally inaccessible, and it was made *so* much worse by them not getting that after a nine-hour drive and then the lift being broken and the receptionist being *horrible* and forcing me to crawl up the stairs on my hands and knees, that no, I was physically incapable of going out for dinner and was in fact barely restraining myself from weeping in pain and fatigue. And we’ve been married for more than 15 years; they’ve seen me the entire time I’ve been sick.

And I’ve had total crashes in front of them before, and it was awful, and they were incredibly worried and upset about it, and I had to use spoons I really didn’t have to explain it all, and in the end they seemed to get it.

But it doesn’t *stick*. It all resets.

So that after a couple of months it’s as though it never happened.

It’s like living in Groundhog Day.

Healthy people are just, apparently, incapable of processing the idea that *this is our lives*, and no, we can’t turn it off for fun or to make their lives easier, and resting in advance or getting a good night’s sleep doesn’t solve it. It’s what we live with constantly, and it really does suck on its own, but the constant lack of getting it and blaming from healthy people really does make it so, so much worse.

the female gaze

Because of the midterms

"Covid was years ago I don't understand why theyre rehashing it!"

The midterms are happening in a few months

"How can they hold him in contempt? He didn't say anything!"

They're performing political theater to remind people of how upset they were during the pandemic about the decisions being made because the midterms are happening in November and the Covid backlash is how they won 2024.

This is horrible! Idgaf if Arday plagiarised or not (I have my doubts the accusations have any truth to them) we have a black man being harassed, forced to step down and now he's been found dead. I don't want to speculate on how and why he died, but this is not good. It's appalling.

May Jason Arday rest in peace. He shouldn't be forgotten like this is some passing news story. Academia has a HUGE problem with racism and other kinds of discrimination. Britain has a HUGE problem with racism.

I'm sorry I don't quite know how to verbalise how I feel about this right now. But we shouldn't let this slip under the radar or be swept under the rug.

source:

Cambridge professor of sociology Jason Arday is accused of plagiarism by another academic

the accuser is a "race realist" who believes that in a true meritocracy all university professors would be white. this is somehow not acknowledged much during the entire ordeal

this leads to several days of media coverage demanding an investigation, or that Arday is expelled from his post immediately

somehow this accusation that has no effect on the lives of 99.99% of the population becomes FRONT PAGE NEWS in all the newspapers for multiple days, above anything else happening in the UK or the world at large

following intense media scrutiny, Arday resigns his post as a Cambridge professor

today, august 14th, days after resigning, Arday is found dead at his home in Battersea

💜🌼 Violet Femme 🌼💜