Black Skins, Ivory Tower: The Rage of a Black Academic
‘The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, said: “I’m devastated for the family and friends of Jason Arday. He faced an unacceptable public hounding and campaign of abuse. I know many Londoners will be angry and upset this evening. Jason Arday was the victim of a pernicious public shaming that other people in his position simply wouldn’t have faced. His death was a tragedy, but once again it should be a wake-up call for all of us.’
(Adams & Dodd, 2026, p. 1)
On Friday the 14th of August 2026, Jason Arday, the professor at the centre of a strange row about plagiarism, and who only recently resigned from his post at Cambridge University, was found dead at his home in London. This was a man who was a father, who was a husband, and who had a life beyond the world of academia. This was a man who was autistic, and who by all accounts did not really speak until he was 11 years of age.
This was, in my view, and especially when you consider these last couple of aspects of his identity, someone who as extremely vulnerable, I have always felt that. So, his treatment at the hands of some enormously big institutions, and his subsequent death, these are things which I want to explore in this blog for two reasons.
The first is obvious. That if this was a white academic, then none of the vilification which he endured would have come his way. To provide evidence of this one only has to look at the recent case of William O’Reilly who is also a Cambridge professor, and was also accused of plagiarism having lifted something like 12 pages of his student’s works into his own, which he then published under his own name (Olsson, 2024). Yet, what is most interesting about the O’Reilly case is not so much that he was exonerated after an investigation. It was the facts that there was no media outcry. There was no investigation by the Right-Wing press into his background, into his history or his family. There were plenty of stones left unturned as this man moved back into his position at Cambridge.
The second reason is that this case highlights the fight against DEI in the Global North right now. The hatred aimed at this man in my view was as much to do with his role as a Black Academic and his positionality as a voice for minoritised groups, as it was about anything else. So given the War on Woke which still rages, this horrible incident is as much about the creation of casualties and what Arday therefore represented, as it is about the man himself.
I was out in town walking along, and two women stopped me.
They had come for a conference and they said, ‘excuse me, can we ask you a question?’
And I said, ‘sure.’
They said, ‘who exactly are you?’
And it just made me laugh. So, I said, ‘why?
And they said, ‘just the way you are walking about and you are talking to everyone.’
The other experience I had was with a Black guy who just stopped me. He was s Rastafarian guy, and he said,
‘I like that, you’re walking like a king.’
This is about how to be.
(Charura & Turner 2026, p. 45)
Being an academic normally comes with a privilege and status which sets us apart from others in the wider community. Hold that idea for a moment. What I actually mean is that this position comes with a certain kudos which is met by those in Global Northern communities. A black academic is not held in to the same level of respect as those who would be white. We are held, like Arday was, to a very different standard of professionalism than our counterparts. That is what makes being a black academic so incredibly difficult.
This is why the quote above is to powerful. It speaks of a moment where the author of this point feels strong enough in himself to stand tall, to walk tall, to walk in his power. And it is noticed. By the Rastafarian with a kind of admiration, by the white women though with a kind of curiosity. They do not understand it, him, his way and being. They are used to his being cowed, shoulders bowed most probably. Are they threatened by this black academic man standing tall? I cannot say either way. What I can say is that there is an invisible demand placed upon black male academics, and that this includes our deportment when in white spaces.
Yet, we try to meet these demands placed upon us. These invisible questions of worth which mean we often have to publish numerous books and papers in order to be seen as more than just an administrator. The fact that we can have a voice, but not too much of a voice, not too big a position, not to loud a presence. There is an unconsciously invisibilising effect which white supremacy has placed upon even our academic institutions that makes being and existing within them so incredibly painful at times.
The invisibility of the black male academic is obvious in our profession as counsellors and psychotherapists but is no less prominent in mainstream academia. Yet, the fact that there are so few of us, whilst that we are still a threat to those academics who believe in the worth of White Supremacy, also says a lot about the power that we have to disrupt the cultural status quo with our words and ideas. Yet, being in these spaces, this is extremely hard. There is a cost to, a racialised one, to walking into campuses and classrooms as the only black face in nearly always majority white spaces. The passive aggression, the pain of which will often sit within us, actions which can come from students as well as colleagues, these are things which so many of us struggle to deal with, and which is never recognised by those who claim to be allies for us.
Black academics. We are often left to suffer alone.
‘I hope all is well. Firstly, I am sorry to hear your news and hope things improve in time. I have had a think about the role you have for me there, and I am still going to pass on the position. The reason I wanted to talk about this role was to get a sense of what it was about and balance it against what I have to offer the XXXXXX. Yet, you have missed two meetings, and even then I offered time and space out of my own schedule to talk yet each time I have been left standing. So, I do feel disrespected as I’d given up other bits of work to make this work, yet to no avail. I therefore wish you all the best over there. I wont be taking on this role.’
I am sick and tired of writing about how we as black men are just not seen in white spaces. Or when we are it normally has to be through the lens of some kind of stereotype. The fact that the press did not factor into their feeding frenzy the aspects of this man’s intersectional identity says to me that they thought he was like every other stereotypical black man; that he was strong of back and shoulder (like a good slave should be), that he should be able to endure all of the slings and arrows thrown at him and say nothing (like a good colonised black man should do), that he shouldn’t complain at all (like a good immigrant should do as well).
There is the ignorance of the fact that this man, this family man, this father, this academic, whilst he may have made mistakes was a human being. What the press and the University have, in my view, therefore done here is a form of dehumanisation. From the moment that he was hired as the poster boy for Diversity Equity and Inclusion to the moments when he was forced to leave, this was a man who was used by many. And in that usage came the dehumanisation of a good man. The rejecting of what it was that made him an individual, which made him unique and a friend to many.
This is the second way that White Supremacy works. It works by gifting itself the right to take away the humanity of an other. It has done so for hundreds of years, since the origins of slavery when the Catholic Church played a huge role in the dehumanisation of persons of colour from across the African continent (Wise & Wheat, 2020). And just this week we saw it in the rhetoric around the Clacton By-election, where Reform, with their policies of stopping ‘the immigrants’ from coming to these shores, reduce the dozens of people who wish to come here down from the facts that these are men, fathers, women, mothers, and children, into just some brown morass which needs to be resisted.
The dehumanisation of black people, of course it happens in academia. Even I have experienced it as a black academic, feeling that I am often just there as a token to a system which wants to be seen to be doing the right thing, yet which really doesn’t want anything to change.
Black anger. I write this nearly blinded by the kind of rage which my colonised self would have pushed down. An anger where I would have overeaten, or fucked someone, or used it against myself through overthinking all those horrible things my own father planted within my mind and psyche to punish myself. I realise that this story, his story, is tragic for everyone, but it is also a wakeup call for all those who claim to see us, black men, black academics, yet who sit back and do nothing when a black autistic man is vilified by the right-wing press and who then takes his own life. This should not have happened. This horror should never have gone as far as it did. The racism which allowed it to, this is all our faults.
We should be ashamed of ourselves!
References
Adams, R., & Dodd, V. (2026, August). Jason Arday, professor at centre of Cambridge plagiarism row, found dead. Guardian Online, 1. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/aug/14/jason-arday-found-dead-after-resigning-from-cambridge-over-plagiarism-claims
George, H. P., & Turner, D. (Eds.). (2026). Black Men, Trauma and Therapy: Revolutionising Therapeutic Thought and Practice. PCCS Books Ltd.
Olsson, E. (2024, April). Copycat don caught again. Varsity, 1. https://www.varsity.co.uk/news/27433
Wise, C., & Wheat, D. (2020). Pope Nicolas V and the Portuguese Slave Trade. Lowcountry Digital History Iniative. https://ldhi.library.cofc.edu/exhibits/show/african_laborers_for_a_new_emp/pope_nicolas_v_and_the_portugu