Once upon a time, an autistic black child was born. Usually, it takes several years to figure that out (the autism, not the blackness), but so autistically autistic was the infant Jason Arday that it was immediately apparent to everyone without there even needing to be any public record of it. Perhaps there is some lost evidence of him having a Reddit account as a toddler; one can speculate. Arday was unable to talk until age 11 and has been unable to stop talking ever since, which is fortunate since otherwise many of his unbelievable life accomplishments would now be unknown.
The range of setbacks he has overcome boggles the mind. Despite being illiterate until age 18, Arday not only graduated high school, but got into college, where he finally learned how to read good. This is even more incredible when you consider that the same year he discovered what the alphabet did he was beaten into epilepsy by random teens- he forgave them so thoroughly that any documentation of the incident is now gone from police records- and that some unspecified time before that he was in a car accident that left him in a waking coma for months. He studied so hard in college that he gave himself a brain tumor, which he evidently removed by himself in the mirror, since there is no evidence of a surgeon having done so. It may be that Arday has in fact learned to read several times in his life, but keeps getting that knowledge erased by semiannual episodes of CTE.
Rumors that Arday attended this school are of course false; the building is entirely too small for humans to fit inside, and anyway, in England it would be “Centre” or some other gay and wrong spelling.
Even though he’d accumulated a substantial amount of what for a normal person would be crippling physical trauma over the course of his short time in the world, of the sort that would require medical interventions that would otherwise severely limit active life, Arday rapidly became one of the world’s most elite athletes. He participated in a ‘30 Marathons in 35 Days’ challenge, which was actually somewhat documented by an independent contemporary account, in the midst of which he suffered a hairline fracture in his fibula, which he seemingly just shrugged off to complete the remaining nine marathons. This was apparently the last time he ran slowly enough for anyone to witness, however, because his career as an ultramarathon runner who hyperGogginsed his way through 600 miles in six days passed entirely without notice by the few other people on Earth who could conceivably do that. He played semi-professional soccer, but was so good that he got bored with it and moved on before anyone could write his name down on a roster. Along the way, Arday became one of the best snooker players in Britain, with a skill level far beyond the need to participate in any public tournaments, other than the single amateur contest he entered but was too gracious to the other players to win.
Did Arday run each marathon while carrying a boat? Sources are unclear, but it would not be out of keeping with his other accomplishments.
He surmounted the intellectual challenges involved in becoming a PE teacher, and from there went on to earn a Ph.D as a black man, with his thesis largely consisting of arguing that it’s easier to do well in academia if you’re not closely supervised. It was so convincing a premise that his doctoral committee at Liverpool University evidently forewent actually reading the dissertation, perhaps also having concluded that his proximity to their whiteness had burdened him enough already. It was thus that Dr. Arday came into being, following a path blazed by Ibram X. Kendi as a bedredlocked black man writing about being black while being black blackly in a world basically controlled by the bad guys in Caddyshack.
Go to any college and it’s basically this.
Thus, despite this incredible story, Arday still had to face the hardest obstacle any brilliant young minority scholar has to deal with, the rampant racism of academia and its unwillingness to hire anyone but straight white males from privileged backgrounds. White nationalist supremacist racists at the University of Glasgow and Ohio State University refuse to this day to acknowledge that he ever taught there, and even Nelson Mandela University in South Africa- presumably in need of de-colonizing themselves- won’t admit that Arday was a visiting professor. Speaking truth to power, he wrote a book about his marginalization, Being Young, Black and Male: Challenging the Dominant Discourse, which was published by Palgrave Macmillan, who then pretended they’d never heard of him and conspired with the bigots at Amazon to suppress the tome’s existence.
This is literally what comes up when you search for it.
Evidently, the hiring committee at Cambridge read the book before it was scrubbed from the internet by Elon Musk, because they fell over themselves offering him a professorship in sociology. Imagine how good this book must have been for that august bastion of choleric whiteness to overlook their own inherent, vicious hatred of black bodies to elevate Arday to their ranks. That really tells you a lot about the level of scholarship they expected from him and what he represented to their institution. He had made it, but his trials weren’t over yet.
His willingness to inhabit a black body was not his only transgressive challenge to hegemonic WASP domination of higher education. In keeping with the subversive discourse of postmodern queering of neoliberal individualism and problematized notions of merit, Arday conceived of research as less a personal effort to assemble evidence in order to produce a unique work of novel scholarship than a collaborative project of collating progressive tropes in order to further a narrative of liberation for marginalized people. Rejecting MAGA concepts like citations and clearly indicating quoted text produced by others, Arday instead brought a hip-hop sensibility to his work, sampling, remixing, and interrogating white-normative ideas of English grammar. The results speak for themselves:
The title makes more sense when you consider that he defended it to his committee with freestyle bars. When the book comes out it will all rhyme properly. h/t Jesse Singal
All of this naturally brought controversy. Arday faced death threats, with masked but doubtlessly Caucasian chavs holding him at knifepoint, raging at how incensed they were that he’d been made a Cambridge don. Like fellow victim of racialized violence Jussie Smollett, who was nearly lynched by Trump voters furious about his lack of screen time in a gay soap opera, Arday faced systemic unwillingness to defend him, with police claiming that cameras had failed to capture any footage of Arday’s attackers. Nor were they able to track down who sent Arday a severed pig’s head, which somehow disappeared before anyone other than Arday saw it. Arday could persevere through all of this totally real danger, but the one thing he didn’t count on, but obviously should have, was betrayal from within the world of scholarship.
We’ll never fully know what happened. All we know is that two white MAGA racists were waiting outdoors in zero degree weather at midnight in the most liberal rich people neighborhood in Chicago on the off chance that they would have the opportunity to attack a minor black celebrity when he randomly went out for a sandwich. Makes sense to Stelter.
Every tragic hero has a fatal flaw. For Arday, it wasn’t hubris, but rather an exaggerated sense of kindness that led him to sometimes hold back on his more vehement criticisms of the racist academic, political, and social establishment of England. While he talked about racism constantly, there were some times when he talked briefly about other things, like his research about racism, and that gave his enemies just the opportunity they needed to destroy him. And they were not slow in coming.
He sounds like he may have warmed up with a few rum and Cokes.
Nathan Cofnas is infamous in the world of academia and at Cambridge in particular. Best imagined as the unholy mix of Dolph Lundgren and Reinhard Heydrich, Cofnas is best known for arguing that data supports the idea that racial disparities in intelligence testing are empirically demonstrable and that public policy should take account of that. For this campaign of genocidal violence, Cofnas was rightly driven from Cambridge, but like Sauron, he lingered, brooding in the dark wastes of Substack, waiting for his chance to strike back. Summoning the eldrich spirits of Steve Sailer and Christopher Brunet, he finally did so in an article where he accused Arday of academic misconduct and lying about his past.
Above: The face of raw intimidating white male power
To their credit, most of the faculty at Cambridge stood hard against this onslaught. They called Cofnas and other critics racists, then continued to call them racists. When that failed to stop the harassment, they called them racists again, but in different ways. They publicly declared that the University of Liverpool had done an investigation and determined that Arday’s work was plagiarism free, and if you didn’t trust them to declare themselves not guilty of a serious, discrediting professional lapse, you were, by all logic, racist.
Somehow, though, this didn't work. People don’t really want the truth- they want a series of sensationalized accounts where anonymous poasters share Cofnas showing multiple examples of Arday’s prose side-by-side with identical text from earlier work, without attribution. They want to hear all about how his clearly original material was distinct for being incoherent, forgetting that Arday has only been able to read for like the last ten years, what with all the head injuries that actually happened. In other words, they you want to focus on the evidence rather than the meta-reality of this discourse taking place within the violent racialized fascist paradigm of Trump’s America that is England.
Then one man arrived with a new line of reasoning that silenced all the haters. Simon Baron-Cohen is a fellow professor at Cambridge, an academic researcher into autism and a friend of his colleague Arday. In addition to taking note of the obvious racism behind the misconduct allegations, Baron-Cohen also pointed out that, given that Arday is autistic, any further criticism of his work is likely to result in Arday committing suicide.
I say “silenced all the haters,” but that lasted all of ten seconds before they re-emerged (Elon Musk is in the comments) pointing out that threatening self-harm in response to criticism is something typical of abusers, and that grown men facing concerns about their professional conduct are not victims of bullying, all of which is of course racist. And it only got worse.
One troll, writing for the Spectator, advanced the theory that Jason Arday is in fact a character invented by Simon’s cousin Sascha Baron-Cohen, a type of academic Ali G who went to the trouble of getting a Ph.D and a professorship for sole purpose of lols. This is obviously ridiculous. For it to work, everyone in any kind of position of authority along the way would have to have been an utterly credulous moron, so committed to advancing DEI and leftist nostrums that he or she would ignore the most blatantly obvious fraud and mendacity on the part of a person who was clearly not even trying hard to fool anybody. These are smart people we’re talking about. They wear tweed and quote Trotsky. Not everyone can do that, and most of us are just jealous.
Besides, he already did that bit.
At any rate, Arday himself ended the controversy by bravely sacrificing his career to spare Cambridge from an incipient mob attack on the part of outraged mediocre right wing white men angry that they’ve been inclusioned out of academic work. We’ll never know what he might have written, what advances in the field of being black might have occurred, had the Ivory Tower been a little more solicitous of his neurodivergent melanated prose-looping and a little less judgmental towards a man whose brain has been polished to a mirror finish by a life of danger that would have stopped a lesser, non-diverse person. He joins Dr. Ian Roberts in the pantheon of scholars with careers cut short by outrageous allegations, forced from the world of education they so loved. Maybe if you ask yourself some hard questions about what you expect from academics, you’ll think more about that in the future.
This is a minor point, bur I swear it looks like he’s always wearing mascara.
Buy Me a PhD from Liverpool U.
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