My father would have some hard words for ex-Professor Jason Arday, the serial fantasist poster cry-bully of our times, and his self-righteous claque of academic supporters. The old man’s qualifications as an Arday denier would be twofold. One, he spent his academic career studying class and society in the USSR (Privilege in the Soviet Union was the title of his most successful book). Second, as a man who made his own meteoric way from a hovel in South Wales to Oxford and then the Foreign Office, and as a member of an ethnic minority to boot, my father would have a few things to say to Arday about the realities of British social mobility and the mechanisms of oppression.
If my father, in 1930s Swansea, was in possession of White Privilege, he did not know it
Start with the verbal jungles of intersectional gobbledegook in which Arday made his career. Communists and Critical Race Theorists alike make their homes in proximate thickets of newspeak. My father spent decades wrestling with Marxist writers who spoke of ‘structural overdetermination”, ‘constitutive disavowal of aporetic structures’ and ‘historiographic metalepsis’ (Louis Althusser, Fredric Jameson and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, if anyone’s interested).
