The whole matter leaves a distinctively sour taste in the mouth.
Jason Arday, a 47-year-old man of British nationality and Ghanaian parentage, was found unresponsive in his house a few days ago. He had taken his own life.
The anger, the handwringing and the accusations have not abated since. Neither has the public outpouring of grief, including a vigil at Trafalgar Square and massive fundraising.
To hear his friend and fellow Professor – Kehinde Andrews discuss the matter, Jason had been subjected to an unremitting wave of attacks and vilification that started from the moment he became the youngest black Professor ever to be appointed by Cambridge University. The culprits were the University of Cambridge itself, the entire white intellectual community, and the British press. Nobody showed any consideration for the well- being or mental health of the person who was being so unfairly pilloried.
Kehinde was a Professor of Black Studies, the first one to be appointed with that title in the United Kingdom. He had spoken with Jason not long before his death and could tell he was under pressure. He, Kehinde, saw the whole drama as part of the effort to delegitimise black intellectuals within the UK University system, and to prove that they were not as good as their white counterparts. To him, the Universities were bastions of institutional racism. He had narrated a film in 2018 titled ‘The Psychosis of Whiteness’ and had published a book by that title in 2023. The thrust of the argument of their traducers was that the black intellectuals, already a tiny minority, were there in some kind of token capacity as a result of DEI, whereas the truth, in his view, was that black and brown intelligentsia worked twice as hard as, and had to be better than their white counterparts to attain and maintain their positions.
