I’m writing this after two news stories which book ended a day. In the morning we heard of Farage’s return as MP in Clacton. In the evening we heard of Professor Dr Arday’s death following a malicious media storm. One person’s mistakes became a career ending story and then a terminal tragedy, another’s thorny relationship with truth seems to have little impact on their path to power.
Is this false equivalence? Or is it accountability unevenly distributed?
It’s all about the pursuit of fairness and meritocracy, we are told. Yet the consequences of a person’s actions are never evenly felt. In the 22 days leading to Professor Dr Arday’s death 249 articles were written about him and numerous TV and radio reports amplified misinformation about him across the globe.
These speculations fed a grotesque untruth; that DEI is the only reason marginalised groups get into positions of power.
Arday’s case is nuanced and may involve plagiarism. But in no way does it validate the former academic and advocate for ‘race science’ Nathan Cofnas who had been sacked for saying no Black people would ever become professors at Harvard in a true meritocracy, and who led the charge on Arday.
Compare and contrast the case of William O’Reilly. O’Reilly is a white Cambridge Professor. O’Reilly was caught plagiarising his own undergraduate students’ essays and was also found to have plagiarised other scholars’ work numerous times before.
In 2020 Tortoise, the independent news outlet, revealed O’Reilly was allowed to lead disciplinary processes into sexual assault allegations at his Cambridge college, and this after he had accused by a student of sexual assault.
Speculation about Arday’s case disregarded his neurodivergence. When white neurodivergence is a feature, ‘be kind’ narratives predominates. Arday’s neurodivergence, would have led to him interpreting and internalising much of the vituperation poured upon him. Where was the kindness then?
The difference in treatment between white members of staff and Arday is noticeable, as the FT surmised recently. You don’t have to look far to hear similar stories.
Any person of global majority ethnicity in a position of any power in any organisation will share their experiences of false allegations, of having to fight rearguard actions, of being challenged over every single action or statement, of roadblocks to any progress on any front, of being expected to push water uphill at all times of every day while their work is plagiarised or disregarded and their successes claimed by others.
Instead, our society seems to prefer to continue harmful narratives around race. Our press amplifies this to attract global clicks and ‘engagement’ from the same bot farms that support Farage et al. Then we add to that already toxic mess, the defining feature of all such racist narratives, that ‘they are all like that’.
The road to success, failure, scrutiny, forgiveness and redemption are forged on an unequal footing. This is abnormal. Yet we seem to be normalising a grossly distorted and unbalanced distribution of accountability where one person’s faults are representative of entire groups.
What we do about this is what will mark us as a society. Do we have that moral courage?
Sanjit Chudha 