It is the morning after the day before, and I am still numb.
The death of Jason Arday will be remembered as one of the worst episodes of racism in the British press.
He was found at his home in south London on Friday afternoon. He was forty-one.
The police have said only that the death was unexpected and not suspicious, and the circumstances are now a matter for a coroner.
What is not in doubt is what was done to him while he was alive. His family have said that the campaign of misinformation was more than he could bear, and that for three years he was subjected to sustained abuse by people who would leave no stone unturned in their determination to undermine him. There will be implications from this, not least for how we understand the cumulative effects of public vilification, racialised hostility and media excess.
The outpouring of grief and commentary from scholars and people of colour has been on a scale I have rarely seen. It has come in response to hundreds of articles published over three weeks or so by newspapers, press outlets and television platforms. The right-wing press led it, though it was not confined to them. All of it followed what began as a post on Substack, written by a scholar known for his work on racial difference who had left a Cambridge college in 2024 after controversy over those views. Questions about citation and about parts of Jason’s biography were raised, and some were serious enough to deserve an answer. But remarkably few outlets paused to separate what had been established from what had not, or to ask why this particular story warranted this particular volume.
Everything here is about the media. The commentary that drove the campaign went unchecked. It was unrelenting, cumulative and determined to find a weakness in every corner of his life, bleeding every inch from the story. With promoted posts on social media, and senior political figures adding their commentary to the mix, sensationalism became the mechanism and racism the engine. The people consuming this content were, for the most part, ordinary. They were not being encouraged to think for themselves. They were being told that one man’s alleged failings proved a case against diversity, equity and inclusion as a whole — that standards had been abandoned, and that someone had been let in who should never have been. A single case became an indictment of a principle.
I recognised something in the descriptions of him. Around ten years ago, after a difficult period, I was assessed and diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome and ADHD at the age of forty-eight. I had resisted the suggestion for years. I did not want to be labelled, or put in a box, or handed an explanation that might sound like an excuse. For a while afterwards I thought, well, that explains a lot. I know now how my own mind works: sensitive, reflective to the point of exhaustion, alert to every shift in a room. I internalise everything. I notice everything, with my mind running at a hundred miles an hour. Sustained public hostility is hard for anyone to absorb. For a person built this way, it is something else entirely.
From all reports Jason was a sensitive and gentle man, and that is entirely intelligible to me. His diagnosis came far earlier than mine. By his own account he did not speak until he was eleven and could not read or write fully until much later, and he had people around him who helped, including a family that did not give up on him. He worked hard. He was relentless and resilient and pushed well beyond what anyone had thought possible. He crossed barriers that had not been crossed before, and he built a life as a thinker and a giver. Those who knew him describe a man who was kind and noble in his dealings with others. Whatever is eventually established about his scholarship, none of that is erased.
What followed was not scrutiny in any ordinary sense. To audit every fragment of a man’s life — the distance he ran, the days it took him, the sums he raised — is not an inquiry into research integrity. It is a search for a hole in every part of him. The aim seemed to be to prove, at all costs, that this man was a fraud, and then to keep proving it after he had already gone. His employer defended him at first and then could not withstand the pressure. He resigned. It did not stop. There is a point at which sustained public vilification ceases to be commentary and becomes something done to a person, and that point was passed long before Friday.
It is worth saying plainly what DEI is for, since so much of this has been conducted in its name. DEI exists because talent is not always recognised, hired or promoted in the first instance. If organisations, particularly in the public sector, appointed people solely on the basis of ability and suitability, there would be no need for it at all. But exclusion continues to show itself in appointments, in hiring, in promotion and in retention, again and again, in 2026, despite equalities dating back to the late 1960s. As a society we have learned very little. This is not about everyone, of course. It is about a small number of people with the power to make these things happen.
At the most renowned and celebrated institutions, Black achievement is permanently provisional. It is vulnerable to attack at the first suggestion that something may have gone wrong, and the attack, when it comes, is never proportionate to the wrong. Black figures are treated as though they must be brought down from a height they were assumed not to have deserved in the first place. That assumption is the racism at the heart of this. It is often sustained by inadequate men who maintain systems designed to leave their own shortcomings unexamined. It is sustained, too, by media classes that will not accept Black talent, Black power, Black presence and Black culture on equal terms.
Set this against the wider picture. We live in a world in which serious crimes committed by powerful political leaders go unchecked, or are hidden, buried, forgotten or normalised. Reputations survive things that ought to end them. Yet when a person of colour is accused, they are not merely brought down. Their existence is pushed out of public life altogether, and the message is delivered both implicitly and explicitly: you were always here on licence. Black people continue to be treated as inadequate because whiteness is assumed to be right, complete and beyond improvement. That assumption is a misreading of human history, biology, culture and civilisation. It has never been true, and it has never needed to be true in order to do its work.
This is the reason I entered this field. It is why my doctorate was on the sociology of race and education, and why I have spent the years since on questions of equality, justice and inclusion. It is why I now study extremism, terrorism, inequality, polarisation, accelerationism and the return of white supremacism, in ways I could not have imagined thirty years ago. These forces have been sustained over decades by elite white structures built by insecure men who will not accept the rest of the world on equal terms, and who protect inherited privilege not because of talent but because of entitlement. I did not expect, three decades in, to be writing this particular paragraph about a colleague.
The tragedy now belongs to his children, his partner and his wider family, who will live with this for the rest of their lives. They have lost a father, a son, a brother and an uncle, and they have lost him in public, with the commentary still running.
Whatever a coroner concludes, and whatever any investigation into his work eventually finds, the conduct of these past three weeks stands on its own and ought to be examined on its own.
Editors made choices.
Commissioners made choices.
Platforms made choices.
Those choices were made about a living man with a family, and they will not be undone by the sympathy now being expressed by some of the very same outlets.
That is where this should lead. I doubt very much that it will.