Event: Jason Arday

The racial identitarians who defended Jason Arday will monster any ‘black’ voice who dissents from the script. Left identitarians have rallied to Jason Arday’s defence, especially after his tragic death. While some admit he made mistakes, they all claim the media questioning of his research record, dodgy CV and history of fabulism was fuelled by racism. It seems expecting a Cambridge professor’s CV to be accurate is now a form of white supremacy. There is a curious double standard at work here. Black public figures may apparently be permitted to make ‘mistakes’, but they are afforded considerably less latitude when they question identitarian grievances or Black Lives Matter orthodoxies. Do that and these avowed anti-racists adopt a strikingly racist tone, deploying such terms as ‘coconut’, ‘Uncle Tom’, ‘house negro’ and ‘race traitor’. You may have freedom of speech, just so long as you remember which opinions have been allocated to your ethnicity. Consider so-called progressives’ response to another black sociologist, Tony Sewell. Sewell chaired the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, established in 2020 following the Black Lives Matter protests. Its conclusions challenged the increasingly orthodox contention that disparities between ethnic groups are evidence of systemic racism. The report acknowledged the existence of racial discrimination but argued that class, geography, family structure and educational attainment are often more useful in explaining unequal outcomes. One could disagree with those conclusions and many did. The Runnymede Trust strongly criticised the report. These arguments are precisely what intellectual and political debate should involve. But some responses went considerably further. Sewell was called a ‘coon’ and ‘race traitor’. A Labour MP circulated an image of the Ku Klux Klan in response to the commission’s findings. Kemi Badenoch, the then equalities minister, condemned the abuse in the Commons, arguing that racialised language was being used…