NonsenseM

My good people, I have been quiet over the whole Jason Arday affair, as it blew up during my break. I have not followed closely, but the way the allegations of dishonesty were handled in the press, the presumption of guilt, the incessant humiliation, the obsessive media exploitation, made suicidality foreseeable. So, as a clinician, my first responses were: what risk assessment and management measures were put in place? What support was offered, and was it sensitive to race and racial trauma? One thing I will say is this: he was killed. He is the prime example of someone acting out collective wishes projected onto him, these internalised necropolitics I speak of. We can kill someone by their own hands while disavowing all involvement, and disowning, all murderous wishes. He was used as a political weapon in a war against progressive change, in the very same way his opponents claim he was used as a D&I poster child. In both cases, his existence became theoretical, what I frequently warn about in anti Blackness. I do not want to engage in over-analysis at this point while his family grieve a son, a father, an uncle, because that will too render him abstract and further dehumanise him. There will be time to do this at length. I send all my solidarity and my condolences to his friends, family, colleagues, and all who have been touched by his work and ideas, however imperfect and flawed they might have been. And indeed black people have the right to exist as flawed, imperfect, complex and at times problematic and be held to account without triggering waves of transgression and envy related hate and normalised violence. That is never justice-seeking, that is antiblackness.