Sean Moore

Remembering Victoria Climbié 🙏🏾🤍 Victoria Climbié died in 2000 at the age of 8, following severe abuse by her guardians. Her death prompted a public inquiry, which led to significant reforms in child protection policies across England. Today would’ve been her 35th birthday.

For weeks, some racist Western media outlets published story after story against Professor Jason Arday, at times every few hours, branding him a plagiarist. They hounded him relentlessly, and the pressure became too much for him. He committed suicide in August, aged just 41. This week, he was cleared of plagiarism yet again. A fresh investigation by the academic publisher Taylor & Francis found nothing to support the allegations. Of the four formal investigations into his work, not one substantiated the charge. The same publications that hunted him are now silent. They have not corrected their reporting, and they have not had the decency to admit they were wrong. This is how hard it is to be Black in a deeply racist world, and to succeed where they expect you to fail. Even those who present themselves as the moral conscience of the Western world have nothing to say. In a shameful act, the Oxford Reform Society has invited Nathan Cofnas, the self-described "race realist" who first raised the plagiarism allegations against Professor Arday, to speak at Oriel College next month. Oriel College, the home of Cecil John Rhodes’ statue. These institutions are racist. Sadly, Black leaders have failed to build rival institutions that give Black people respect and intellectual dignity. We are forced to endure disrespect because our leadership has failed us completely. Black billionaires line up to hand money to these institutions in exchange for meaningless honorary titles, instead of building our own. May Professor Arday's soul rest in peace. You were hounded to your death by publications that today do not even have the shame to admit they were wrong.

He won the US Open as an amateur and got no prize money. He was refused a visa by South Africa for years for being Black. And in 1992 a newspaper told him it was going to print his medical records, so he had to stand up in front of the world and announce he was dying. He said: "I didn't commit any crime. I'm not running for public office. I should be able to reserve the right to my medical history." He won the US Open in 1968, Wimbledon in 1975, and was the only Black man ever to win either. He had heart surgery twice in the early 1980s and received a blood transfusion. The blood supply was not screened then. That is how he contracted HIV. He told his family and kept it private for three and a half years, which was his right and which in 1988 was also basic self-protection — people with the virus were losing homes, jobs and children. In April 1992 a reporter rang him, said the paper had it, and asked him to confirm. He was given twenty-four hours. So he called a press conference, with his wife beside him, and announced it himself rather than let it be done to him. He then spent the last ten months of his life founding an AIDS foundation, campaigning, and being arrested outside the White House protesting the treatment of Haitian refugees. He died in February 1993 at forty-nine. He had been arrested for protesting apartheid, arrested for protesting Haitian deportations, and outed by a newspaper for having had heart surgery.