William Johnsen

Extracts from article in Spectator 16th August by Brendan O’Neill: Behold the human wreckage of the cult of diversity. The tragedy of Jason Arday is that he was both built up and destroyed by the ruthless machinery of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). The academy made him into the golden boy of its philistine project of ‘decolonisation’ and gave not one thought to what the consequences might be if his thin story unravelled, as it inevitably would. No one can deny it now: wokeness makes false gods and real tragedies. . . This is the poison chalice of the state religion of diversity. It lays traps for the very people it celebrates. It handpicks members of ‘the oppressed’ for moral anointment and institutional gushing while leaving them open to exposure as others start to query their credentials. That’s the toxic bargain of identity politics: it builds teetering pedestals for ethnic-minority thinkers, meaning their fall from grace is often twice as fatal. And what a pedestal they made for Arday. They worshipped him as ‘the best in the world’. They beatified him as a black wunderkind whose very presence in a place like Cambridge might help to wash away its sins of whiteness. They canonised him as a living monument to ‘decolonisation’. It was precisely this, their giddy, narcissistic desire to manufacture a kind of black saviour, that made them turn a blind eye to the questionable elements of Arday’s CV and life story. They sacrificed their due diligence to the god of decolonisation. And Arday suffered. He was both poster boy and sacrificial lamb of the diversity crusade. Even as he gained from it – reaching the dizzying heights of a Cambridge professorship – he was being damned by it. The foundation of myth and sand his starry career was built on was untenable. Its collapse was a given. It is a testament to the ideological blindness of the inhabitants of our ivory towers that none of them foresaw it. . . . The Faustian ruthlessness of it all is mindblowing. . . . The media is the only institution in this entire tragic scandal that did its job properly. Journalists found a story and they told it. It was the academy and Arday’s colleagues who failed to do their jobs. Who failed to prize merit over identity, and failed to foresee the public embarrassment that would befall their falsely promoted friend. They ignored the truth – the media found it. I and others have been arguing for years that the politics of identity is a disaster for all, black and white alike. White kids are overlooked, black kids are patronised. Whites are branded ‘privileged’, blacks ‘oppressed’. Whites are seen as the beneficiaries of historic crimes who must atone for past sins, blacks as history’s perma-victims who require the gracious helping hand of the state. We are demonised or infantilised according to the accident of our race. Enough. Let our monument to Jason Arday be the restoration of the true ideal of equality. We couldn’t save Jason but we can save merit from the monstrous jaws of identity.