THE BLACK PROFESSOR THEY COULDN’T WAIT TO DESTROY – Pride Magazine

Jason Arday had the audacity to become everything Britain tells Black children they can be. Then came the pile-on. The right came for him. Parts of the left joined in. And the British press discovered that there is nothing quite so delicious as watching a Black man fall from the heights.

There is something deeply uncomfortable about the death of Professor Jason Arday.

Not simply because a 41-year-old man, a husband, father and Cambridge professor has died. Not simply because he had become one of the most extraordinary examples of Black British academic achievement. But because of what happened to him in the weeks before his death, and because of the enthusiasm with which Britain’s media joined the spectacle.

Let us be absolutely clear about what we know.

Jason Arday was found dead at his home in south London on Friday, August 14. The Metropolitan Police have described his death as unexpected but not suspicious. A coroner’s investigation is pending. His family, however, has spoken of a sustained campaign of abuse, harassment and misinformation that began after his appointment to Cambridge and intensified dramatically during the recent controversy. (Financial Times)

We should not pretend to know what happened inside Jason’s final hours.

But we can ask a very uncomfortable question.

What kind of society thinks it is acceptable to subject a human being to this level of public humiliation?

And what does it say about Britain that so many newspapers appeared to relish it?

Pride knew Jason.

We interviewed him when he became Cambridge University’s youngest Black professor.

What I remember was not the caricature that subsequently emerged in the newspapers. Not the “poster boy”. Not the “mythomaniac”. Not the supposed symbol of everything wrong with diversity.

I remember a shy, thoughtful, lovely young man who…