Why the Left Needed to Believe in Jason Arday

Jason Arday was either the most interesting man in the world, or he was 
a liar. It turned out to be the latter.

All this has revealed many unflattering things about academia: DEI 
invites fraud by lowering standards, the bigotry of low expectations is 
alive and well, and a disturbing number of “experts” — not just Arday 
but all the Cambridge professors and BBC journalists who co-signed him — 
are compromised by ideology, cowardice, or both.

But the Arday scandal has also revealed something else: White liberals 
in the English-speaking world want to believe in the archetype of the 
up-from-nothing black intellectual who, despite huge disadvantages, goes 
on to achieve greatness. In fact, they want to believe in this sort of 
story so badly that they are willing to turn off every ounce of 
skepticism that they would normally bring to bear on fantastical claims.

The irony, however, is that we already have many examples of 
up-from-nothing black intellectuals who go on to greatness. It’s just 
that they usually turn out to be conservatives — or if not 
conservatives, then at least out-of-step with the left-wing religion of 
racial justice.

Consider Thomas Sowell. Sowell was born in the Jim Crow South and grew 
up in a house without hot water or electricity. His father died before 
he was born, and his mother died soon after. As a teenager, he did a 
brief stint in a homeless shelter, sleeping with a knife under his 
pillow. Years later, he somehow managed to make it to Harvard 
University—before affirmative action existed to cast a doubt over such 
achievements—and he began what would become one of the great 
intellectual careers in modern American history.

Or think of Roland Fryer. Fryer was abandoned at birth by his mother. 
His father, meanwhile, was an abusive, gambling alcoholic who ended up 
in prison for rape. He also spent quite a bit of time with his 
great-aunt and cousins, who ran a major crack cocaine operation. Perhaps 
unsurprisingly, by his teenage years, Fryer was involved in petty crime. 
Yet he managed to get into college on an athletic scholarship and then 
caught the economics bug. He would go on to become an award-winning 
economics professor at Harvard.

Or consider Glenn Loury. Loury grew up in a redlined, working-class 
neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago in the 1950s. During his 
teens, he fathered two children, and supported them by working in a 
printing plant—all while taking classes at a community college. 
Eventually, he worked his way up to MIT, where he earned a PhD. And 
despite his later crack cocaine addiction, Loury went on to an 
illustrious career as an economist and political commentator.

In an alternate reality, Sowell, Fryer, and Loury would be heroes of the 
left, just like Jason Arday was until his downfall. After all, it is the 
left and not the right that frequently talks about “centering black 
voices.” But there’s one problem. Though progressives would never say 
this out loud, people like Sowell, Fryer, and Loury don’t serve the 
purpose for which black intellectuals are intended, which is not to 
advance research or fight for the interests of black people but rather 
to scratch a very specific psychological itch in the white liberal psyche.

In the progressive mind, white people are forever the problem and need 
to be told that purging the racism within their hearts is the key to 
black advancement. Black intellectuals who ritualistically affirm this 
belief — people like Ta-Nehisi Coates, Ibram X. Kendi, and Nikole 
Hannah-Jones — are useful. They are serving their intended purpose. 
Black intellectuals who don’t do this are not just useless; they are an 
active threat to the white guilt complex.

Sowell, for example, has spent his career arguing, quite persuasively, 
that discrimination is not the only possible cause of racial disparities 
and that culture matters a great deal, too. Fryer has argued, again 
persuasively, that American police departments are no likelier to use 
deadly force on black suspects than on suspects who aren’t black; that 
Justice Department pattern-or-practice investigations into police 
agencies (often favored by Democratic administrations) cause an increase 
in violent crime, which hurts the black community most; and that the 
“acting white” penalty imposed by the black community on its own members 
is a real thing. Loury, for his part, has a long-running podcast with 
John McWhorter (a self-described “cranky liberal Democrat”) that has 
featured some of the best criticisms of woke racial politics out there.

So with all of the genuinely inspiring black intellectuals rendered 
useless by their stubborn independence of mind, who is left to scratch 
this guilty itch in the liberal psyche? Well, it would seem that the 
second string has had to suffice. And that’s where the Jason Ardays of 
the world come in. It should go without saying that Arday’s death is a 
terrible tragedy that no one should celebrate. At the same time, it is 
true to say that this tragedy was enabled by the psychological need 
among liberal elites for a black avatar of their guilt.

Arday’s death should be a call for liberals and progressives to look 
inward — not to expunge the supposed demon of white supremacy, but to 
look at the nature of white guilt itself. Ultimately, white guilt is a 
virus that leads its victims to prioritize their own need for catharsis 
over the public’s need for truth. The moment that elites in the West 
have this much-needed epiphany en masse will be the moment that we 
ensure the tragic case of Jason Arday never repeats itself.

Coleman Hughes