The Oprahfication of Antiracism

Professor Priyamvada Gopal writes:

Christmas arrived early this year for right-wing keyboard warriors. Jason Arday, a Black British academic, resigned from a prestigious professorship at Cambridge University after a string of revelations about alleged plagiarism and outlandish claims, including that he wrote a book that doesn’t exist, ran 30 marathons in 35 days and played for Crystal Palace. It was a gift-wrapped triumph for those on both sides of the Atlantic who have long had Black academics, the humanities and universities in their sights, confirming their prejudices about everything from multiculturalism, progressive values and Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion initiatives (EDI), to “critical race theory” and the abilities of Black people. Choked with fury, they accuse the humanities and social sciences of propagating “grievance studies” and universities of being too “woke”, that is, too inclusive of women, sexual minorities and people of colour.

No surprise, then, that the whole chain of recent events was triggered by a blog by “anti-woke” researcher and self-described “race realist”, Nathan Cofnas.

Let go from a loose affiliation with a Cambridge college after he published a blog post entitled “A Guide for the Hereditarian Revolution”, Cofnas exudes victimhood even though his rights to free speech and racist views were fully upheld by Cambridge. He believes racial differences are a biological fact and has declared that in a meritocracy there would be “close to zero” Black professors at Harvard (and presumably Cambridge). Cofnas has also made the false racist observation that sports and entertainment are the only arenas where Black people can achieve highly.

Cofnas’ recent blog resurrects verbatim overlaps between Arday’s academic work and those of others. Credible questions around plagiarism had already been documented by others, including journalist Jack Grove, who was prevented from publishing by legal threats.

Culture warriors like Cofnas who obsessively target Black academics in particular, but also people of colour, women and sexual minorities, are really fighting over who gets to maintain demographic dominance in universities. Arday did face an “unrelenting level of public scrutiny and personal attack” from the right after he was appointed. For people who feel entitled to rule the roost, small moves towards equality and sharing institutional space feel like oppression. They justify their exclusionary views through discredited theories like “hereditarianism”, “race realism” or “scientific racism”, which posit race as a biological essence and claim innate differences of ability between races, for which there is no credible evidence.

This is why the supposed “diktats of critical race theory” are a particular bugbear for culture warriors. It simply states that race is a historical invention, and a relatively recent one, and that race and racial differences are social categories that have no fundamental biological basis, given that genetics show that human beings are more than 99.9% identical at DNA level. Perhaps the Human Genome Project and Genome Campus near Cambridge should be accused of wokeness.

There is, in fact, a more relevant criticism to be made of EDI as it operates at many institutions, including Cambridge. Under the reign of neoliberal economic ideologies, it has been rendered largely symbolic and superficial, fully compatible with the growing commodification of education. Arday’s public talks and accounts of his life largely fit in with this “Oprahfication” of antiracism. In one, he speaks of how he triumphed through “will not skill”. Cambridge also credited his success to exceptional character traits, adding that he intended to use his platform “to inspire more people from under-represented backgrounds into higher education”. It was the familiar and seductive story of an individual triumphing over difficult circumstances through “indomitable” grit. “Just do it!” could be the corporate slogan. Redolent of self-help and inspirational fables, this approach appeals to institutions deeply resistant to systemic change and easily threatened by genuine challenge.

It certainly looks like Cambridge got things badly wrong in rushing to appoint an early-career scholar with a fairly thin output to a highly prestigious and very senior post, making him the youngest-ever Black professor at Cambridge at 37. They made things worse by putting out an unusual amount of publicity stressing his race, youth and apparent victories over great adversity, including learning difficulties. The same media now tut-tutting over Arday were fully involved in parading him as a Black wunderkind on flagship programmes. But the very presentation of Black achievement as exceptional betrays troubling racial presumptions.

Academics at Cambridge, including me, have called for an independent investigation into what went wrong. Since the university is vulnerable to the charge that there are few Black British academics in its employ, some managers may have thought a high-profile Black hire might help cover a multitude of absences and bring kudos with it. That has backfired, not least since his research, which Arday has publicly said he doesn’t really like doing and finds difficult, appears to not have been scrutinised properly.

Roger Mosey, who was head of television news in a “hideously white” BBC, accused the university of a “hardline pursuit of diversity”. In fact, Cambridge may have done the exact opposite with one highly visible professorship taking the place of more wide-ranging institutional change.

A small group of former academics and managers believe universities are in decline since their far more homogenous time. What really needs to happen in order to foster Black excellence would give them a collective aneurysm. Conscientious mentoring and sustained institutional support for at least a generation of talented young Black scholars are needed so that very many more than one can aspire to secure academic jobs. Such scholars would be walking in the footsteps of respected British scholars of Caribbean or African origin like Stuart Hall, C.L.R. James, Gail Lewis, Margaret Ebunoluwa Aderin, Paul Gilroy or Kate Okikiolu.

Our universities need more, not fewer, opportunities to combine inclusion and excellence, which, sorry to say, is not the sole specialty of any one ethnic group or gender. A lone individual’s transgressions would not then be so prominent, and could not be weaponised to smear entire communities and disciplines. There have been several recent cases, at Cambridge alone, of white male scholars being accused of academic or sexual misconduct. Where is the rolling media coverage of these? White male and elite privilege have shielded many such men from consequences for a long time. Where was the furore when it was reported that the white associate professor of religion and Reform “kingmaker”, James Orr, was tasked with recruiting “hundreds” of highly able Cambridge students into the party?

As the likes of Boris Johnson and Elon Musk rush to denounce Cambridge and Arday, they remind us that the former professor is not our biggest problem. It is that we live in a world where shallow pep talk, falsehoods, and disinformation have become the norm for public and political discourse. Perhaps it’s time for all of us to be a little bit more critical and a lot more awake.