The World of Nathan Cofnas

The Jason Arday affair has repeatedly been shown to have been nothing like as bad, or even as unusual, as it was presented, and there may well be more such correction to come. The whole thing was got up over the summer to distract from the true scandal of Lola Salem, itself extending to the emergence of a Parisian-style Far Right intellectual and cultural scene in London with connections to the very hearts of Reform UK and the Conservative Party. The self-appointed inquiry into Arday announced its existence and composition in one of the two magazines closest to Salem and to the already convicted Henry Hopwood-Phillips. And proving that he still held the United Kingdom visa that he needed to address a Reform event, but which the Labour Government had denied to Andreas Malm to address a Tribune one, Nathan Cofnas is to speak at the Oxford college from which Salem had been suspended, as Charlie Brinkhurst-Cuff writes:

When I heard that Nathan Cofnas – the self-described “race realist” who spearheaded a campaign against Jason Arday, the Black, former Cambridge professor whose academic work prompted unrelenting scrutiny before his untimely death – was due to speak at Oxford University’s Oriel College next month, I wasn’t surprised. Only a few months ago, the university union had hosted Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson), one of the most dangerous far-right men in the country who was actively responsible for stirring up race riots across the summer. I was, however, disgusted.

This column will not be another treatise on the right or wrongs of free speech; we have been there and done that. But what I am interested in is the world of elite academia, of which most of us have only ever skimmed the surface. By my reckoning, the world of Nathan Cofnas is dank, self-obsessed and manages to be both deeply hypocritical and highly illogical while utterly convinced of its superiority. This is a man who, in the weeks after Arday’s death, appeared on right-wing podcasts decrying a peaceful vigil as an “anti-Cofnas hate rally”. Cofnas has claimed if he had set foot in central London that evening, he would have been murdered. I attended the vigil, and it was flooded with tears and sorrow at the premature loss of Arday by those who loved him.

A couple of years ago, I went to an exhibition in London’s Wellcome Collection by artists Larry Achiampong and David Blandy, titled Genetic Automata; it explored race science and eugenics. In the first room were artefacts, mostly from the beginning of the 20th century: a swatch of different hair textures and colours, neatly labelled; a collection of glass eyes used as part of an antisemitic study to compare the irises of children alongside a set of sepia-toned photographs; a device that measured the heads of individuals to make judgments on their intelligence or supposed affinity towards criminality. None would be out of place in a sci-fi show: they were terrifying, and ridiculous.

What these objects reminded me of, as someone who has engaged with interest in the (very British) history of race science, reading the work of geneticist Adam Rutherford and science journalist Angela Saini in particular, was just how dehumanising it is at its core. As Saini wrote in her 2019 book, Superior: The Return of Race Science, “Mainstream scientists, geneticists and medical researchers still invoke race and use these categories in their work, even though we have been told for 70 years that they have no biological meaning, that they have only social meaning… Racial injustice and inequality in their minds isn’t injustice or inequality at all. It’s there because the racial hierarchy is real.” On the growth in right-wing “race realists” such as Cofnas, she accurately predicted that they have been playing a “waiting game” – waiting for the right time to espouse their views publicly and virulently. “The public assumed that the extremes of scientific racism were dead, when in fact they were always active under the radar,” she wrote. The time, unfortunately it seems, is now.

Cofnas is a part of a dark and dangerous legacy, so grotesque it is fit for a horror movie (think: the most gruesome aspects of the transatlantic slave trade and the Holocaust). It takes a sick-minded and corrupted individual to decide to spend their life’s work dedicated to this field of “study”; to spend their time looking for genetic differences in intelligence, even though the former of which has been debunked time and time again, and the latter of which is inherently subjective. How many times is it necessary to say that race is a social construct; that skin colour and phenotype can basically never be a measure of anyone’s inner world? I do not tar Cofnas with the brush of evil lightly. His contributions to academia are, despite his weak protestations, founded on sand, and, from the papers that I’ve read parts of, both dull, damaging and ahistorical. Or, as Rutherford writes, “risible and vapid”.

And so back to Oxford, and the fact that the university’s Reform UK student supporters group has invited students to an evening with the man. Reform has been labelled by Oxford students themselves as the first anti-university party. They are fresh off the back of not one but two major undercover investigations into their racism, and earlier this year their party leader, Nigel Farage, was reminded of the fact that his schoolmates were the victims of his nascent racist behaviour. Thus far, the university hasn’t stepped in to prevent the event going ahead. As put by academic and author Kehinde Andrews, a friend of Arday’s, “This is not an example of Oxford against its values. These are the values of Oxford University.” A place where racist language becomes coded into diatribes about DEI. Where someone like Cofnas can be awarded a PhD [at Oxford?]. “Maybe,” Andrews says, “it's a perfect talk that should be given to remind you all of what the university is.”

Even so, today, an open letter and petition calling for the cancellation of the event, signed by academics and celebrities including Beverly Knight and Zawe Ashton, has been circulated, and I predict the ongoing backlash to the event will be substantial. I completed a fellowship at Oxford during the height of the pro-Palestine encampments and protests – many of the students’ actions were tightly organised, coordinated and deeply politically aligned. Surely, Cofnas’s appearance at the university won’t be met with anything less than that same energy and righteous anger.