Steven Thrasher on the Killing of Jason Arday

Though I have been mostly offline for my annual summer social media sabbatical, I watched the Jason Arday story unfold with increasing horror over the last couple of weeks. With hundreds of stories in traditional media, along with many people texting me updates because they perceived parallels between his situation in academia and my own, it was unavoidable. 

I had never interacted with Jason, but I’ve spoken at Cambridge twice over the last two years—on my way out of the academy myself—and, like many Blackademics, I’m aware of most of the few of us who live in Black and brown skin while inhabiting these primarily white spaces. 

Jason’s life ended in tragedy, and while our stories bear many similarities, at least I am privileged to leave academia on my own two feet and not in a body bag. May Jason know peace now, something he was not allowed to feel in the last weeks of his life. 

Suicide is complicated and multifactoral in its causes, but it is undeniable that the ghoulish hunting of this gentle spirit is why he is dead today. Jason was not just hounded out of Cambridge or academia; he was hounded out of the workforce, hounded out of existence. For this wretched Western society (which is so well exemplified by the grotesque nature of so-called “higher” education) wants each of us to believe we are born to be exploited and used up—especially people who are Black or mentally ill or disabled. This grotesque order wants each of us to believe that if we fail to manage our own exploitation, we deserve the death penalty.

I, for one, refuse to accept this.

I want to consider Jason’s story in tandem with my own, but not to foreground myself. No, I want to hug Jason close because there is a tendency when looking at the downfall of Black or brown academics or writers to cleave them into categories of “worthy” or “unworthy.” “Good trouble” or “bad trouble.” It’s the same sentiment Chris Rock utilized when he yelled “I love Black people but I hate niggers” in 1999 and it is often applied to situations like Jason’s. This narrative tries to distinguish between Blackademics deserving of sympathy and niggers—because, let’s be honest, that’s the word gatekeeping Primarily White Institutions (PWI) like Cambridge would use if they could. 

Nothing Jason was accused of doing justified what he was subjected to

I have no idea if, how, why, or to what degree Jason may have done or not done what he is accused of having done. And I do not care. At all. He seems to have been a gentle soul who navigated disability, racism, and cruelty with tenderness and tenacity—a human being struggling with mental illness whose cries for help were ignored. As my friend Greg Gonsalves asked, “Who had the duty of care for Jason Arday? From my perspective, it was everyone around him, who watched what he was going through and walked away, ignored it. I don’t care what he was accused of; it is monstrous that no one stepped in to help. He died alone.” (Greg works at Yale, a university which is actively re-segregating itself and colluding with the Trump administration to destroy higher ed. “Whatever you think about universities,” Gregg added, “they are not places of justice or kindness.”)

Nothing Jason was accused of doing justified what he was subjected to: being hounded to his death (even after he resigned) by a chorus of petty, cruel, and often blatantly white supremacist people who filed hundreds of stories about him (not to mention an avalanche of tweets). I received multiple breaking news alerts about his death—about the death of someone who should have never been a globally known name. But that’s what contemporary academia does. It forces writers, journalists, and professors to to summit pedestals if they are to have any hope of securing precarious employment. Then it waits for them to fall, and rips them to shreds when they inevitably do.

The way Jason was treated in the press as a Blackademic is so common that it has almost become a genre of sorts. Recently, another prominent Blackademic was accused of poor citational practices (I will not mention them by name or link to the coverage to spare them more unfair attention). The parallels between the coverage of this other scholar’s work and Jason’s were so similar, as were the targeted attacks, that you can begin to see this issue for what it is: an insidious structural problem.

The real transgression which triggered the investigations of both of these scholars was being a star in a PWI, and having a crossover book by a major trade publisher. This was their true sin. This is what brought a level of scrutiny upon them, which cost them their careers (and, in one case, their life).

“Dare to step into these spaces,” they warn, “dare to take some of the resources we’ve been hoarding, and this could happen to you, too.”

I am reminded of the case of Juan M. Thompson, a Black journalist who was fired from the Intercept for fabricating sources in 2016, prior to making bomb threats against Jewish Community Centers, serving 5 years in prison, and dying at 39, likely of a drug overdose. Thompson was a fabulist and also seriously mentally unwell. When there are so very few Black journalists and professors in PWIs, it is extremely suspicious that some who squeak in do so with stories too outlandish to be true. Is this storytelling required to get in the door?

And what does it mean when most of us who don’t make them up also have to present heroic narratives about ourselves as the price of admission? 

What if we didn’t blame individuals for not solving a systemic issue? What if they weren’t punished for their shortcomings with a lynch mob? 

What if we instead asked questions like:

Why are there so few Black people in well-resourced institutions? 

Why does someone with Black or brown skin have to have some super human quality—like claiming to run 30 marathons in 35 days—to gain entry into one of these institutions? 

Why are Black and brown institutions—like HBCUS or universities in Africa or Mexico—purposefully under resourced? 

Why are people who inevitably fail to find stability on the wobbly pedestal they’ve been placed on the only ones from marginalized communities who can break into well-resourced institutions? 

Jason, others in PWIs, others kept out of PWIs, and others trying to do right in under-resourced nonwhite institutions are victims of a kind of systemic violence. When so much vitriolic rhetoric is directed at one person, it’s a form of what Koritha Mitchell calls “Know Your Place Aggression.” Mitchell describes this as “the flexible, dynamic array of forces that answer the achievements of marginalized groups such that their success brings aggression as often as praise. Any progress by those who are not straight, white, and male is answered by a backlash of violence—both literal and symbolic, both physical and discursive—that essentially says, know your place!” 

What does it mean that our downfalls and deaths, rather than our achievements and ascensions, are the only things of interest to these voracious outlets?

Some of the people who hunted Arday are, let’s be honest, extremely mediocre people. To call them journalists would be an insult to the profession. And while he was partially their focus—and while he paid with his life for their malice—their bigger target was all non-white people who try to wrest away resources from PWIs. “Dare to step into these spaces,” they warn, “dare to take some of the resources we’ve been hoarding, and this could happen to you, too.” Every public lynching has hoped to serve this purpose of deterrence, and this once was no exception. One of the reasons I warn against “first narratives” and times when Black people are “the only one” in The Overseer Class is not just because the dynamics push one to become an overseer, but because they leave one vulnerable to scrutiny, shunning, and, ultimately, ruination. 

The mediocre “journalists” covering Jason’s downfall are vultures. His death was a breaking news event in the New York Times, Guardian and BBC—publications, I can personally attest, which have ignored the work of many brilliant Blackademics in recent months, but which will giddily announce their deaths. 

What does it mean that our downfalls and deaths, rather than our achievements and ascensions, are the only things of interest to these voracious outlets? 

In The Viral Underclass, I wrote about how racism eventually got George Floyd—through the police, through Covid, through poverty; one way or another, racism was always going to get that man. And it did. I look at how racism grinds up Black and brown people inside these PWIs, how it uses us up and casts us aside, systematically. How, as Afeef Nessouli and I reported in the Intercept, it is Black and brown people with HIV who are spit out by public health projects around the world—after they perform the important labor that makes it possible for white researchers at PWIs to buy houses and build careers in the global north. 

On Halloween, 2024, not long after I myself had been suspended from teaching over my support for Palestine, I was invited to debate at the Cambridge Union Debate Society. (I stayed in Jesus College, where Jason Arday was a professor.) The motion before us was “This House Welcomes the Decline of America.” I chose the occasion to talk about a gay Latino student in the first college class I’d ever taught. His name was Andres. He was a total pain in the ass, but also brilliant and wonderful, and I loved him. He was an immigrant from Colombia, and I was the “first adult” he told he was HIV-positive. He did sex work to meet NYU’s huge costs. By the time he left NYU, he was $150,000 in debt. Andres wanted to pursue scholarly study—and he certainly had the smarts for it—but he saw law school as the only way to get out of debt someday. Yet by the time he left law school, he was $300,000 in debt. He died at age 27 of a drug overdose. 

As I said that Halloween night at Cambridge, “It is obscene that America could not find a place for my beautiful, queer, brown, pain-in-the-ass student–who was not my student at all, really, but my teacher! And America took him away from this world before he got to do what he came here to do!” America has no copyright on lethal racism, though; England, its press, and its universities remind us of that often. 

Andres’ was just one of many I had to mourn during my short stint in academia. In America, while I was in grad school, there weren’t many Black or brown PhD students studying what I was studying (and none at all in my cohort at NYU). But we found each other at conferences and on Twitter, and we kept in touch in group chats and tried to support each other. 

And yet, amongst those few of us, three died before I finished my PhD: Doria Johnson (cancer, like Johanna Fernandez and Audre Lorde, at age 47), Jesus Estrada Perez (“suicide” in jail, 28), and Andrew Dowe (unknown, 34). 

Racism is succinctly defined by Ruth Wilson Gilmore as “the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death.” Western society in general, and its universities specifically, not only fails to make a place for the many brilliant non-white people who have so much to offer the world; it produces and exploits the vulnerability of people like Jason, Andres, Doria, Jesus, and Andrew.

As a friend put it to me, “The moral of this unspeakably tragic story: the ‘post-racial’ university and the elite it serves are ideological weapons of death.”