The Jason Arday tragedy underscores the perils of tokenism
There is a particular kind of frustration I feel when a white colleague, even with the best of intentions, adjusts the dial on the radio to hip hop the moment I, a British academic of African ancestry, walk through the laboratory door. It is a gesture that says, “You have been seen, but not as yourself: as a label.”
I have spent my academic career navigating these awkward moments – in my own laboratory, in shared departmental facilities, at conferences and at social events. The laughter as a senior academic at a conference dinner claims not to be able to see me in the dark outside the restaurant. The incredulous looks when I explain that my instrument is the piano and my repertoire is classical, not jazz or pop or hip hop. The patronising smiles at the well-meaning ceremony where I am told how proud our society is to see a “Black man” receive such a prestigious award, and the common assumption that I only got it because of my race – despite the fact that I was the only nominee with papers from prestigious journals in both the Nature and Cell portfolios.
As I have previously described in Times Higher Education, I gave that prize back eight years later because I could no longer stomach the insinuation that my two decades of peer-reviewed science had been secondary to the colour of my epidermis as far as the prize judges were concerned. Such assumptions, my article suggested, were the inevitable, counterproductive result of positive ethnic discrimination. In a separate article, I also spoke on my discomfort with the term “Black academic”, and I predicted that the academy’s obsession with racial labelling would eventually curdle into a darker reality.
After I won that prize, colleagues suggested that I should “ride the EDI train” all the way to a professorship. But the most successful riders of the EDI train, it seems to me, are a cadre of mostly white managerial academics who are absorbed into an institutional culture of committees, promotions, impact metrics, grant capture and branding. They are parachuted on to committees, given platforms and promoted up the ranks at a pace that has much more to do with their loudly proclaimed commitment to diversity than with the grinding, unglamorous work of scholarship.
I don’t deny that their actions are well intentioned, but they trap the institutions they lead in a white saviour complex that sees “Black/Brown/Yellow” (yes, I have heard even that dated, racist term used by white academics) as vulnerable victims. At the same time, these managers pitchfork such “diverse voices” not only into “decolonisation” working groups within the institution but also into public life – panels, public talks, media interviews – not because of their intellectual substance but because of their symbolic value.
The tragedy of Jason Arday, is – to some extent – a case in point and should be a wake-up call. Here was a beautiful mind of resilience. His journey – from being non-verbal in childhood, as confirmed by some of his school friends, to becoming the youngest-ever Black professor at Cambridge – was testament to his human spirit. But this narrative was apparently all Cambridge valued him for, his appointment serving as a token of institutional virtue. And when an institution defines you by your trauma narrative or your skin colour, it leaves no room for you to be ordinary, to be flawed, to be a complex human being, or simply to be an academic. It is a burden no one should be asked to carry.
That is especially true when, as I’ve described, the system of positive ethnic discrimination that managers have built creates a perception that every minority scholar is a diversity hire. The higher a chosen few ethnic scholars are prematurely elevated, the harder they can fall – and the more isolated they become from the wider community of scholars who might have supported them.
My father, a sceptic with a keen eye for human folly, told me on the day I was awarded a permanent position: “Those who live by the label, die by the label.” He urged me to ensure that academia saw me as a researcher first and as a complex human being with many identities – yes, of African heritage, but also a Londoner, a lover of classical piano, a person with flaws, doubts and contradictions.
I tried to live by that advice for over 20 years in British academia, but the ethnic labelling proved impossible to escape and I escaped in 2023 to be a researcher in the wild and to write my forthcoming memoir, a plea for the sector to see all academics as they are: individuals, not avatars.
Until academics in senior positions abandon ethnic tokenism and positive discrimination, the profession I love dearly will continue to see Black academics scrutinised, exposed and broken under pressure that their white colleagues rarely face, punished severely for the ordinary imperfections every academic has.
The academy must stop asking what its minority scholars look or sound like and start listening to what they actually have to say. It must allow them the dignity of entering it as equals, on the strength of their ideas and research alone. We need professors from minority backgrounds who are as brilliant and as credible as the last white academic who held their position. And if that means there are fewer of them – at least in the short term, until the system adjusts to the new reality – then so be it.
The alternative is a future in which universities’ senior ranks are multiethnic but hollowed out, with the complex, hyphenated, brilliant minority talents having long since walked away and those remaining always prone to being destroyed, professionally and personally, by the very institutions that claim to celebrate them.
It is time to stop living by the label. Or, as my father would say, academia will surely die by it.
Aymen Idris is founder and director of the Africa in Science (AiS) thinktank and author of the forthcoming memoir, The Hyphenated Academic.
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Staff diversity: race and ethnicity