The comfortable place for a Black person in the racist imagination is not Cambridge.
If he appears on the evening news accused of a crime, the image is familiar. It can be quietly filed away in the old folder: violence, poverty, disorder, poor education. Everything is in its proper place, and the world is working as expected.
But what do we do with a Black man who becomes a professor at Cambridge?
That is what makes the story of Jason Arday so interesting. Not because he is above criticism—he faced serious academic allegations, and it is entirely reasonable that he should be held accountable for them. What is striking is how quickly the question can shift from: Did Arday do something wrong? to: Were we wrong to open the doors to people like him?
Suddenly, diversity policies enter the courtroom.
Did he get there on merit? Did the colour of his skin help him? Did he take the place of someone more qualified?
It seems that with every achievement, a Black person must provide an additional certificate of merit.
The irony is that this leaves him facing an exam that is almost impossible to pass: if he fails, he confirms the stereotype. If he succeeds, his success itself becomes a source of suspicion.
It is a beautiful game—especially when you are the one writing the rules.
Perhaps racism does not always need the unsuccessful Black person because it hates him. Perhaps it needs him because he is reassuring. His place at the bottom keeps the order of the world intelligible: we are here; they are there.
But the Black person who enters the same university, carries the same title and sits behind the same desk disrupts the architecture of that world, just a little.
And so the question left by Arday’s story is not whether he was innocent or guilty. That is another matter.
The more unsettling question is this: Why can a white professor make a mistake and remain simply a professor who made a mistake, while a Black professor, when he makes one, may find himself having to defend the very idea of his presence at the university?
Perhaps the problem is not that the Black man failed the exam.
Perhaps the problem is that he entered the room.