His death belongs to a larger culture in which racism, inequality, market values and authoritarian cruelty increasingly determine whose suffering matters and whose can be ignored.
I am sickened and deeply saddened by the death of Jason Arday. He was only 41, a young man whose life was cut short following a period of intense public controversy and scrutiny, much of it shaped by pressures and forces far larger than any one individual should have to bear. His death is first and foremost a profound human tragedy. But mourning him also requires that we look beyond the immediate circumstances of this tragedy and ask difficult questions about the society and institutions that created the wider conditions in which his ordeal unfolded.
Jason Arday’s death needs to be understood within the wider structures of power that shaped his ordeal. The liberal language of “accountability and humanity” individualizes the tragedy and leaves untouched the larger machinery of power that determines whose errors become scandals, whose vulnerabilities become public spectacles, whose failures are forgiven, and who is forced to carry the burden of institutional racism.
There is far more at work here than a failure to balance accountability with compassion. To frame this simply as a problem of public judgment, social media excess, university malpractice, or the need for greater civility is to ignore the structures of power that make some people far more vulnerable than others to humiliation, abandonment, and public condemnation.
Nor can what happened to Jason Arday be separated from the larger political landscape in which cruelty, disposability, and racialized violence have increasingly become normalized. Across the globe, governments are waging war on immigrants and people of color, criminalizing dissent, expanding regimes of surveillance and repression, and embracing policies of expulsion, exclusion, and racial cleansing. Gaza has become the most horrifying expression of this machinery of death, with children killed on a staggering scale and an entire population subjected to devastation, displacement, and hunger. At the same time, grotesque levels of inequality condemn millions to insecurity and abandonment, while the planet is sacrificed to the demands of profit and militarism. These are not isolated developments.
They bear the mobilizing passions of fascism: the manufacture of enemies, the celebration of cruelty, the contempt for vulnerability, the racial sorting of human beings, the militarization of knowledge, and the elevation of violence into a governing principle. In such a world, what happened to Jason Arday cannot be reduced to a private tragedy or explained solely through the circumstances of an individual life. His death points to something larger and more disturbing. It forces us to confront a social order that increasingly trades in disposability, human suffering, war, and cruelty, and then treats the casualties it produces as if they were merely private misfortunes.
It is within this broader culture of disposability and cruelty that Arday’s death takes on its larger significance. Systemic racism and a social order organized around greed, dispossession, hierarchy, and profound inequality do not operate in the abstract. The legacies of colonialism have not disappeared. They have been absorbed into institutions, cultural assumptions, and structures of privilege that continue to determine who belongs, who is protected, whose mistakes can be survived, and who is subjected to relentless scrutiny.
For generations, Black and brown scholars have been forced to carry burdens their white colleagues rarely encounter: the demand to represent an entire race, to prove repeatedly that they deserve to occupy spaces historically denied to them, and to endure forms of scrutiny in which professional criticism can quickly become a racially charged judgment on their intelligence, legitimacy, and very right to belong. These burdens speak to institutions still haunted by the ghosts of a colonial past and the racial hierarchies it produced, now intensified by a far-right assault that seeks to turn higher education into a laboratory of indoctrination, purged of historical consciousness, critical thinking, and a culture of questioning.
The racial politics surrounding Arday’s destruction become even harder to ignore when one considers who helped ignite the campaign against him. Nathan Cofnas, the self-described “race realist” who publicized allegations against Arday, had previously argued that in a genuine meritocracy the number of Black professors at Harvard would “approach zero” and that Black people would largely disappear from prestigious positions outside sports and entertainment. The contrast is especially damning: Cambridge had previously upheld a plagiarism complaint against a white academic involving extensive use of a student’s work, yet he retained his position and escaped anything resembling the public spectacle visited upon Arday. Accountability matters, but when its intensity, publicity, and consequences are distributed so unequally, accountability itself becomes entangled with the racial machinery of power.
This is why symbolic change can never substitute for structural change. Representation matters, but representation without a transformation in the underlying relations of power can become a form of institutional camouflage. As Paul Tiyambe Zeleza notes, Arday was “eagerly elevated as a symbol, ruthlessly scrutinized as an anomaly, and callously discarded as a liability.” His story exposes the cruel underside of performative inclusion: institutions can turn Black achievement into symbolic capital, advertise it as evidence of their own enlightenment, and then withdraw protection when the person carrying that symbolism becomes controversial, vulnerable, or inconvenient.
There is a disturbing contradiction at work here. Arday’s extraordinary biography was celebrated as a story of adversity overcome, with his academic ascent presented as evidence of institutional transformation. But the machinery that helped turn him into a symbol also made him extraordinarily vulnerable. His visibility became a commodity. His biography became part of the university’s public image. Once allegations concerning his scholarship and personal claims emerged, the institution that had benefited from his symbolic elevation had its own reputation to protect. What had been celebrated as triumph could now be treated as a liability to be managed.
This is the violence of what has been called “inclusive exclusion”: institutions open their doors sufficiently to advertise diversity while leaving largely intact the racialized structures of power operating behind them. Black and brown scholars can be welcomed as evidence of progress while being denied the institutional security, solidarity, and protection necessary to survive when that visibility turns against them. They become hypervisible as symbols of institutional virtue and dangerously isolated as human beings.
The media can intensify this process by transforming legitimate questions of academic accountability into a racialized public spectacle. Arday’s alleged failures did not remain his alone. They became entangled with a much larger ideological attack on diversity, equity, and the presence of Black scholars in elite universities. Even one liberal commentator acknowledged that Arday was “fetishized in his ascendancy by white liberals” and “fetishized in his downfall by white conservatives.”The formulation is revealing. In both instances, Arday the human being disappeared behind what others needed him to represent: first as evidence of racial progress, then as evidence of its alleged failure. Here one of racism’s most enduring mechanisms becomes visible: the failures of white academics generally remain individual failures, while the failures of Black academics can be turned into spectacle and made to stand for the supposed failures of an entire race, a political project, or the very idea of racial equality.
The mythology of meritocracy compounds this injustice. Elite universities have never been neutral temples of merit. They are saturated with inherited privilege, family connections, patronage, wealth, elite networks, and forms of cultural capital accumulated across generations. Yet these mechanisms of preferential treatment largely disappear from public discussion until a Black scholar is accused of having benefited from diversity initiatives. Preferential treatment suddenly becomes scandalous precisely when its presumed beneficiary is Black. The enormous machinery of privilege that has historically advantaged white elites is renamed “merit,” while attempts to address racial exclusion are denounced as threats to standards.
There is another force at work: the market itself. Contemporary culture has developed an enormous appetite for spectacularizing narratives of suffering, trauma, resilience, and amazing acts of transcendence. Universities, publishers, media organizations, and cultural industries participate in converting such stories into institutional prestige and commercial value. Black suffering becomes marketable, overcoming it becomes inspirational, and the complicated humanity of actual people can disappear beneath narratives designed to sell books, enhance institutional reputations, and generate publicity. Human beings become brands, their wounds commodities, and suffering itself a spectacle for consumption. As Guy Debord observed in The Society of the Spectacle, “the consumer now becomes the consumer of illusion.” In this regime, the spectacle does more than conceal reality; it normalizes cruelty, turns violence into an object of consumption, and functions as “a guarantor of the system’s totalitarian cohesiveness.”
Taken together, these forces reveal something much larger than the failure of one university or the excesses of one media campaign. They expose an entire machinery of cruelty in which institutional branding, systemic racism, market values, racialized surveillance, the mythology of meritocracy, and the hunger for public spectacle reinforce one another. These forces are not merely cultural. They are embedded in material relations of power that determine whose lives acquire institutional value, whose vulnerabilities can be exploited, and who becomes disposable when that value disappears. Race and class intersect within these relations rather than operating as separate forms of domination. A person can be elevated because an institution needs a symbol, scrutinized because racial reaction needs a target, commodified because suffering sells, and abandoned because institutions ultimately protect themselves. The culture that turns humiliation into entertainment can just as easily turn grief into another spectacle once the damage has been done. Public cruelty is followed by public mourning, while the structures that produced the cruelty disappear from view.
Nor can this machinery of cruelty be separated from the larger political and economic order in which it thrives, an order structured by profound inequalities of race and class and by institutions increasingly governed by market values. We inhabit a society increasingly wedded to war abroad, repression at home, staggering inequality, and the normalization of human disposability. Cruelty has become more than an individual failing. It has become a political language, a cultural spectacle, and increasingly a governing principle. It is within this poisoned landscape that authoritarian and fascist subjectivities flourish, sustained by institutions and cultural apparatuses that teach us whose suffering matters and whose can be ignored.
This is why Jason Arday’s death cannot be understood through the comforting language of individual responsibility alone. Accountability matters. Academic standards matter. Truth matters. But accountability stripped of history and power can easily become another weapon of inequality. The question is not whether Arday should have been accountable for mistakes or misrepresentations. The question is why accountability assumed such a spectacular, racialized, and potentially destructive form, and what structures of power determined its intensity, meaning, and consequences.
What Jason Arday’s death exposes reaches far beyond one university, one controversy, or one life, however precious that life was. His death forces us to confront the human cost of mistaking representation for justice. Diversity becomes hollow when institutions congratulate themselves for opening doors while refusing to dismantle the structures of power operating behind them. Inclusion becomes another public-relations gesture when those who enter historically white institutions are left to bear racialized burdens largely on their own.
Compassion for Jason Arday and his family is essential. But compassion without a language of power risks becoming another form of silence. The deeper question is not simply whether we can hold people accountable without humiliating them. It is what kind of society produces such relentless forms of humiliation in the first place, especially one increasingly shaped by the racism, cruelty, and savage inequalities of neoliberal fascism.
We need to ask who benefits from such a system, whose power and material interests it protects, whose labour and suffering it exploits, why its burdens fall so unequally, and why institutions so eager to display the symbols of racial progress remain unwilling to confront the structures that make genuine equality impossible. Mourning matters, but mourning must become more than a fleeting occasion for sorrow. A society should be judged not simply by whom its institutions elevate as symbols of progress, but by how those same institutions treat them when they become vulnerable, controversial, or no longer useful. In Jason Arday’s case, his abandonment at the moment of greatest vulnerability exposes the very structures that his celebrated appointment was supposed to prove had disappeared. If his death is to carry a meaning beyond grief, it must also carry us beyond the empty language of accountability when accountability is stripped of history, power, and the unequal conditions under which judgment is imposed. It must compel us to confront the histories of domination these institutions carry, the racial burdens they continue to impose, and the machinery of power that turns vulnerability into punishment, accountability into spectacle, and symbolic progress into a substitute for justice.
Henry A. Giroux currently holds the McMaster University Chair for Scholarship in the Public Interest in the English and Cultural Studies Department and is the Paulo Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. Second half should read: His latest books are
The Burden of Conscience: Educating Beyond the Veil of Silence (Bloomsbury in 2025);
Assassins of Memory: Critical Pedagogy and the Politics of Erasure (Bloomsbury, 2026). He is LA Progressive's Associate Editor.
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