The empty cup of whiteness and its unsatisfiable drive for revenge
Content note: white supremacy, racism, ableism, death, genocide
The death - or murder by media - of Professor Jason Arday has been sitting heavily in my spirit.
It’s so obvious that the widespread participation of journalists, public figures and ordinary people of different political persuasions in supposedly ‘investigating’ what should have been an institutional manner is a level of dehumanisation uniquely reserved for Black people who dare to enter public life.
Professor Arday never committed any crime. Yet there are plenty of people in similarly prestigious positions who likely did but have never been investigated, let alone harassed in public.
What’s striking is that the public hounding didn’t stop after Professor Arday resigned. Because the racist monster the propelled this pile-on was unsatisfiable.
People even kept going after his death. And they may be seeking their next target soon.
The monster was let loose because people in positions of power gave the allegations against Professor Arday coverage, air time and attention (instead letting his employer deal with the situation as would have been appropriate).
This was always about something else than plagiarism. Nathan Cofnas, who launched the allegations and later admitted that he did primarily because of Professor Arday’s “exalted position”, is an outspoken eugenicist and Zionist (the two are connected).
Eugenicist thinking is foundational to the development of AI, which, as Adam Karenina Sherif pointed out to me, is ironic, given that this is an industry that has effectively normalised plagiarism.
Cofnas has openly argued for the intellectual superiority of white people (like himself) and supports Israel’s ongoing genocide of Palestinians. He doesn’t believe there is a space for Black intellectuals in the public sphere - perhaps, he doesn’t think that they should exist at all.
The fact that so many media outlets bothered to investigate the claims of such an openly bigoted man is alarming.
It’s no different to running fabricated stories about ‘beheaded babies’ after October 7 that served to justify the genocidal violence on Palestinians that followed.
People who parrot these claims become complicit in the atrocities that are done in their name. As Sneha Krishnan, Associate Professor at the University of Oxford, put it:
“If there was a story in the public interest in this case, it was that there is a growing legitimacy given to race science and eugenics even within major universities, and that this is putting Black and antiracist scholars at enormous risk.”
Why did so many people seemingly relish in the public assassination of a Black autistic man?
I’ve been hearing Francis Weller’s voice echoing in my head and how he speaks about the emptiness that sits at the heart of white supremacy and patriarchy. I would extend this to all forms of supremacy - including eugenics and Zionism, which are driven by an obsession with positioning one group of people above everybody else.
Weller describes this emptiness as:
“A chronic feeling of lack, of not enoughness”
“I’ve got to improve myself, I’ve got to be better”
“I don’t have enough, I will never be enough”
Photo of a turbulent sky with dark grey clouds on the left that look like a predator’s mouth and yellow clouds on the left meeting it in the middle.
Do you recognise these experiences? They certainly are familiar to me. I know all too well what it feels like to try to quiet the not-enoughness by accumulating more - whether it’s productivity, money, achievements, completed chores etc.
But I never get there - and that’s the point. Because I’m pouring into a bottomless cup, which cannot be filled; it has to be restored.
“There’s nothing that’s been untouched by white emptiness. In our desire, in our rapacious hunger for more, always wanting more, more land, more power, more wealth, more dominance, whatever it is - this is a crucial issue.”
This is the only way I can make sense of what happened to Professor Arday. A mob of emptied out people, steeped in the culture of white supremacy and emboldened by everyday racism being echoed by politicians on all sides, went on to attack someone they could project their fears of inferiority onto in a bid to fill that huge, bottomless void in their hearts.
If we are to stop trying to patch up our insecurities by putting other people down, we have to address the emptiness inside of us.
(This doesn’t just go for white people, by the way, but anybody who has been socialised into supremacy of any kind.)
We can start right here. The next time you feel inadequate, watch your response. Are you flicking on the TV in an attempt that some reality show will make you feel better about yourself? Do you treat a retail worker like trash or leave a smug comment on the internet?
Supremacy and extraction is one (ineffective) answer to emptiness. But it’s not the only one.
Instead, we can focus on building a solid foundation for our cup and that of our culture at large: a clearer sense of our centre, where we belong, a reminder that ours and everyone’s life is sacred, that we are loveable. So that we can break our isolation and catch and contain the emptiness when it arises.
People who knew Professor Arday have described him as kind and gentle, somebody who “believed, perhaps unfashionably, that love mattered - in education, in institutions and in society” (Simon Woolley).
If love is what Professor Arday lived for, we owe it to him and his life to cultivate it everywhere, starting with each other. May he rest in peace.