Behold the human wreckage of the cult of diversity. The tragedy of Jason Arday is that he was both built up and destroyed by the ruthless machinery of DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion). The academy made him into the golden boy of its philistine project of ‘decolonisation’ and gave not one thought to what the consequences might be if his thin story unravelled, as it inevitably would. No one can deny it now: wokeness makes false gods and real tragedies.

Journalists found a story and they told it. It was the academy and Arday’s colleagues who failed to do their jobs

The death of Arday is not only dreadful – it is enraging. It feels like a catastrophe foretold. Indeed, some of us wondered out loud if Arday had friends around him as the media storm over his alleged fabulism grew and went global. It was reckless in the extreme for the intellectual elites to fashion a new ‘black genius’ and then say ‘Oops’ when his carefully curated legend started to fray at the seams. They condemned him with their fawning.

This is the poison chalice of the state religion of diversity. It lays traps for the very people it celebrates. It handpicks members of ‘the oppressed’ for moral anointment and institutional gushing while leaving them open to exposure as others start to query their credentials. That’s the toxic bargain of identity politics: it builds teetering pedestals for ethnic-minority thinkers, meaning their fall from grace is often twice as fatal.

And what a pedestal they made for Arday. They worshipped him as ‘the best in the world’. They beatified him as a black wunderkind whose very presence in a place like Cambridge might help to wash away its sins of whiteness. They canonised him as a living monument to ‘decolonisation’. It was precisely this, their giddy, narcissistic desire to manufacture a kind of black saviour, that made them turn a blind eye to the questionable elements of Arday’s CV and life story. They sacrificed their due diligence to the god of decolonisation.

And Arday suffered. He was both poster boy and sacrificial lamb of the diversity crusade. Even as he gained from it – reaching the dizzying heights of a Cambridge professorship – he was being damned by it. The foundation of myth and sand his starry career was built on was untenable. Its collapse was a given. It is a testament to the ideological blindness of the inhabitants of our ivory towers that none of them foresaw it.

This is where we cut to the rancid heart of identity politics. I have seen it reported that some black thinkers had reservations about Arday but they chose to keep them hidden. My God, their devotion to the cult of diversity outweighed their concern for a friend in the grip of fabulism. Propping up the edifice of identitarianism mattered more than guarding a colleague from a coming tempest that was always going to be as fierce as it was predictable. They preferred to bask in the half-light of ‘black genius’ rather than look out for a black colleague. The Faustian ruthlessness of it all is mindblowing.

Already, leftists are blaming the media for Arday’s death. Hacks hounded him into despair, they say. I’m not having this. The media is the only institution in this entire tragic scandal that did its job properly. Journalists found a story and they told it. It was the academy and Arday’s colleagues who failed to do their jobs. Who failed to prize merit over identity, and failed to foresee the public embarrassment that would befall their falsely promoted friend. They ignored the truth – the media found it.

I and others have been arguing for years that the politics of identity is a disaster for all, black and white alike. White kids are overlooked, black kids are patronised. Whites are branded ‘privileged’, blacks ‘oppressed’. Whites are seen as the beneficiaries of historic crimes who must atone for past sins, blacks as history’s perma-victims who require the gracious helping hand of the state. We are demonised or infantilised according to the accident of our race.

Enough. Let our monument to Jason Arday be the restoration of the true ideal of equality. We couldn’t save Jason but we can save merit from the monstrous jaws of identity.