A suicide is not a lynching

Just when you thought the discussion about Jason Arday’s death couldn’t get anymore ghoulish, here come the ‘lynching’ wailers. This was a lynching carried out by a media industry drunk on racial hatred, they say. In this historically illiterate morality tale, Arday is the innocent black man and the reporters who queried his CV are his hooded killers. ‘The media lynched Jason Arday’, says Ibram X Kendi. Rarely has the soul-sucking relativism of wokeness been on such stark, sick display.

I have long been sceptical of the bourgeois misanthropy that dresses itself up as ‘anti-racism’. Yet even I am shocked by this hijacking of the bloody legacy of racial terror to score cheap moral points in 2026. Even I am astounded at the use and abuse of real anti-black terror as cheap fuel for modern grievance culture. I understand everyone craves clicks, but to liken the entirely legitimate questioning of a black professor’s claims with the dragging of a black innocent to a tree to be hanged for the delectation of a baying mob – this is truly beyond the pale.

Kendi was first out of the gates of shamelessness. He’s the African-American author of How To Be An Antiracist who achieved global fame in 2020 as the ideological feeder of rich whites consumed by historical self-loathing. If you are a ‘prominent black scholar’, they will ‘hunt you like a lynch mob’, he wrote. And that’s what they did to Arday. The ‘white-owned, mainstream media’ circled round him like vultures, ‘[piling] on and on and on and on’.

And they killed him. They lynched him. Of course they will never admit their part in this racial murder – ‘if you die from all the attacks, the media still calls the attacks on you “accusations” to wash their hands of the blood’, says Kendi. And that’s the sickest thing about these neo-lynchings, he says – ‘your lynchers announce your death as if they had no role in your lynching’. Thus all those headlines saying ‘Jason Arday found dead’, written by white scum who were as responsible for his demise as were those Klansmen who weaved the noose around the necks of their black quarry.

Kendi is not alone in marshalling past horrors as a kind of exclamation mark to his own privileged rage in the present. This was a ‘culture-war lynching’, said Black Lives Matter UK of Arday’s death. Columnist Karen Attiah, until recently of the Washington Post, called his demise a ‘death by media mob’ that brings to mind ‘the old machinery of anti-black terror’. In real time, on the digital highway rather than an Alabama dirt track, ‘Jason Arday was being lynched’, said British academic Kehinde Andrews.

Where to begin with such self-serving moral hyperbole? The first and saddest point to make is that only one person bears responsibility for Jason Arday’s death, and that is Jason Arday. He and he alone was the author of his untimely demise. To call his death murder, far less a lynching, is a crime against truth. It robs Arday himself of moral agency. There is inverted racial bigotry here, the presumption being that a black man could not possibly have authored his own destruction. No, those all-powerful whites, that ‘white supremacy in academic drag’, must be the true architects of his ruin. I don’t know what we should call such black infantilisation and white demonisation, but I know it’s not ‘anti-racism’.

Then there’s the patrician washing away of Arday’s own moral wrongs. In depicting him as an unblemished innocent, hounded by vindictive whites, his posthumous defenders strip his life of its complexities. The truth is that Arday was a man who made very bad choices. He appears to have plagiarised the work of others and to have engaged in giddy fabulism to make his life appear tougher and more fascinating than it was. To scrub such truths from the record is not ‘pro-black’ – it is a nauseating crusade of condescension that reduces blacks to blameless entities undeserving of the scrutiny that other ‘races’ receive.

To liken a suicide to a lynching is to fully abandon truth, meaning and moral intention. If you cannot see the difference between those bedraggled black men dragged against their will to the hanging tree and a privileged black man choosing to end his own life, then you are beyond help. Argument – words themselves – will not rescue you from the cesspit of cultural relativism in which you have chosen to make your moral home.

For me (perhaps because I’m white – forgive me – and I wrote critically about Arday), the grossest thing in the ‘lynching’ lie is the implicit suggestion that reportage is murder. That digging for the truth is a potential death sentence for the vulnerable. That saying untoward things about a professor who happens to be black is by definition racist, and possibly even KKK in its consequences. This is a grotesque slander against journalists whose only intention was to uncover the truth about Arday and the powerful institutions that employed and flattered him.

To call these people ‘lynchers’ is repulsive beyond belief. Every journalist I know who queried Arday’s rise to professorial power was motored by a thirst for truth. Skin colour was immaterial to them. They only wanted to know whether Arday had been honest, and what it says about Cambridge, the BBC and the other institutions that fell at his feet that not one of them asked that simple question. Calling journalism murderous, equating the asking of questions with the prepping of nooses, is tyrannical. It is right out of the Stalinist playbook to accuse dissenting scribes of endangering life with their pesky, lowlife questions. ‘Shut up or people will die’ – that’s what the lynching hysterics are saying.

It is their destruction of truth that truly jars. To call the self-authored death of Arday a ‘lynching’ is an appalling act of historical desecration. A lynching is not a literary device. It is not a shrill synonym for perfectly normal journalistic scrutiny. A lynching is the real, brutal robbing of a life. To jealously snatch that word and stretch it so thinly over a modern media firestorm is an insult to every black man who was dragged from his bed. What a testament to the suffocating self-pity of the woke that they see media inquiries as tantamount to extrajudicial execution. Their vanity is the enemy of history.