Jason Arday died on 14 August, a week after resigning his professorship at Cambridge, with allegations against him still unresolved: plagiarism in his scholarship, and disputes over parts of the personal story in his memoir.
Whatever is eventually established, his family and friends are owed more than a case study; and we should be cautious about drawing firm conclusions from an unresolved case. But his death forces a wider question that should not be lost: why have racialised academics writing about race so often had to put their own biographies at the centre of their arguments, using their lives to show the damage that white privilege can do?
The unmarked norm
I know this territory because I have been there myself. In writing about race, cultural identity and institutional life, I have drawn on experiences that are mine, for good intellectual reasons.
Racism is structural but structures are not always visible; they become perceptible in encounters – in who is assumed to belong, who is interrupted, who is doubted, whose authority attaches effortlessly and whose must continually be demonstrated. Whiteness has long had the privilege of appearing not to be racial at all. It occupies the position of the unmarked norm. A white academic can enter a room without their presence being read through race. Telling one’s own story makes that asymmetry visible to people who have had the privilege of not seeing it.
There is a deeper problem with the neutral, disinterested voice of conventional scholarship prizes: it was never actually neutral but built from a particular vantage point and presented as though it belonged to no one. This is the central insight of standpoint theory. No perspective is entirely neutral, but some perspectives have historically been treated as if they were. Those who occupy the dominant position are rarely required to explain where they are speaking from, while those who name their own social position are more readily dismissed as subjective or partial.
Experiences can therefore be excluded from the scholarly record not because they matter less, but because they are not presented in a form that the discipline recognises as objective. First-person testimony can correct this. It is not a request for sympathy or an admission of victimhood, but an intellectual claim that an account of institutional life which omits how power is felt is incomplete.
The autobiographical burden
Here is the difficulty this creates. When this becomes an expectation – that racialised academics must disclose lived experience in order to establish that the power exists at all – we have what might be called “the autobiographical burden.” It is not enough to analyse racism. Academics of colour are asked to demonstrate it through themselves – the childhood incident, the moment of exclusion, the racist remark, the meeting in which authority evaporated, the occasion somebody mistook them for somebody more junior. The personal story can make concrete what a structural argument may otherwise leave abstract: the ways in which race continues to shape ordinary institutional life.
This burden falls not on racialised academics generally, but on those who write, or are invited to write, about race and cultural identity – a Black mathematician is rarely asked to establish their subject position before their findings are taken seriously.
Within that group, the asymmetry is stark. White academics writing about inequality are not required to excavate their biographies to establish their authority to speak, nor to catalogue the moments they benefited from whiteness before analysing white privilege; their relationship to the subject can stay intellectual. The racialised scholar is more often asked to make it personal – sometimes explicitly, by editors wanting the angle; sometimes self-imposed, because an abstract account of inequality is more easily contested, while a precise account of what happened to you is harder to wave away.
Once academics of colour use their own lives as part of the argument, questions about the argument can become entangled with questions about the person. Once the person becomes part of the evidence, their biography is also opened up to scrutiny. This is why the questions the Arday case raises reach beyond Arday himself, and why his death makes them more urgent, not less. Doubts about one scholar’s integrity or autobiography do not demonstrate the intellectual bankruptcy of lived experience, autoethnography or scholarship on race generally, and racial inequality does not reduce anybody’s obligation to tell the truth or properly attribute others’ work.
But nor should the truth of structural racism depend on the moral or biographical perfection of every person who describes experiencing it. We would not reject research on sexism because one feminist scholar behaved badly, or conclude class inequality had been disproved because a working-class commentator embellished their childhood. Racialised academics can still be made to stand for something larger than themselves – their success taken as evidence of racial progress, and their failings used to cast doubt on the structures they were trying to illuminate.
Making room to be ordinary
Universities have contributed to this.
Higher education has become adept at packaging individuals as narratives – the exceptional journey, adversity overcome, barriers broken, firsts achieved – celebrating diversity through people’s stories without confronting the harder business of examining how power operates within their own structures. Such stories humanise complex issues and inspire students, but they also turn racialised academics into symbols, and symbols are given very little room to be ordinary.
The risk is that a different expectation takes hold: that academics of colour should continually explain what race means through their own lives. We should be able to analyse race without making every relevant experience public, and to be afforded the same complexity and fallibility as anyone else – including the ordinary obligation to get one’s facts and citations right, which is a scholarly standard, not a racialised one.
None of this requires abandoning autoethnography, quite the opposite. First-person scholarship can reveal dimensions of institutional life that conventional evidence struggles to capture, making whiteness visible by describing what the apparently neutral institution looks like from a position it has historically failed to recognise as normative. Lived experience is a legitimate source of knowledge, but it should not become something that a racialised academic feels obliged to perform.
The Arday controversy should not lead to a retreat from first-person scholarship. That would be the wrong lesson. Autoethnography matters because it can reveal what more ostensibly detached forms of inquiry leave unseen. It also requires the same standards of truthfulness and attribution as any other scholarship. The challenge is to preserve the value of lived experience without allowing the credibility of a structural argument to rest too heavily on the biography of the person making it.
