Jason Arday kept pleasing people; thus, he was doing good. That’s what he told himself. White people are happy with themselves when they can like a black person, and it’s a powerful dynamic. As a force it can carry the good and the bad. Barack Obama: a capable and worthwhile leader of the free world (especially when compared with the present man). Jason Arday: a plagiarist and liar whose life fell apart. Each gave whites something the whites needed: a chance to stand with somebody black and feel like all is right between them. Especially when excellence is involved: whites, guiltily expecting to look down, experience relief, even giddiness, at a chance to look up.
Obama made them look up because he excelled in every conventional way: he had brains, height, bone structure, grace, poise, and strength, plus academic record, scholarly knowledge, and professional success. Arday fabricated his excellence and he made it outlandish. Obama the paragon can stand there like a suit advertisement with a professor’s vocabulary. Arday and his dreadlocks were a more antic proposition. He came up with stretchers, claims that would cause a dude to roll his eyes and say “Whatever.” The 30 marathons in 35 days, no, 12 days. The village wise woman, no, aid worker, who issued a prophecy about his life. The fact that the prophecy matched word for word the title of an episode from cable TV. In a bar or a youth hostel all this would be laughed at. But at Cambridge he went over.
It's not just that his dissertation had dozens or scores of plagiarized items and nobody checked. His academic work also featured grammatical errors and punctuation mistakes and these were in plain view. Nothing registered. The process was geared to other factors: not academic proficiency but a knack for causing good feelings, high-minded feelings, in the people who did the processing. Let’s say Cambridge is the best and therefore its Faculty of Education is the best. Then that’s how the best graduate school of education in the world chooses a professor for an endowed chair. Imagine what the other colleges and grad schools are up to.
You hear how Arday was a victim, an idea that gripes me because nobody made him lie and steal. A black man in a white country has got a tough hand to play, but plenty do it without acting any worse than the rest of us. But zoom out and, sure, society’s got itself twisted around racial difference and that craziness will show up in some exotic ways. I’ll add a factor: the willingness of so many people to chase feeling instead of dealing with facts. Feeling in itself is fine. But rigging your actions and opinions to come up with some desired feeling—that leads to falseness and endless mistakes. I feel, or believe, that MAGA voters want to feel something—wrathful, triumphant, avenged—and that’s why they vote for Trump. The smart people at the Cambridge Faculty of Education made the same kind of mistake. They elevated Jason Arday so they could feel enlightened and wonderful.
So it goes with Alabama gas station operators and the people who supposedly keep higher education from falling over. Plain duty disappears and fantastical self-gratification gallops in. People have always been fools, but in modern times we’ve found a way to spread foolishness and root it even deeper in our souls. Combine that and our society’s race complex, and a man’s life can take a disturbing shape. Look at Donald Trump and look at Jason Arday, whose balloon head filled with nonsense that made whites happy. His life popped and now he’s dead and the rest of us are as crazy as ever.