The tragedy of Jason Arday was barely wrapped up, his body not yet cold, before the racism cryers were swarming social media. ‘He’d still be alive if he’d been white’ — that was the wail of these ghouls of grievance. Within hours of the announcement of his death, a scalding morality tale had been forged: he was unjustly hounded by the media, and it’s because he was black. It’s a narrative as full of holes as some of those that the tragic Arday weaved during his career. It mustn’t stand.

No one denies that Arday’s death is awful — the dreadful final act to a public scandal involving fabulism, plagiarism and the state religion of DEI. Yet we can deny – and we should – that racism was the motor of the media’s interrogation of his CV and biography. Arday was a prominent academic figure. He was noisily championed by some of our most heavyweight cultural institutions, including Cambridge University and the BBC. It was entirely within the public interest to fact-check the man’s life story.

Yet to the identitarian left, he was black, and thus all criticism of him is bigotry. ‘If Jason Arday were a white middle-class academic, he would not have been hounded by the British press in the way he was’, declared independent MP Zarah Sultana. Arday wasn’t ‘the first academic to be accused of plagiarism’ but he was ‘the first first where those things became a front-page story’, said Ash Sarkar. And we all know why: ‘When white people do wrong, they’re seen as individuals, and not stand-ins for their entire race.’ That’s big talk in an era when bookshop shelves groan under the weight of moralistic tomes on ‘white fragility’ and when left-wing media outlets like Sarkar’s bemoan the ‘unbearable whiteness’ of populism.

Trade-union leaders rushed to condemn the witch-hunting bigots of the media. Arday was subjected to a ‘brutal takedown that unleashed a tirade of racism’, said the National Education Union. The media’s obsession with him smacked of ‘racism’ and ‘must be investigated’, said Jo Grady of the University and College Union. We will see more of this. The faux-liberal loathers of the free press will marshall Arday to do their grim, tyrannical bidding against ‘clickbait’ and ‘tabloid culture’.

But not one of the claims of the racism-spotters stacks up. Take the idea that Arday’s plagiarism and fabulism were subjected to an over-the-top savaging because of his blackness. It will be news to Raynor Winn that whiteness shields alleged fabulists from wild media storms. Her memoir, The Salt Path, has been relentlessly called into question by newspapers and even a 74-minute Sky documentary. Two of the best-known fabulist scandals of recent years involved preppy white men: James Frey, who made up loads of stuff for his ‘memoir’ A Million Little Pieces, and Stephen Glass, who invented people and events from pure cloth in his reporting for the New Republic. They even made a Hollywood film about him, called Shattered Glass.

It is demonstrably false that black thinkers suspected of public deceit get it in the neck more than white thinkers. It is a testament to the dangerous levels of race-brain among the credentialled classes that they interpret everything involving black people through the distorting prism of racial hatred. It isn’t careful analysis but kneejerk moralism that leads them to wail ‘racism!’ whenever a person of colour is investigated. It’s as mad as if someone had written a column on anti-white hate following The Salt Path’s mauling.

Then there’s the depiction of Arday as just a normal bloke going about his life who did not deserve the unforgiving spotlight of media scrutiny. He was a ‘human being with friends and family’ who was turned into a ‘pawn for vicious culture wars’ by a media industry addicted to ‘racism and clicks’, said Jeremy Corbyn. The dishonesty on display here is insane. You’d think the media had targeted a random bloke for invective, when in truth they merely asked questions about a public-facing professor of extraordinary if undeserved renown.

Arday was the youngest black professor in the entire history of Cambridge University. He was feted by the BBC. He frequently appeared on national media platforms, including Question Time and the Today programme. He wrote his life story, Great and Unfortunate Things, for a handsome advance from Simon & Schuster. He was a public figure, a very public figure, and thus the scrutiny of him was both legitimate and, it turned out, fruitful. The media uncovered truths that Arday and his enablers either consciously buried or never thought to query. If there had been more scrutiny of Arday in the academy – instead of all the woke, paternalist gushing heaped on him by the old white guard – then this scandal and its awful denouement might have been avoided.

Indeed, the best media coverage of Arday was really about the institutions that indulged him. The universities that were so bowled over by his blackness that they failed to do their due diligence on his CV. The media institutions that canonised him as a black wunderkind, a kind of god-child of the neo-religion of diversity. Yes, this was a tale about one man’s fabulist claims, but it was a larger story about the incineration of academic integrity on the bonfire of woke. If the media hadn’t dug into this story, the moral rot of that counter-Enlightenment would have spread and spread.

It’s so clear now that the racism mania of the credentialled classes is a kind of pathology. What a dispiriting and misanthropic way to go through life, always spying the dark motivating force of racial hatred. To see the media, the universities, the police and the public itself as racist – what a bleak, bankrupt philosophy; what a soul-sucking dogma to be imprisoned by. ‘Racism’ has replaced ‘evil’ as the great unifying foe of the ruling class, the pox upon which they stake their moral distinction from the masses. But the truth is that it’s they who racialise everything, not us. It was they who judged Arday by his skin colour, not us. And now they seek to ringfence their baleful ideology from the scrutiny of free people by barking ‘racist’ at all dissenters. I won’t have it.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.