Left identitarians have rallied to Jason Arday’s defence, especially after his tragic death. While some admit he made mistakes, they all claim the media questioning of his research record, dodgy CV and history of fabulism was fuelled by racism. It seems expecting a Cambridge professor’s CV to be accurate is now a form of white supremacy.

There is a curious double standard at work here. Black public figures may apparently be permitted to make ‘mistakes’, but they are afforded considerably less latitude when they question identitarian grievances or Black Lives Matter orthodoxies. Do that and these avowed anti-racists adopt a strikingly racist tone, deploying such terms as ‘coconut’, ‘Uncle Tom’, ‘house negro’ and ‘race traitor’. You may have freedom of speech, just so long as you remember which opinions have been allocated to your ethnicity.

Consider so-called progressives’ response to another black sociologist, Tony Sewell. Sewell chaired the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, established in 2020 following the Black Lives Matter protests. Its conclusions challenged the increasingly orthodox contention that disparities between ethnic groups are evidence of systemic racism. The report acknowledged the existence of racial discrimination but argued that class, geography, family structure and educational attainment are often more useful in explaining unequal outcomes.

One could disagree with those conclusions and many did. The Runnymede Trust strongly criticised the report. These arguments are precisely what intellectual and political debate should involve.

But some responses went considerably further. Sewell was called a ‘coon’ and ‘race traitor’. A Labour MP circulated an image of the Ku Klux Klan in response to the commission’s findings. Kemi Badenoch, the then equalities minister, condemned the abuse in the Commons, arguing that racialised language was being used to intimidate ethnic-minority people who dared to think differently. Sewell’s woke critics seemed to think that because they disagreed with a black man’s opinions, they could insult him for being black.

While the identitarian left has extended sympathy to Arday from the start of the plagiarism scandal, it has withheld it from black and Asian public figures who hold the ‘wrong’ opinions. In 2024, Labour MP Dawn Butler shared, before deleting, a post describing Badenoch, who had just become Tory leader, as belonging to ‘white supremacy’s black collaborator class’ and referring to ‘white supremacy in blackface’.

The underlying assumption is unmistakable. Only progressive views are regarded as authentically black views. To dissent from the approved identitarian script is regarded as a racial betrayal.

Katharine Birbalsingh has encountered something similar. Britain’s most famous headteacher has spent years challenging left-wing orthodoxies about discipline, educational inequality and racial disadvantage. She has argued that hostility towards minority conservatives reflects an assumption that black and Asian public figures owe a duty to express opinions conforming to a specific worldview. Diversity, it turns out, is rather like a school uniform: everyone is encouraged to express themselves, provided they turn up wearing the approved kit.

Then there is Munira Mirza, Boris Johnson’s former policy chief. Of Pakistani heritage, Mirza has long challenged fashionable thinking about institutional racism and multiculturalism. Her offence is not denying racism exists, but questioning an anti-racist politics that interprets disparities primarily through racial discrimination.

The reaction when she was asked to help establish the government’s race commission in 2020 was revealing. At a Black Lives Matter rally in Hyde Park, organiser Imarn Ayton denounced Mirza from the platform, declaring that Mirza ‘does not believe in what we believe in, she’s not in line with what we believe in’. She then led demonstrators in chanting ‘Munira Mirza must go’.

That phrase – she’s not in line with what we believe in – captures the problem perfectly. Here was a woman of Pakistani heritage being denounced at a demonstration supposedly celebrating minority voices because she held the wrong opinions about race. After decades demanding that society listen to minority voices, identitarians finally discovered a minority voice they desperately wanted to shut up.

This exposes one of identity politics’ least attractive characteristics. Its professed celebration of minority ‘voices’ often comes with an unstated condition: those voices must say the right things.

There is something profoundly illiberal about treating ethnic minorities as representatives of racial constituencies rather than autonomous individuals capable of reaching different conclusions. Worse, terms such as ‘coconut’ and ‘Uncle Tom’ resurrect precisely the racial essentialism that anti-racism supposedly exists to defeat. They suggest that political beliefs somehow belong to skin colours. The old racist said your skin determined your character. The new racialist has made one important addition: now it determines your politics as well.

Black public figures should have the same freedom as everyone else to hold whichever views they please, without having their racial authenticity called into question. Otherwise, ‘diversity’ amounts to little more than demanding that different-coloured faces say exactly the same thing.