16/08/2026
The death of professor Jason Arday is stirring something in a lot of us, and I don't think that's incidental.
What strikes me most is an observation on how most institutions elevate individuals without protecting them. How representation gets treated as spectacle rather than something requiring actual support. How the same rooms that celebrate a person's arrival go quiet, or turn hostile, the moment things get hard.
Arday's story isn't only his. It's a pattern I've watched and read about play out across academia repeatedly where we see black scholars rising fast, held up as proof of progress, and then leaving often without institutions ever having to explain why.
That silence is doing damage we don't talk about loudly enough and we need to. The PSYCHOLOGICAL toll on BLACK ACADEMICS, (deliberately narrowed down to black academics) who watch this cycle repeat, who wonder whether their own visibility is protection or exposure, deserves far more attention than it gets. It shapes decisions people make long before anything becomes publico& one chooses whether to speak up, whether to stay, whether to trust an institution that says it wants them there.
I say this as someone who has genuinely loved the idea of academia. But the more I read about cases like this, the more I find myself pulling back and not out of cynicism, but SELF-PRESERVATION. As a Black woman, I'm aware of what visibility can cost inside institutions that haven't shown they'll protect their own when it matters, and that awareness changes how I think about where I'm willing to put my career.
And to be clear, I'm not saying any of this expecting someone to remind me that not every institution is the same. I know that. This isn't about every institution. It's about a pattern too many of us have already lived through, or watched someone else live through, and the version I want us to be louder about is the one that keeps happening quietly, without anyone ever having to answer for it.
