The Problem With DEI Is White Supremacist Perpetration and Perpetuation of Enforced Black Inferiority - Part 8

The Jason Arday Affair does not pass muster when squarely and wholly predicated on the critical subject of academic competence and scholastic adequacy and integrity, because the recently deceased Cambridge University Professor of the Sociology of Education had been recruited and/or hired on the basis of his recognized accomplishments in the aforementioned discipline, and not as an ab-initio tabula rasa or a complete novice or outlier to the field. For instance, we are reliably informed that the late Mr. Arday had teaching and/or work experience acquired from the Universities of Durham and Glasgow, both of which are located in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and both of which rank among the best or the topmost universities on the Global Scale or Index.

We also learn that the University of Glasgow, Scotland, ranks among the Top-Ten Universities around the world, while the University of Durham, located in North-East English, and ranked Number 6 Overall, in the UK, ranks among the Top-200 Universities around the globe. Now, what the foregoing means is that contrary to what some morbidly self-infatuated academic and professorial critics of Professor Arday would have the rest of us scholars and fellow academics in the global community believe, the Martyred Ghanaian and Indigenous Continental African-Descended Professor had not been hired to teach as a Fulltime Senior Faculty Member at Cambridge University, unarguably one of the very best universities both in the United Kingdom (UK) and in the Global Community completely out of the metaphorical or the proverbial blue.

Which, of course. Also immediately brings us to the tired, old question of whether the systematic and the seismic hounding of Professor Arday into an early grave was not primarily and almost exclusively based on his ethnicity and/or racial identity (See “Analysis: Jason Arday’s Death Will Send Shockwaves Through a Divided Academia,” by Branwen Jeffreys, BBC’s Education Editor, August 15, 2026). But what Yours Truly wants to particularly highlight here is the unarguable fact that the kind of Media Lynching that fatally felled 41-year-old Mr. Arday is far more the norm than the anomaly or the rarity, this author’s having experienced the same, first-hand, even right here at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York (SUNY-NCC), where Yours Truly taught English Composition and Literature, as well as Creative Writing and Africana Studies and Philosophy for some 26 years, that is, until he was literally chucked into the Garbage Can of Involuntary Retirement in September 2003.

You see, when this author was hired to teach, originally temporarily, at SUNY-Nassau, on January 21, 1997, having been invited for job interviews for at least three or four times prior, the relatively more senior colleague to whom he was affiliated by the department chairperson as his mentor, namely, Professor Michael Bullshitsky, not his real name, an extremely frustrated Doctoral-Degree Manqué or what is hereabouts commonly and infelicitously called “ABD” or “All-But-Dissertation,” had automatically assumed, characteristically prejudicially, that this author was one of those run-of-the-mill prime beneficiaries of the much-maligned Affirmative Action Policy Bonanza. Mr. Bullshitsky would one day capriciously, churlishly and knavishly imply to Yours Truly, during a casual conversation in our shared office, that people like Yours Truly were extremely lucky to have “landed a plum job” right out of graduate school.

You see, the comical reality here was that the American-born and Italian-descended Michael Bullshitsky was actually the one who had been offered his fulltime and tenure-track job well before he had completed graduate school with the Master of Arts Degree in English Composition and Literature at the nearby State University of New York at Stonybrook. On the other hand, by January 1997, Yours Truly had already acquired his Master of Arts Degree from Temple University, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and was smack in the process of completing his Doctor of Philosophy Degree in Ghanaian-Anglophone Poetry from the same university. His dissertation would be completed and successfully defended by early March 1998, almost exactly a fortnight before the painful passing of this author’s beloved mother - Mrs. Dorothy Adwoa Aninwaa Okoampa-Ahoofe (Néé Sintim[-Aboagye] - 1934-1998).

Not surprisingly, Michael Bullshitsky, who well appeared to have been born with the proverbial “Sicilian Pizza” and a diamond cutter in his mouth and hand, respectively, would never get to complete his Doctoral Dissertation on one of the Four or Five Major Campuses of the 60-Campus State University of New York. And yet, royally failed Affirmative Action Beneficiaries like Michael Bullshitsky appeared to have absolutely no qualms, whatsoever, pretending as if it was hardworking and “Genuinely and Generously Talented ‘Field Niggers’” like Yours Truly - at least that was what I was often told by several of my colleagues at the time - who did not really belong. Indeed, it was a whiteman’s world and has always been a whiteman’s world in which the rest of us were constantly being asked to prove our intellectual and professional mettle and puissance.

Of course, every toddler knows that the Statutory Policy of Affirmative Action, presently renamed as the Policy of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI), is just another practically unwholesome and politically lurid hocuspocus attempt to hoodwink the very Black and African People on whose barbed-wire beaten hide and blood it was that hatched what has come to be known as erroneously recognized as Contemporary American Civilization by a morally and a conscience-numbed Neo-Slavocrats, as nauseously provoked and evoked by the Trumpian Ideology of MAGA or Make America Great Again.

Which is also why when Cambridge University’s Chancellor Christopher Robert Smith - aka Lord Smith of Finsbury - passionately and poignantly asserts that whether, indeed, a significant portion of the academic output of the late Professor Jason Arday passes muster when rigorously subjected to scrutiny or not, one thing is clear and certain, and it is that, by and large, the overwhelming majority of Mr. Arday’s venomous detractors indubitably appear to predicate their plaint or grievances and reservations whole on the historical exception that was the race and the ethnicity of the victim, and the the added bonus of the fact that Professor Jason Arday had also been clinically diagnosed to have been severely afflicted with autism (See “Cambridge Chancellor: We Must Uphold Academic Integrity in the Wake of Arday Tragedy” Telegraph 8/19/26).

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr.. PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]