Commentary
In Britain, there is a prevalent kind of inverse racism, or racism that dares not speak its name, illustrated powerfully by two cases, one of homicide and one of academic appointment.
In the case of the homicide, a man called Valdo Calocane, of a respectable immigrant family originally from Cabo Verde, stabbed three people to death seemingly at random and tried to kill three others by driving into them in a stolen van.
Calocane graduated in mechanical engineering from Nottingham University. His brother had studied computer science at Cambridge and still worked in the field. Lack of opportunity could, therefore, hardly have been the explanation of his conduct.
In fact, he was mad, suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. Before he killed, he had been violent on several previous occasions (and no doubt others unreported), each time impelled by his paranoid delusions.
It is a long-established principle in psychiatry that the best predictor of future violence is past violence, and, in his case, it was highly probable that without treatment, he would be violent again, though the particular act of violence that he committed, outlined above, could not have been predicted.
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Why, then, was he not treated? It was certainly not for lack of staff to treat him, and legal means existed to do so, whether or not he wished to be treated. It would have been eminently reasonable to invoke those means in his case: in fact, eminently unreasonable not to do so.
But they were not invoked, probably because Calocane was treated not as an individual human being with individual needs, but as a member or representative of a race. His treatment, or lack of it, was probably partly explicable by an attempt to improve a statistic rather than to help a man.
The statistic to be improved was that of the over-representation of black people, particularly of young black men, in the compulsory treatment of psychiatric disorders. The staff involved in his neglect probably did not want to increase this disparity further by treating Calocane against his will and, therefore, neglected to do so, with catastrophic results.
They were probably prey to the ideological view that disparities in outcomes between different ethnic (or other) groups must be due, almost ex officio, only to prejudice and social injustice: hence they saw Calocane as an instance of something rather than as an individual in his own right. It was as if they understood the Hippocratic injunction, first to do no harm, as to mean not to do harm to specific social groups.
The second instance is that of Jason Arday, the former professor at Cambridge University, who died tragically. I do not think the university could be blamed for not spotting the plagiarism in his Ph.D. thesis, which involved something entirely obscure. A society in which every work is suspected of plagiarism is not one in which I would wish to live.
As Dr. Samuel Johnson said, it is better sometimes to be deceived than never to trust. In the course of my career, I have reviewed hundreds of books, and it never crossed my mind for a moment that any of them might have been plagiarised or not written by the alleged author. If there was plagiarism (which I doubt), I did not spot it.
But Cambridge University could certainly be blamed for appointing as a professor a man the quality of whose work was as obviously poor as Arday’s, and whose account of himself was so obviously, and even transparently, suspect.
It is very difficult to escape the conclusion that he was appointed largely on demographic grounds rather than on purely academic ones, and that had he not been a young black man who claimed to have been diagnosed autistic at the age of 3, not to have spoken until the age of 11, and to have been illiterate until the age of 18, he would not have been appointed professor in 2023—the year that Calocane killed.
The media attention given to his appointment was almost frenzied. No doubt his unusual appearance for a Cambridge professor—very long dreadlocks—was part of the reason for this attention, but the fact that he was young and black, and supposedly handicapped, was strongly emphasized. The BBC, in particular, was uncritical and almost sycophantic.
There was no investigation of his extravagant and implausible claims about himself and his life history. If he had not been black, it is unlikely that anyone would have noticed the appointment of someone to a chair of a subject as arcane—and, according to many, as valueless—as that of the sociology of education.
Arday quickly became something of a media personality, instantly recognizable—surely something unusual for a person with autism as allegedly severe as his.
“Youngest black professor appointed” was the gist of many headlines, though, in fact, 37 (his age at appointment) was not so very unusual an age for the appointment of a professor. A.J. Ayer, for example, was appointed to the Grote Chair of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic at University College, London (a chair far more prestigious than Arday’s), at the age of 35. Enoch Powell was appointed Professor of Classics at Sydney University at the age of 25. It was Arday’s blackness that made his appointment newsworthy.
Again, there is reason to believe that he was not treated just as a man, with personal characteristics, abilities, defects, and so forth, but as a representative of a race, an instance rather than as a person. In his case, this was initially to his advantage, but not for very long, and it ended in his utter humiliation.
As I write this, it has not been officially proved that he committed suicide, but even if he died of a sudden illness—a heart attack, say—it would be hard to believe that it had not been provoked by his humiliation. And this would not have occurred if he had not been, as in a sense Calocane had been, the victim of a form of inverted racism in which some black people are not held to the same standards as others. This is bad for everyone concerned, and if it does not stop, it will sometimes end in individual disaster.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
