The Jason Arday scandal

It's interesting because people with ND typically find it difficult to lie, whereas Arday seems to have based his entire career on it. The charming, manipulative grifter is also a very unusual presentation.

That's just not true. Any such numbers were vanishingly small.

But the media and others have decided they are going to convince you otherwise, to justify the current situation.

I can't imagine I am going to convince you otherwise, and shall not bother trying.

So you are saying the wrong people reported on this and only the right people like The Guardian should be allowed to and if they do, then it would be a legit 'charge'?

This just shows doesn't it, the ludicrousness of it all. Gotta be on 'the right side of history' even when things are staring you in the face.

Would have thought that was patently obvious. After Cafnas, the Mail and Telegraph led the charge. I haven’t looked but I expect GB News are creaming their drawers too.

Would have thought that was patently obvious. After Cafnas, the Mail and Telegraph led the charge. I haven’t looked but I expect GB News are creaming their drawers too.

I agree with a lot of this but there are convincing arguments that class is increasingly important in America, and maybe more so than race.

William Julius Wilson (former president of the American Sociological Association, himself black) was arguing this back in 1980s, and I think his book is still pretty relevant now.

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo13375516.html

It's arguable that the rise of wokeness in America, especially around stuff like critical race theory, was much more tied to class than race. Stuff like 'defund the police' was opposed by huge numbers of black people- they wanted better police, not no police.

https://reason.com/2024/05/14/black-people-overwhelmingly-want-to-maintain-or-increase-police-presence-they-also-want-better-police/

Would have thought that was patently obvious. After Cafnas, the Mail and Telegraph led the charge. I haven’t looked but I expect GB News are creaming their drawers too.

Your statements are objectively wrong, to pull out just two: there may not have been massive plantations, but there were black slaves in the UK and black people have been present in these lands throughout history.

By whom, exactly?

Cambridge is too powerful to ever collapse. Not quite as mighty as Oxford but almost. I’m sure it will weather this storm.

I’m upset by the story because my DS is non verbal and I found his life story so inspiring. I’m now questioning everything about the guy and wondering whether he made his diagnosis up entirely.

Just to clarify I mean he’s been conspired against.

Just to clarify I mean he’s been conspired against.

There was some slavery here, but there were no appreciable numbers of blacks in the general UK population until after 1945. Many people had never even seen a black person, other than African American GIs and Caribbean troops stationed here during WW2.

Friday night entertainment for the wonderful Mumsnet hive mind

https://x.com/GrumpyOW/status/2085743542291296679
Class photo time .... More details of which Sunday school he was chatty at ...

Also
When DID he buy his dreads
https://x.com/AjaTheEmpress/status/2085716564884562417

I have heard it all now - a young black man has been set up. Absolutely unreal.

Your statements are objectively wrong, to pull out just two: there may not have been massive plantations, but there were black slaves in the UK and black people have been present in these lands throughout history.

@LifeBeginsToday don't be discouraged, academia brims with the neurodivergent.

The fuller quote isn't context that justifies the claim though.

Under a colorblind system that judged applicants only by academic qualifications, blacks would make up 0.7% of Harvard students. (Even that might be an overestimate, since high-school credentials are sometimes given a boost by affirmative action.) In a meritocracy, Harvard faculty would be recruited from the best of the best students, which means the number of black professors would approach 0%.

Why is the 'meritocracy' standard assumed to be academic success alone? The link shows that Harvard recruits based also on a six-point personal rating, a six-point athletics rating, and a six-point extracurricular one. Is a person who scores perfectly in exams but who is just hothoused with no outside interests who can't relate to other people better suited to being a Harvard student or professor? In his blog post he doesn't even mention the other criteria and leaves it to the reader to assume that the other ways of measuring the suitability of a Harvard candidate are merely 'woke' and not at all valid.

Blacks would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment.

So he neatly segues from his assertion about a meritocracy at Harvard into a general assertion about all high profile positions, as if Harvard is a microcosm of society and as if extreme academic success ought to be the only requirement to attain any high profile position in a meritocracy (outside of sports and entertainment which I assume he begrudgingly admits require athleticism or performance skills more than good SATs). But that's clearly not true.

I mean, you're saying that the context makes it less racist, but imo it makes it not only racist, but also stupid. If this dildo were working in a meritocracy, he certainly wouldn't have any academic appointment, and not just because he is expressing difficult ideas, but because his arguments are terrible.

Exactly.

I don't think most British people born before 1990 (?) had even heard of Rosa Parks growing up. But everyone born since has been force fed stories of her, almost as if she were one of our own.

George Floyd was American. The BLM movement came from him.

American footballer Colin Kaepernick was the first to take the knee before a match. For a time it looked as if it was compulsory in Premier League matches.

Even the dreaded n-word is American, whereas forty years ago it was only known as something from Huckleberry Finn.

Nearly all the rap songs that use the n-word, and call for attacks on the police, are American.

British society has swallowed American views on all of this. Whole and undigested.

I wonder how many current British schoolchildren realise that there were never black slaves in the UK? That there were effectively no black people here until the 1950s? That the 1960s may have been characterised by the civil rights movement across the Atlantic, where there was still massive discrimination, but here we were swinging and it was all about mini skirts, Profumo, the Beatles and the end of the Chatterly ban.

History is being rewritten before our eyes, and we are being forced to sign up to American guilt.