Wanted: Affirmative Action Poster Boys for Assuaging Neoliberal Guilt

John H. McWhorter, "The Arday Tragedy: from Tokenism to Wokenism"

His blackness was the crucial factor in his elevation to the pinnacle of academia by whites eager to feel good about themselves and secure that they couldn’t be called racist

For a long time, it was the view from the Left as well as the Right that tokenism was wrong. It was considered disrespectful of black people, i.e., racist, to place us in a position because of the color of our skin when we weren’t qualified for it, or when otherwise we wouldn’t have been wanted there, just for the sake of appearances.

But one consequence of what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez referred to recently as Woke 1 was an unspoken revision of this view: tokenism was now okay. Jason Arday was one of the results of this new perspective.

Back in the day, the classic example of tokenism—call it Tokenism 1.0—was giving a black person a visible role but not much in particular to do. Elevating a black person to a role of actual influence, when optics are clearly the main justification, is just as harmful, if not more so. The often-used term of art for this approach is “DEI,” though more straightforwardly, it is Tokenism 2.0.

Arday, who was found dead last week amid a maelstrom of revelations about his scholarship and various questionable claims of achievement, hardships, and disabilities, was elevated as a token in the same spirit as the black characters shown on Norman Lear sitcoms that addressed tokenism 50 years ago—Archie Bunker bringing a black man into his lodge to avoid losing its tax break, George Jefferson being invited to join an all-white tennis club just for optics, etc. I don’t sense that Arday was a cynical operator as many have portrayed him. He seems to have been an extreme example of a type: someone who gets a sense of self-worth through exaggerating his hardships and achievements. Most such people live anonymous lives, alternately annoying and entertaining people with their endless tall tales, obviously founded in insecurity.

But Arday ended up retailing his fictions in modern academia, a world with a burning desire to celebrate blackness and demonstrate its antiracism. No one is on record having chuckled in the corner that hiring Arday at Cambridge University will “give the place a little color,” in the fashion of the old sitcoms. Nonetheless, it’s impossible to avoid the reality that Arday’s color was the crucial factor in his elevation. His scholarly work was insubstantial, a judgment that would be fair even if it hadn’t turned out to be plagiarized to such a degree. Yet he was granted a Ph.D. (the title of his dissertation has a glaring typo) and several honorary degrees, asked to give various keynote addresses, regularly invited on radio and television, and made the equivalent of a full professor at Cambridge University at 37. It’s inconceivable that a white person would be elevated to the pinnacle of the profession—especially a Cambridge professorship—with such a thin record.

Then there was his wildly improbable life story: suffering both a brain tumor and a stroke, yet passing his dissertation defense immediately after recovering from them, despite having lost all memory of what he wrote; suffering from epilepsy, autism, and Asperger’s; not speaking until 11 and not reading until 18; playing championship-level ping-pong despite his many handicaps; being threatened at his Cambridge office by masked, armed men, mysteriously unrecorded by CCTV cameras; discovering that a pig’s head had been sent to his parents; running marathons at world champion-level, including doing so with a leg swollen to twice its size; and so on. Frankly, all of this is so incredible, in the literal sense, that a white scholar making these claims would almost certainly have been instantly dismissed as a fabulist. But Arday was black, and the whites around him considered it more important to be seen elevating him—especially as he was someone claiming past hardships—than viewing his claims as the fables they were.

This was tokenism.

Arday was not a one-off but part of a trend after Woke 1 in 2020. Consider, for one example, former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, whose performance in that role for the Biden administration made demonstrably clear that her abilities were not her main qualification. Carolyn Rouse’s bizarrely incoherent interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education made it hard to believe that her being a black woman was not central to her appointment as president of the American Anthropological Association. There have been other prominent cases. I don’t relish calling these things out and will refrain from naming more names, but when someone black is installed in a position where it’s all but impossible not to see that race played a dominant role in their selection, this is what used to be called tokenism. Maybe we can call it “wokenism.”

It makes whites feel good about themselves and secure that they can’t be called racists. But it also makes the broader society question the capabilities of any black person in a position of authority or prestige. It encourages a sense that being just so-so is the best that blacks can do.

A common rejoinder to this complaint is that when a white person is mediocre, we don’t decide that all whites are mediocre. But the issue is whether blacks are placed in prominent positions beyond their qualifications more often than whites, and with what degree of mismatch. If a white person becomes a Cambridge professor at 37, they have credentials of the wunderkind variety. One example of this was Stephen Hawking. Arday’s credentials, by contrast, involved being black and having a certain stage presence. It’s not surprising that he went along with all of it and even processed questions about the legitimacy of his work as racism, worth reporting to the police. He had been lavishly praised and had gone largely unquestioned and unchallenged for years.

But presenting Arday as an exemplar of academic excellence was immoral—both insulting to blacks and cruel to him. Without it, he would have experienced no gruesome public downfall, and he would likely still be alive.

Today’s wokenism is no more justified than yesterday’s tokenism. We must face reality. If there are no truly excellent black candidates for a post, giving it to one more white person may feel frustrating—but it is always better than the dehumanizing patronization of naming a token black person.

Fifty years ago, this was conventional wisdom. It’s one of those cases where we should heed our elders.