Behind every story is a person

On racism, accountability and collective responsibility

I have started this piece more times than I can count. Every time, the words have felt too small, too neat, too much like a statement and not enough like the truth. So let me just start where I actually am.

I am sad. I am angry. And I am tired in a way that sits somewhere underneath language.

Professor Jason Arday has died. He was forty-one, Cambridge's youngest ever Black professor, and one of the most significant academic voices this country has produced on race and education. He was a son, a partner, a father, a brother, an uncle. He was a person, long before he was ever a headline.

In the weeks before his death, that person was picked apart in public. Questions about his work became questions about his worth. We all know this in the work we do as racialised people. I am not drawing a comparison, not at all. But it makes you think about who is next. Scrutiny became suspicion, and suspicion became something closer to a hunt. His family have said he was subjected to a sustained campaign of abuse for years, and that the weight of it became too much for a man they describe as gentle, and who always wanted to see the best in everyone.

I did not know Jason personally. But I know this pattern. I have lived enough of it, and sat with enough people who have lived it too, to recognise its shape the moment I see it forming.

This week, trying to make sense of this alongside others, there were no words. Not words that can be made sense of. Only a loud cry.

I am deeply saddened by his death, and my thoughts are first and foremost with his family, friends, colleagues, students and all those who loved and knew him. I also recognise the profound impact this is having on Black and racialised communities, disabled and neurodivergent people, and many others who have seen parts of their own experiences reflected in the conversations of recent days.

I believe deeply in the power of people's stories. But believing in people's stories also means thinking seriously about what happens when people speak, become visible, or find themselves placed under intense public scrutiny. There is a human being behind every story. A person behind every headline. And there can be very real consequences when racism, ableism, hostility and dehumanisation are allowed to become part of public discourse.

Jason's story was not one he chose to tell in the way our sector usually means it. It was taken from him, turned over in public, and used against him. What happens to the person once they have made themselves visible? Who is standing with them when the room turns hostile? Who checks in after the headlines move on?

How do we make storytelling safer? How do we move beyond expressions of solidarity, which are easy to write and easy to post, towards collective responsibility, which is much harder to hold? Every time we build a campaign, a framework or a piece of research that centres racialised voices, we are trying to build exactly the kind of protection that Jason and people like him did not have. Prevention and protection built without us fails us. That has never felt truer than it does this week.

There are people right now who would look at what happened to Jason and take it as a warning to stay quiet, to shrink. I understand that fear. But I refuse to let it be the lesson we take from this. We will keep telling these stories, and keep asking difficult questions of the systems we work inside. When the response to our visibility is hostility, we will not let that shout us down.

Jason deserved better than he got. The very least we owe him now is to keep building something better — something we did not manage to give him in time.

Behind every story is a person. Our responsibility must begin there, and it must not end when the story stops being useful to us.

With love, care and solidarity,

Isaac