Imagine a world in which the late Cambridge University professor Jason Arday had released a widely hyped book published by Simon & Schuster, one of the Big Five publishing houses, then embarked on a book tour, and nobody said anything.
For such a thing to have happened to a “renowned sociologist,” a “highly respected scholar of race,” “the youngest Black person ever appointed to a professorship at Cambridge”—well, that would have been racist.
Instead, when Arday’s Great and Unfortunate Things was released earlier this month and some, including the Washington Free Beacon, had the temerity to scrutinize his obviously absurd life story, well, that was racist too. “He couldn’t see a way out because of this avalanche of stories,” Arday’s friend Kehinde Andrews told the UK’s Channel 4 News, laying the blame for Arday’s suicide on Friday at the feet of “the media.”
“A man was lynched yesterday,” Andrews said. “He’s now dead because he’s black.” The race huckster Ibram X. Kendi also described Arday’s suicide as a lynching and blamed the press.
It’s unclear whether that includes Simon & Schuster, the KKR-owned publishing house that is raking in money off the book, which stood by the book as proof of Arday’s fabulism mounted while giving a shout out to his ghostwriter, Eve Claxton, whose name doesn’t appear on the cover of the U.S. version. The publishing house appears to have known something was amiss but seen green: It nipped and tucked the book along the way, acknowledging the possibility he could lose his professorship. It has also removed the video and audio from the book’s promotional page.
A spokeswoman for Simon & Schuster, Julia Prosser, did not respond to a request for comment about why the publisher made those edits to the book proofs and whether it stands by the factual claims in the book—which it is promoting as a “memoir of overcoming remarkable challenges and responding to adversity with resilience”—in the wake of a New York Times report that concluded Arday’s claim to have been non-verbal until the age of 11, which is detailed in the book, was false.
If Arday died at anybody’s hand but his own, the culprits are those who set him up for inevitable humiliation, some of whom are still profiting from his lies, Simon & Schuster chief among them.
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