It’s Open Season Again
My “Open Season” framing centers on the systemic normalization of violence—both physical and structural—against Black people. I wrote about this tendency, which often leads to death, more than 12 years ago in a separate blog. Today, violence is sanctioned, algorithmically amplified, or legally minimized across media platforms and public spaces. More importantly, it creates a social reality where targeting Black lives carries little to no consequence.
That thesis connects directly to the broader structural issues around figures like David Starkey and Nathan Cofnas, featured in this video link, seeking to quantify a pseudo-science that has shaped a pseudo-culture intent on a black intellectual and cultural eradication campaign. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C27UXFdz0sA&t=134s :
These public figures reduce systemic inequities derived from the brutal slave trade to pseudo-scientific arguments about genetic or intrinsic inferiority. In other words, they twist themselves into pretzels to lay the groundwork that legitimizes the harm they do, and strip away empathy. In the dozen years since my last article on “Open Season”, digital algorithms now reward sensationalist, racially hostile, or inflammatory content, creating an environment where dehumanizing narratives circulate rapidly and feed into real-world hostility. The shorts offer adrenaline to the unwary, and their sponsors are rewarded handsomely.
Applying the phrase “open season” to the recent campaign against Jason Arday implies that a hunt has taken place and the search continues for more non-white victims (the inferior ones proclaimed by the ideology). The term highlights how legal frameworks, media framing, and institutional silence combine to make targeting marginalized populations somehow a noble pursuit. Such perversion is possible only in a pseudo-culture without guardrails where victims are hamstrung or crippled to be ineffective—helpless.
The recent death of Jason Arday, the youngest Black professor appointed at the University of Cambridge, serves as a tragic case study in how bad-faith racial campaigns operate in the digital age. Arday was subjected to a coordinated, high-profile public crusade spearheaded by figures like Nathan Cofnas, an explicit proponent of pseudo-scientific “race realism,” an ideologically driven pseudo-science that openly claims that Black academics only hold prominent institutional roles due to diversity initiatives rather than merit. Furthermore, the ideology asserts that Black people would perform so poorly in merit-based academic selection that their representation in elite academia would be effectively zero.
This vapid injection of racism demonstrates how outdated racial hierarchies are weaponized within modern political warfare. Rather than engaging in standard institutional peer review or academic oversight, self-described race warriors use Substack, social media, and sympathetic media outlets to turn technical academic disputes into ideological public spectacles. The intent is to weaponize public outrage against high-profile Black figures.
Central to the rhetoric used by Cofnas and similar figures is the premise that Black achievements in elite spaces are inherently suspect or illegitimate. By framing Black professionals as “DEI hires” or “diversity poster boys,” right-wing ideological networks attempt to sanitize 19th-century scientific racism under the guise of defending academic standards or “meritocracy.” The treatment of Harvard University President Claudine Gay is an earlier example, championed by the wealthy hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, a privileged donor, who accused her of plagiarism that his own wife was found guilty of in her own thesis. Yet she remained unaffected because the objective and political payoff of these race warriors is the subjugation of Black people.
Systemic Target on Institutional Presence
The broader objective extends beyond any single individual. By turning individual Black scholars into symbols, these campaigns seek to signal that entering elite academic or cultural institutions will carry severe personal and professional costs, effectively deterring structural inclusion.
The trajectory of the Arday campaign reflects a broader strategy where online hostility and pseudo-intellectual racial doctrines converge to create hostile environments for Black scholars, reinforcing traditional power dynamics through modern platform amplification.
Professor Jason Arday controversy: Cambridge has questions to answer
This short video coverage illustrates how major media outlets and online platforms framed the high-profile controversy and public scrutiny surrounding Jason Arday prior to his death.
The video is a tally-ho moment, like a peak event in the English foxhunt, when the fox is cornered and is about to be torn to shreds by the dogs. That, after all, is what the foxhunt is all about: inflicting pain and suffering on the haggard and driven to helplessness. There is a consistent harassment of Arday—not charges—but a racial hierarchy language used to delegitimize him, allegations to advance a race realist ideology.
I cannot fathom what makes certain people swell at others’ pain and suffering, but judging from the recent past, a past that I have noted with clarity in the frozen fields of Russia when Nazis had attacked the unwary, emboldened by their pseudo-science, we are looking down the barrel of a destructive force that will make these past events seem acceptable. The unrelenting attacks against Black people everywhere signal that we are being prepped for a black winter. Africa should take heed.
