I won’t speculate on the specific circumstances of Jason Arday’s death, but the media storm around his fall from grace feels so fucking repetitive.

Violence is a set of technologies and our media loves to share tools. The toolbox used against Arday is a very familiar one. 

1. Take a vindictive person with a bee in their bonnet. In this case it’s Nathan Confas, a “race-realist” who believes in the junk science that race is actually something that can be found in genetics (rather than a thing made up in the 18th-ish century to justify imperial wealth accumulation/slavery)

2. Run the story through a series of opinion pieces by people who can recycle their typical columns/agendas and use it to whack someone they don’t know the first thing about. Also don’t forget the interviews with randomers that don’t have their intentions particularly scrutinised beyond “whacked person declined to comment”

3. Pressure the brands/institutions/employers into dropping them (or at least publicly disciplining them) based on manufactured public outcry 

4. Step away once there's human wreckage and maybe release a platitude about how tragic it is things ended up how they did without acknowledging your own part

When I first started writing it was in the wreckage of Gamergate. That’s probably where this sort of technology in its current iteration really got its grand debut, specifically the thing of picking out one random marginalised person you resent and trawling through their life to find ways to ruin them. It is of course a trend that legacy media publications, and their rowdier cousins were more than happy to pick up and run with, conflating clicks on a dead internet with “public interest”. I am very used to obfuscating every detail online, not because of a fear of scammers taking the meagre funds acquired through rambling online, but because of the awareness that today someone could decide you are marked for the noose. 

I invoke lynching not to break from recycled narratives about the #blackexcellence or how they hate to see us shining or whatever. I don’t think there’s anything new to be said there, and I have a Complex relationship to #blackexcellence that I’m sure you’ll have seen in some writing before or will at some other juncture. But while there have of course been very classed dynamics to lynching, the bare violence of it all lays bare the reality known by many, but expressed most memorably (to me) in Audre Lorde’s Litany for Survival, which is that they can always just decide they want to break us and kill us. Whether they want what you have, or want you out of sight entirely, or just feel like that’ll excise the yearning maw within them. This system we live under has marked us for disposability, regardless of how high or low we exist within it. And they don’t always win, you’d be surprised how hard it is to break or kill someone in their entirety. 

Regardless, I’m fucking sick of it all, down to the reheated half-condolences from certain media and academic figures. And I’m sorry Jason that we haven’t yet broken the world that allowed them to do this to you.