Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas has long opposed Affirmative Action, on the basis that any exceptional benefit would cheapen his own achievements, and cause others to question if he is there by merit, or as a token.
The Jason Arday story is terrible for minorities: if someone can be a total fraud, plagiarizing everything, lying to everyone, but get away with it for years by bullying critics with accusations of racism... then how many other Jason Ardays are there? Of course people will ask this.
This cheapens the achievements of honest, deserving men and women from disadvantaged backgrounds: maybe others will view their work with suspicion, worry that they're hiring "another Jason Arday", never sure how to weigh their actual achievements against the clearly exceptional benefit of DEI.
Like all acts of injustice, it backfires in the end. People acted willingly unfairly in favor of Jason Arday, elevating his bogus work and turning a blind eye to red flags. The result is a new, explicitly racist stereotype, which will hurt actual deserving scholars.
The lesson is simple: we must treat people fairly, by the merits of their work -- with no plus- or minus-points for surrounding circumstances.
Kevin A. Bryan (@Afinetheorem)
I don't want to pile on to the Cambridge situation, but media coverage saying "plagiarism" are really missing the boat. There is pretty obvious fraud - literally claiming he did interviews that couldn't have happened and so on - in like every paper of his that I looked at. 1/4
— https://nitter.net/Afinetheorem/status/2084666949955387634#m