I found some time during my leave to write something a little more personal. For Efiko Magazine, I reflect on the Jason Arday tragedy, the burden of Black excellence, and what it means to carry the weight of representation in spaces where one’s successes and failures can so easily be made to signify more than oneself. I’ll drop the link in the comment section. Excerpt: “(T)here is an uncomfortable part of the Arday story that cannot be ignored. His public reputation had been built partly around an exceptional biography and around the label “Cambridge’s youngest black professor”. That label itself reveals the psychological trap at the centre of black excellence. His age at appointment had no bearing on the quality of his scholarship, yet it became part of Cambridge’s marketing. Arday, the institutions that celebrated him, and the media that amplified his story all participated, to varying degrees, in turning one man into a racial symbol.”