Groucho Marxism

In 2023, Jason Arday was appointed a professor of sociology of education at Cambridge, attracting media attention as the youngest black professor in the university’s history. Earlier this year, it emerged that Arday may have plagiarized some of his writings, falsified research, and made false claims in his academic history and autobiography. An intense witch-hunt followed, orchestrated by media outlets such as the Times, the Telegraph, and the Spectator. Last night, Arday was found dead in his London home having apparently committed suicide. It appears he was hounded to death by the right-wing media. This tragic episode tells us a lot about how racism is alive and well in this country. It also tells us that the concept of ‘race science’ has not yet been fully eliminated from our public discourse.

Race science is based on the belief that humanity divides into biologically distinct groups with inherent behavioural or intellectual characteristics. It emerged during the European Enlightenment and 19th-century colonialism to justify social stratification, slavery, and imperial dominance. Early race science relied on flawed and biased practices like craniometry (measuring skull sizes) and IQ testing to assign intellectual capacities to different groups. It led to the development of the field of eugenics, which advocated for improving the genetic quality of the human population through selective breeding. This inspired harmful social policies and forced sterilizations under the guise of improving human hereditary traits, and ultimately led to the atrocities committed by the Nazis in the mid-20th century.

These atrocities demonstrated what happens when these ideas are taken to their logical conclusion and led to a significant diminution of interest in race science. It did not go away completely however and was kept alive by a small group of dedicated individuals. One such individual is Charles Murray, who in 1994 co-authored a now infamous book with Richard J. Herrnstein called The Bell Curve. Murray and Herrnstein argued that human intelligence (measured by IQ) is a better predictor of life success than parental socioeconomic status and contributes heavily to group performance disparities. In so doing, they argued that humans can neatly be divided into races, and that these races have measurable disparities in intelligence. These are the core propositions of race science.

Another such individual is Nathan Cofnas, a self-defined ‘race realist’. Cofnas was sacked by Cambridge University in 2024 and underwent a disciplinary investigation into a blog post about black academics which suggested that in a meritocracy, there would be ‘close to zero’ black professors. He is at the centre of the storm around Arday as it was Cofnas who first alleged plagiarism in Arday’s PhD thesis. Of course, there is nothing wrong with academics highlighting plagiarism; indeed, they have a duty to do so. And it may be that Arday was guilty of plagiarism, although that is not clear at this stage. But there is no doubt that Cofnas went out of his way to find a black professor who he could discredit so as to back up his preexisting beliefs.

It is tempting to simply dismiss individuals such as Murray and Cofnas as racist cranks – particularly as their ideas have been roundly debunked by the scientific community. However the furore around Arday demonstrates that these ideas have not yet been fully discarded by the wider public. This is despite the fact that the core propositions of race science are embarrassingly easy to debunk. Modern genomic research demonstrates that human genetic variation is continuous rather than categorical, meaning two people of the same perceived race can be genetically more distant than two people from different racial groups. Thus the idea that humans can neatly divided into races does not tally with the scientific evidence. This demonstrates that race is a social (i.e. constructed) rather than a scientific concept.

The fact that humans cannot be neatly divided into races means that it doesn’t make any sense to argue that different races have measurable disparities in intelligence. But let us suspend disbelief for a moment that humans could be neatly divided in this way. Would it make sense then? The answer is no, for the obvious reason that there can be no single measure of intelligence. There are many types of intelligence: linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalistic, existential, creative, practical, and so on. Many of these are difficult or even impossible to measure quantitatively. How would we go about quantifying interpersonal intelligence, for example?

The idea that these different types of intelligence can be boiled down into a single ‘intelligence quotient’ metric is nonsense. The standard IQ metric really measures just logical-mathematical and spatial intelligence. And it doesn’t even do that particularly well. So even if it was the case that human beings could be neatly divided into races, and it could be shown that there was a difference in IQ between these races, that wouldn’t really tell us anything interesting. It certainly wouldn’t tell us anything about why different people experience different outcomes. The truth is that disparities in health, education, and socioeconomic outcomes are driven by environmental, historical, and systemic inequities rather than innate biological traits. So why can’t scientists convince people of this?

In a 2025 article published in Evolutionary Human Sciences, evolutionary biologists Kevin Lala and Kalyani Twyman identified five barrier to the effective countering of racist pseudoscience. The first such barrier is a widespread belief in genetic determinism. The second is an overly simplistic conception of heredity that attributes the inheritance of traits, and of their differences, to genes and genetic variation. The third is belief in the naturalistic fallacy: the false idea that traits that evolved are desirable or inevitable. The fourth is the failure of relevant scientific disciplines to take responsibility for teaching the science of racism. And the fifth is the self-promotion of academic fields, many of which are tarnished with a history of racism and eugenics which they are too embarrassed to talk about.

All of these factors are undoubtedly relevant. But I think a better explanation lies in the fact that a widespread belief in race science among the general public is beneficial to the ruling class, as it makes it that much easier for members of this class to pursue a divide-and-conquer strategy, which in turn makes it that much easier for them to cling to power. The implicit message underlying all the furore around Jason Arday in the mainstream media is that people from ‘lesser’ races should not get ideas above their station. Arday may well have been a fabulist who arguably should not have been made a professor. But he was also a human being who was unfortunate to find himself directly in the firing line of the ruling class’s divide-and-conquer culture war. Perhaps now he will find some peace.