The Thread I Was Already Pulling: Jason Arday, Eugenics, the Insularity of Power — and When Human Difference Becomes Human Rank
The Thread I Was Already Pulling
Jason Arday, Eugenics, the Insularity of Power — and When Human Difference Becomes Human Rank
There are times when I return to something I have written months or years earlier and discover that I was pulling at a thread I did not yet completely understand. The words belonged to what I was thinking then, but time, circumstance and the unfolding of other human stories sometimes return those words to me carrying a weight I could not have anticipated when I first wrote them.
That is what happened when I returned to a Grace Notes piece I wrote in November 2025, “Let’s Look at Eugenics — The Whittaker Family.” I began with the Whittaker family of West Virginia because their generations of familial isolation and consanguinity had become a worldwide visual spectacle. Cameras arrived, millions watched, and their appearances, disabilities, circumstances and family history became material for strangers to examine, discuss, ridicule, pity and diagnose from the distance of a screen.
But even then, I was never really writing only about the Whittakers. I was thinking about ENCLOSURE — about what happens when bloodlines, ideas, institutions, cultures and power become so committed to reproducing what is familiar that difference itself begins to feel threatening. I was thinking about what happens when sameness becomes confused with strength and isolation begins masquerading as preservation.
I wrote then:
“Ideas, like genes, need diversity to thrive. Strip away new blood, new thought, new empathy, and brilliance folds in on itself until only fear remains.”
Reading those words again now, in the terrible aftermath of the death of Professor Jason Arday, I hear them differently. Not because the Whittakers and Jason Arday represent equivalent circumstances. They absolutely do not, and to pretend otherwise would diminish two profoundly different human stories. What connects them in my consciousness is something else: what happens when the individual disappears inside the category through which the rest of us have decided to examine them.
But there is another part of that original essay that matters even more to what I am thinking now, because my argument did not remain in the mountains of West Virginia.
I DELIBERATELY TURNED THE MIRROR TOWARD THE AMERICAN ESTABLISHMENT.
When I return to that earlier piece, I realize that I was not looking at eugenics merely as an ugly historical science concerned with reproduction, nor was I suggesting that the Whittakers themselves represented eugenics. I was using their extraordinary familial enclosure as a lens through which to consider insularity — what happens when a system becomes so enclosed within its own likeness that it repeatedly reproduces itself and eventually mistakes that repetition for evidence of its own superiority.
And this is where my reasoning became more deliberately uncomfortable.
“Their echo chambers are not made of mountain hollows but of privilege and power, their insulation born not of poverty but of ideology.”
The comparison was intentionally provocative, but my concern was not that every wealthy white man, conservative thinker, technology entrepreneur or political actor is somehow a eugenicist. That would reduce a complicated argument to accusation. I was examining something much more structural: the proclivity of entrenched power to recognize, reproduce and protect its own likeness, often with such historical familiarity and impunity that its insularity becomes almost invisible to those comfortably occupying it.
I was asking what happens when enormous concentrations of political influence, technology, wealth and cultural authority become capable of determining whose ideas travel, whose fears become national priorities, whose identities are protected, whose presence is presumed legitimate and ultimately whose vision of America acquires institutional force.
In the original piece I described this as an “intellectual inbreeding” — again, deliberately metaphorical — through which myths about civilization, demographic replacement and threatened whiteness circulate and reinforce themselves. I was looking at the insularity of power and asking whether an establishment can become so accustomed to seeing itself reflected in the institutions it controls that its own predominance begins to appear not historical, but natural.
The Constitution of Inheritance
That thought carried me into the section of my original essay I called “The Constitution of Inheritance.”
There I wrote:
“At the very core of what racism embodies is this: the belief that one group’s bloodline, one group’s reflection, is the rightful custodian of the nation’s promise.”
That was the American posture I was interrogating. Not merely prejudice between individuals, but an architecture in which political, economic and institutional power has historically reflected a particular racial and social inheritance, and where the opening of that architecture to others can consequently be experienced not as the enlargement of democracy, but as displacement.
There is an uncomfortable circularity in that history that deserves considerably more examination. If institutions exclude people for generations, those already inside accumulate the credentials, networks, property, wealth, institutional familiarity, cultural authority and generational access that exclusion makes possible. When the doors are eventually forced open, the beneficiaries of that accumulated advantage can point to their own predominance as evidence of merit.
That was the insularity I was attempting to understand. And it is why I wrote then of “the quiet inheritance of eugenics reborn as entitlement.”
AND THEN CAME JASON ARDAY.
The tragedy surrounding Professor Jason Arday has now become entangled with questions of academic integrity, plagiarism, race, DEI, merit, intellectual capability and the standards governing one of the world's most prestigious universities.
Those questions cannot simply be wished away because the human ending is tragic. Academic integrity matters. Evidence matters. Standards matter. If scholarship contains plagiarism or serious attribution failures, those matters deserve proper investigation. Blackness cannot exempt someone from accountability any more than whiteness should insulate someone from it.
But there is another question here, and it is the one pulling me directly back to what I wrote in 2025:
Somewhere in the public pulverizing of Jason Arday, the discussion stopped being only about one professor, one dissertation or one university. Arday increasingly became evidence within a much larger argument — about DEI, merit, Cambridge, Black professors, intellectual capacity, and ultimately whether racial equality represents earned achievement or institutional preference masquerading as achievement.
One of the prominent critics advancing allegations against Arday, Nathan Cofnas, has situated his broader work within arguments about heredity, race, intelligence and equality. His larger philosophy does not, by itself, prove or disprove any allegation concerning Jason Arday. Those claims have to stand or fall upon evidence.
But it matters when we ask what Jason Arday was being made to represent.
And there is where the echo of my earlier writing became impossible for me to ignore.
The Whittakers had become specimens through which strangers contemplated genetics, disability, consanguinity and isolation. Jason Arday was becoming evidence through which strangers contemplated race, intelligence, merit, DEI and Black intellectual legitimacy.
Again, these are not equivalent circumstances. The connection for me is the mechanism — the hauntingly familiar disappearance of a complicated individual human being into a category large enough to carry everybody else's theories about what that person supposedly proves.
There is an asymmetry here that I cannot easily dismiss. When an individual from a historically dominant group fails, plagiarizes, proves incompetent or behaves disgracefully, we generally understand that failure as belonging to that individual. We do not routinely summon that person's entire race to the witness stand. But when the presence of someone from a historically excluded group has already been politicized as evidence of diversity, there is an extraordinary temptation to make that person's failure representative — to convert the individual into proof that opening the institution was itself the mistake.
That is where Jason Arday intersects with the argument I was already making.
Not that criticism is eugenics. Not that academic standards are racist. Not that heredity cannot be studied. And certainly not that Jason Arday should have been immune from scrutiny because he was Black. My concern is what happens after the individual becomes the category — when an allegation about scholarship becomes an argument about racial capacity, when a controversy about an appointment becomes an argument about whether Black inclusion corrupts merit, and when an established order can present its own historically accumulated predominance as neutral while describing deliberate attempts to disturb that predominance as ideological.
Correcting My Own Understanding
Returning to my original essay has also caused me to correct and refine my own understanding. I used genealogy too loosely in describing eugenics. Genealogy traces ancestry and inheritance. Eugenics historically went considerably further, seeking to influence human reproduction according to judgments about which inherited characteristics — and ultimately which human beings — were considered desirable, undesirable, fit or unfit.
America did not merely entertain those ideas as abstract intellectual propositions. It institutionalized eugenic thinking through compulsory sterilization and other policies governing reproduction and supposed human “fitness.” But revisiting my own writing now causes me to wonder whether the deeper inheritance of eugenics begins even before the laboratory, the sterilization order or the law.
When human variation becomes hierarchy, when observations about populations become verdicts upon individuals, when one person's failure is recruited as evidence of an entire people's inferiority while another person's brilliance is treated as an extraordinary escape from what has already been presumed about the group from which that person came, we have entered territory that history should have taught us to examine very carefully.
Because from there the questions become increasingly consequential. Who is naturally intelligent? Who is naturally productive? Who belongs in the university? Who deserves the appointment? Who earned the position? Who supposedly received what rightfully belonged to somebody else? Who is naturally capable of governing? Who represents civilization?
And ultimately, who gets to inherit the future?
I am not suggesting that America or Britain is simply recreating the eugenics programs of the early twentieth century. That would be historically careless and would make this argument much easier to dismiss. History rarely returns wearing precisely the same clothes.
What troubles me is whether the architecture of ranking human worth can become intellectually respectable again, only now through vocabulary sufficiently contemporary, academic and politically useful that we fail to recognize the ancestry of some of the assumptions underneath it.
Heredity, race and IQ, demographic replacement, merit, social productivity, civilizational decline, DEI, who deserves admission, who deserves appointment, who earned their position and who supposedly received somebody else's — none of those subjects, standing alone, constitutes eugenics, and some belong legitimately within academic and political inquiry. Intellectual freedom must include the freedom to investigate difficult and uncomfortable propositions.
But intellectual freedom must also include our freedom — and our responsibility — to interrogate the premises and implications of those propositions.
When arguments about inherited racial characteristics begin converging with judgments about who is intellectually capable, socially valuable, institutionally deserving or naturally fitted to occupy positions of consequence, history gives us every reason to ask what old hierarchy may be acquiring a new vocabulary.
That is not censorship. It is scrutiny.
Accountability and Humanity
And perhaps this is where the Jason Arday tragedy gives an unexpectedly louder platform to the questions I was already asking.
We should not have to manufacture a saint from a complicated human being simply because his ending was tragic. Neither should allegations against him become permission to make his life proof of something about millions of Black people who never met him.
We should be able to examine wrongdoing without pulverizing personhood, defend academic standards without converting one Black scholar's alleged shortcomings into evidence about Black intellectual legitimacy, examine heredity without resurrecting hierarchy, confront racism without making legitimate scrutiny impossible, and defend equality without pretending that every individual possesses identical ability or accomplishment.
Those distinctions require intellectual maturity. They also require something increasingly scarce in public discourse: the willingness to allow a human being to remain a human being rather than converting that person into ammunition for an argument already waiting to be made.
And perhaps that is the question I was unknowingly reaching toward when I wrote about the Whittakers:
That question feels much larger to me today than it did in November 2025.
Perhaps the most dangerous inheritance of eugenics is not only the science it corrupted, the policies it produced or the bodies upon which governments exercised their power. Perhaps it is also the habit of mind it legitimized: the temptation to encounter another human being first as a category, assign that category a position within a hierarchy, and only afterward — if we ever get there — discover the individual person.
And this brings me back to another passage from my original essay:
“The antidote to isolation isn’t vengeance; it’s contact, curiosity, and the courage to let the unfamiliar touch us. America, at its best, was never pure. It was a conversation — messy, defiant, alive.”
I still believe that. Not because diversity magically eliminates human failure. It does not. Not because every claim made in the name of equality is necessarily true. It is not. And not because historical injustice excuses contemporary misconduct. It cannot.
I believe it because a society confident enough to encounter difference does not need to establish a hierarchy of human worth before it can understand the people who comprise it.
Returning to the Thread
I am sharing my November 2025 essay again because I find myself reading my own words differently now. Not because I believe everything I wrote was perfectly expressed. I have already found terminology I would refine and distinctions I would make more carefully. That, too, is part of thinking. We should be able to return to our assumptions, challenge them, correct them and discover whether they still withstand what the world subsequently places before us.
But I would not retreat from the central question I was asking.
I was writing about enclosure, purity, ideological inbreeding and the extraordinary capacity of established power to reproduce its own assumptions while barely recognizing that reproduction as insularity. I was asking what happens when a nation begins confusing historical dominance with natural entitlement and when those accustomed to occupying the center experience the arrival of others as a threat to merit, civilization or inheritance.
And so I return to two thoughts I wrote before I knew his story would ever intersect with mine: “Ideas, like genes, need diversity to thrive,” and “the quiet inheritance of eugenics reborn as entitlement.”
I wrote those words then. I am interrogating them more deeply now.
Because perhaps the question before us is no longer merely whether eugenics belongs to some safely buried chapter of twentieth-century history. Perhaps the more difficult question is whether we recognize its intellectual descendants when old assumptions about hierarchy, inheritance and human worth arrive speaking the language of our own time — and whether, amid all our arguments about intelligence, merit, race, equality, academic integrity and human difference, we can still remember the most elemental thing of all:
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