Note: My contributions to this site have always focused on climate change. Today, however, I’m posting something rather different. It concerns the academic community of which I am part, and the deeply uncomfortable questions raised by the recent death of Jason Arday. Although it has no direct climate dimension, I feel there is an important responsibility to speak about what has happened, and to reflect on the role that we, as colleagues and as a wider academic community, may have played through what we said — and what we left unsaid.

In the wake of Jason Arday’s death, there needs to be a much wider and more uncomfortable reckoning than simply pointing the finger at the UK media. What we have witnessed from sections of the press, to me at least, has the disturbing hallmarks of a racist lynching: a sustained campaign of vilification, humiliation and dehumanisation, pursued with complete disregard for the consequences for the person, or his family, at its centre. There is a legitimate question to ask about where such scrutiny came from, why it became so relentless, and whether its ultimate effect was to hound a person out rather than to hold a public figure to account.

I am making no comment here on the veracity or otherwise of Jason Arday’s work, position or statements that he made. My concern is that I doubt the same level of widespread public scrutiny would have occurred had he been a white professor, particularly a white professor working in a non-racialised area of academia. That is an uncomfortable question, but one that should not be avoided simply because the answers may be difficult.

But it is also far too easy for the rest of us to absolve ourselves.

There is now, rightly, an outpouring of grief and outrage from across the academic community. Yet I have to ask myself, and others, whether Jason Arday might still be alive today had we spoken out more forcefully, and much earlier, against what was happening to him. I was part of that silence.

There will always be people whose motivations are fundamentally self-serving, regardless of how damaging their actions may be. But they are a small minority. The greater danger comes when their actions are enabled by the silence, timidity or self-preservation of other ‘good people’, people who may voice their concerns privately, but who do not have the courage to speak out publicly. History repeatedly shows us that destructive forces do not require a majority; they require enough decent people to remain quiet.

That is perhaps the most difficult responsibility this moment asks us to confront. It is not enough to condemn the perpetrators after the damage has been done. We have to find the courage to speak when speaking is difficult, when it is inconvenient, and when doing so carries a cost.

Primo Levi warned of the danger of remaining indifferent in the face of serious wrongdoing; Martin Luther King Jr. similarly reminded us of the profound damage caused when good people remain silent. Jason Arday’s death should leave us asking not simply, “Who did this?”, but also, “Where were the rest of us, and why were we silent?”

If this terrible loss should prompt anything in us, it is a renewed determination not to mistake silence for neutrality. Sometimes, failing to speak out is itself part of the machinery that allows hate and injustice to flourish.