Jason Arday, Wayne Brown and the Perils of Black Exceptionalism

An essay by Bayo Adelaja, Founder and CEO of Do it Now Now

I have always had a slightly complicated relationship with the phrase “the first Black”, although until recently I don't think I knew that it was complicated. Like most people who care about representation, I am pleased when I see that somebody has become the first Black person to lead an institution, the first Black woman appointed to a particular board or the youngest Black person to achieve something that, for whatever reason, nobody who looks like them had managed to achieve before. I will probably click on the article, I might send it to someone, and depending on what the achievement is, I may even feel strangely proud of a person I have never met.

There is good reason for that, because a first tells us as much about an institution as it does about the person who has achieved it. If somebody can become the first Black person to occupy a position in Britain in 2026, it means that however long that institution has existed, and however many statements it has made about equality, diversity or inclusion over the years, every single person who held that position before them was not Black. The achievement belongs to the individual, but the fact that it is a first belongs to the institution and the society that produced it.

Much of my working life has been spent thinking about these sorts of barriers, so I am certainly not about to make the argument that representation doesn't matter. I run an organisation that spends a considerable amount of its time trying to help people gain access to opportunities, money, networks, knowledge and institutions that they have historically found much more difficult to reach, and I still believe that opening those doors is incredibly important. What I am beginning to question is what happens when we make so much of the person who eventually manages to walk through one.

Perhaps, as a sociologist, I should have recognised the shape of this problem sooner.

I should probably also be clear about what I mean when I use the term Black exceptionalism, because it has more than one life in academic literature. In parts of the racial stratification literature, Black exceptionalism describes the particular durability of the boundary separating Black people from other racial groups, rather than exceptional Black achievement. I am using it here in another sense, much closer to the argument Michelle Alexander makes in The New Jim Crow about the social usefulness of highly visible examples of Black success. Alexander's point is not simply that exceptional Black people exist, but that their existence can perform ideological work: the person who makes it through can be used as evidence that the system itself is open, even when the distribution of opportunity beneath that exceptional case remains profoundly unequal.

That distinction interests me because there is something very seductive about the exceptional individual. Structural inequality is difficult to photograph, whereas the Black professor standing outside Cambridge is very easy to photograph. Institutional racism is complicated to put into a press release, whereas appointing the first Black person to a senior role produces a headline that everyone understands. The exception gives us a person through whom we can tell a much larger story about progress, and sometimes allows us to avoid the much less satisfying question of whether the conditions that made that person exceptional have actually changed.

I first found myself thinking seriously about this after the death of Wayne Brown, who became the UK's first Black chief fire officer when he took charge of West Midlands Fire Service. Brown died by suicide in January 2024 and the subsequent inquest found that, before his death, he had been experiencing extreme stress arising from an ongoing harassment case and a workplace investigation into his qualifications that had become public. The coroner later raised concerns about the support available to senior members of staff experiencing significant stress, particularly while subject to workplace investigations.

There are several ways to understand that story and I think it would be dishonest to choose only the parts that make the argument I want to make. Questions had been raised about Brown's qualifications and those questions could legitimately be investigated; being a Black leader cannot mean being exempt from the standards that apply to everybody else. At the same time, the coroner's findings tell us something about the extraordinary stress he was experiencing and about shortcomings in the structures around a very senior person who was going through an incredibly difficult period.

Both of those things can be true, which seems obvious when written down, but we have become surprisingly bad at holding competing truths about people at the same time. Somebody can have done something wrong and still be treated wrongly. A question can be legitimate while the culture surrounding its pursuit becomes disproportionate. An institution can have genuine concerns about somebody's conduct while retaining obligations towards their welfare.

What I kept returning to in Brown's story was the fact that he had not entered public consciousness merely as another chief fire officer. He was the first Black chief fire officer in the country, which meant his appointment had already been made to represent something beyond one man's career before any controversy began.

Sociologists have thought about this problem of numerical rarity for a long time. Rosabeth Moss Kanter's work on tokenism was originally developed through the study of women in male-dominated corporations, but one of its most useful insights is that being numerically unusual inside an organisation does not simply make someone underrepresented; it makes them unusually visible. The token attracts greater attention, their differences from the dominant group become more salient and their performance is placed under particular pressure precisely because there are so few people like them there. Later work on tokenism has continued to find this combination of heightened visibility, isolation and representational pressure.

The first is therefore doing two jobs at once. They are doing the job they were actually appointed to do and, whether they agreed to it or not, they are also performing a representational role created by their scarcity.

I thought about that again while watching the story of Jason Arday unfold.

When Cambridge announced Arday's appointment as Professor of Sociology of Education in 2023, it did not simply announce that it had recruited a new academic. The university described him as its youngest Black professor and told the extraordinary story that had accompanied his rise through academia. His autism, socioeconomic background, childhood experiences and unconventional journey into higher education became part of the meaning of his appointment, while Arday himself spoke about widening access for people from underrepresented backgrounds. Cambridge explicitly located his story within a wider conversation about the barriers facing Black, neurodivergent and socioeconomically disadvantaged people in education.

I remember stories like this because I like stories like this. There is something incredibly satisfying about watching somebody reach a place that the circumstances of their life suggested they might never reach, particularly when their presence there makes it a little harder for anyone to argue that people like them simply do not belong. For a Black child, an autistic child or a parent trying to imagine what might be possible for their child, the sight of a Black autistic professor at Cambridge can mean something, and I don't want our critique of exceptionalism to become so clever that we forget that.

The difficulty is that the inspirational story and the institutional story become intertwined. Arday was no longer simply a scholar whose work could be assessed alongside that of other scholars; his appointment had also come to signify something about inclusion, social mobility and the possibility of overcoming barriers.

Then came questions about his academic work and wider biography. He faced allegations of plagiarism, which he denied, scrutiny widened to other aspects of his academic and personal record, Cambridge announced an investigation into his appointment and time at the university, and Arday resigned in August 2026. On 14 August he was found dead in London, aged 41. Police have said that his death was unexpected but is not being treated as suspicious, while his family has described the intense harassment and misinformation they believe he had experienced.

Again, I don't think we have to decide that none of the questions should have been asked in order to be disturbed by the wider phenomenon. Allegations of academic misconduct are serious and universities should care deeply about the integrity of academic work. What interests me sociologically is the speed with which questions about one professor could become evidence within a much larger argument about diversity, merit and whether institutions had lowered standards in their attempts to become more representative. That debate has continued after Arday's death, with the case being interpreted through sharply competing accounts of academic standards, racialised scrutiny, media responsibility and institutional failure.

This is where Alexander's understanding of exceptionalism becomes particularly useful to me, because the same exception can perform contradictory work at different moments. When the exceptional Black person succeeds, their presence can be invoked to demonstrate that the system is becoming fairer; when the same person fails, their failure can be invoked to suggest that attempts to make the system fairer went too far. In both cases an enormous amount of structural meaning is being extracted from one person's life.

I tried to think of the equivalent.

If a white professor is found to have plagiarised their work, there should obviously be consequences and there may also be questions for the university that appointed them. What does not generally follow is a wider debate about whether universities have become too willing to employ white academics. If a white chief executive exaggerates something on their CV, the board may be furious, the person may lose their job and the organisation may review its recruitment processes, but very few people would conclude that perhaps our wider commitment to putting white people into senior leadership has gone too far.

The comparison sounds ridiculous because the category itself disappears when the person belongs to the dominant group. Whiteness does not usually have to explain the individual behaviour of every white person because there are enough white people occupying enough different positions for their differences to remain visible. One white professor does not have to represent white professors because white professors are not treated as a sociological curiosity.

This is one of the privileges of numerical and institutional dominance: individuality.

Underrepresentation does something different. When there are very few people like you in the room, the distance between the individual and the category contracts, which is why the exceptional Black person's success can feel collectively meaningful and their failure can become collectively dangerous. Kanter helps explain the visibility, but there is also something here that Black intellectual traditions have wrestled with for much longer.

Du Bois described double consciousness as part of the peculiar experience of seeing oneself not simply through one's own understanding but through the gaze of a society that has already produced ideas about what a Black person is. More than a century later, the language still feels remarkably useful because what I am describing is not simply external scrutiny; it is the way awareness of that scrutiny can become internalised into how one moves through institutions, how carefully one prepares and how much time one spends anticipating the meaning other people might attach to one's behaviour.

This is also where I think our celebration of Black excellence becomes more complicated than we sometimes allow.

Black excellence exists within a much longer tradition of racial uplift, in which the achievements and conduct of particular Black people were understood as having implications for the standing of Black people collectively. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham's account of the politics of respectability is useful here because it shows how standards of behaviour could become a strategy of resistance: Black communities confronting racist assumptions about inferiority used education, propriety, discipline and achievement partly to challenge the ideological foundations of racism itself. Higginbotham's argument is more nuanced than the way “respectability politics” is often used as an insult today; respectability could be both constraining and politically useful, a method of asserting dignity in a society determined to deny it.

I think Black excellence contains some of the same tension.

There is a reason the phrase has so much emotional power. Black people have spent generations confronting institutions and ideas that were perfectly comfortable assuming our inferiority, so there is something deeply understandable about wanting to gather evidence of our brilliance and put it somewhere impossible to ignore. We celebrate the professors, lawyers, entrepreneurs, doctors, artists and leaders because their existence challenges a story that has been told about us for a very long time and because, for those of us who grew up without seeing many Black people occupying certain positions, the person who finally gets there can genuinely expand our understanding of what is possible.

The problem begins when a strategy for resisting racial inferiority quietly becomes another standard Black people are expected to satisfy. If respectability says that our behaviour can help demonstrate our worthiness, exceptionalism goes slightly further and suggests that extraordinary achievement can demonstrate that worthiness conclusively. Both contain the possibility that the structural question is gradually relocated into the individual: instead of asking why the institution is unequal, we become preoccupied with producing a sufficiently impressive Black person to succeed within it.

That creates a particularly uncomfortable question for those of us who work in racial equity, because sometimes we can inadvertently participate in the same process.

About a year ago, through our work, we handpicked a group of high-potential Black leaders who we believed had valuable things to contribute to public conversations. We wanted them to be better positioned to challenge the status quo with their own voices rather than constantly having other people speak about the communities, sectors and problems they understood firsthand, so we brought in a professional PR person, worked with them on storytelling and gave them resources and support around giving interviews, writing opinion pieces and communicating publicly.

The thinking behind it was quite straightforward and, if I am honest, very typical of how I tend to approach problems. If talented Black leaders were not sufficiently represented in public conversations, perhaps part of the problem was that they had not had access to the professional support that makes being visible easier. Give people that support, develop the skills, help them understand how the media works, and then hopefully they would be better equipped to step forward and challenge some of the narratives being constructed without them.

The intervention worked. They were better prepared, they knew how to give the interview, they knew how to shape the argument and they had stories and expertise worth sharing, but almost all of them, having gone through that process, chose not to pursue greater public visibility.

At first that surprised me, because I had assumed we were solving a preparedness problem and therefore expected preparedness to produce participation. What they understood, perhaps better than I did when we designed the work, was that knowing how to do something does not necessarily make the consequences of doing it attractive. They had watched visible Black people deal with racist abuse, hostile social media responses, emails from strangers, invasive scrutiny and the strange experience of having people who know almost nothing about you develop extremely confident opinions about your intelligence, character and right to occupy the position you hold.

They understood the kind of racism that is obvious enough to identify immediately and the other kind that is sufficiently ambiguous that you can lose an entire evening debating with yourself about whether what happened was really what you thought it was. They also understood that becoming publicly visible meant accepting that mistakes which might ordinarily remain personal could become racialised, with an ill-judged comment, a disputed claim or a difficult interview potentially being interpreted through assumptions much larger than the person who made it.

What we had interpreted as a skills gap was, at least partly, a rational calculation about cost.

That experience has stayed with me because these were precisely the people we so often claim are missing. We regularly ask why more Black experts are not commenting in the media, why more Black leaders are not writing opinion pieces or putting themselves forward as public voices and why the people invited to explain our communities or speak about the issues affecting them are so often the same small group. Sometimes we respond by creating another media training programme, another confidence-building intervention or another list of experts, when the expert may already be there, fully capable of speaking and simply unconvinced that the opportunity is worth giving strangers permission to pull apart their life.

As a sociologist, I think I initially made the mistake of treating what looked like a deficit in participation as a deficit located in the participants.

Once I looked at it differently, their decision made considerably more sense.

William A. Smith's concept of racial battle fatigue was originally developed to describe the cumulative psychological and physiological toll produced by repeatedly encountering racialised stress, particularly among Black people navigating historically white institutions. It provides useful language for something our leaders appeared to understand intuitively: racism does not only matter at the moment somebody says something explicitly racist. There is also a cumulative cost to anticipating racism, interpreting ambiguous encounters, managing one's response, deciding which battles deserve attention and returning to work while carrying everything that happened before.

Seen through that lens, declining visibility need not be evidence of insufficient confidence at all. It can be a form of self-preservation by people who understand the likely social conditions of becoming more publicly visible.

That distinction matters because a pipeline problem and a price problem require very different solutions. If somebody does not have the skills, we can teach them; if they do not have the networks, we can try to build them; if nobody knows they exist, we can introduce them. But if capable people are deliberately withdrawing because they have watched what public visibility does to people who look like them, then the problem sits much further outside the individual, and no amount of confidence training is going to solve it.

It also means that the consequences are bigger than what happens to the person receiving the abuse. When thoughtful people decide that participating in public life costs too much, the public conversation does not somehow become neutral; it becomes more heavily shaped by whoever is willing, protected or perhaps simply reckless enough to endure the consequences of being visible. We then mistake the voices that remain for the full range of available expertise and wonder why our debates feel so narrow.

There is another concept from Black cultural theory that seems relevant here, which is what has sometimes been called the burden of representation: the pressure placed on the relatively small number of Black people who become publicly visible to speak not only as themselves but somehow for Black people more generally. Stuart Hall wrote about experiencing precisely this burden as one of very few Black participants in intellectual spaces, where one's contribution acquires an additional obligation to bring an entire perspective into the room.

It is difficult to imagine a better description of what happens to the first.

The exceptional Black person is simultaneously hyper-individualised and de-individualised. We want every detail of their biography because their exceptional story makes them interesting, while at the same time denying them the luxury of being simply themselves because their presence has been recruited to represent something larger.

Institutions benefit from this too, which is why I think responsibility cannot stop with the individual.

There is obvious value attached to being the organisation that appoints the first. The photograph is useful, the biography is useful, the announcement is useful and the person's success can become tangible evidence of institutional progress. When the appointment is somebody like Jason Arday, whose story can be connected to race, disability, class and educational disadvantage simultaneously, the symbolic value is enormous.

I don't think there is anything inherently malicious about celebrating that story. The problem is that the benefits and risks of exceptional visibility are distributed differently. The institution receives much of the reputational value of the exceptional appointment while the person carries much of the reputational and emotional risk of becoming exceptional in public. If something goes wrong, an institution has processes it can retreat into: investigations, reviews, statements, committees and eventually another news cycle. The person still has a face, a family, an inbox and a life that cannot be separated quite so efficiently from the story.

Wayne Brown's case makes another part of this uncomfortable for me because the coroner specifically identified shortcomings in provision for senior staff experiencing significant stress or potential disciplinary investigation. There is something about that which feels familiar far beyond the fire service. The further somebody rises, the more capable everyone assumes they must be of managing whatever comes with the position; if they have already overcome significant barriers to get there, the assumption of resilience becomes even stronger. We tell people that their journey demonstrates strength and perseverance, celebrate how much they have survived and then sometimes seem surprised when surviving yet another thing turns out to be difficult.

For Black leaders there is another pressure layered on top of that, one that is difficult to quantify but easy to recognise if you have experienced it. When you are one of relatively few Black people in a space of influence, you become aware that people are forming an opinion about you while also wondering whether, consciously or otherwise, they are forming an opinion about people like you. It makes you prepare more carefully, anticipate the questions, check things twice and learn both the official rules and all the rules nobody bothered to write down.

Du Bois would probably recognise something in that experience, even if the institutions have changed.

From the outside, this behaviour can look like exceptional professionalism and often it genuinely is, but I increasingly wonder how much of what we celebrate as Black excellence has also been produced by people understanding that they have less room to get things wrong.

Which brings me back to the problem at the beginning.

The exceptional Black person performs an extraordinarily useful social role because everybody can make them mean something. Those committed to diversity can point to them as evidence of progress. Those sceptical of structural racism can point to them as evidence that opportunity is already available to anyone sufficiently talented. If they fall, opponents of diversity can point to the same person as evidence that institutions sacrificed standards in pursuit of representation.

The exception becomes proof whichever way the story ends.

What disappears in all of those interpretations is the ordinary human being in the middle.

That is why I have become less interested in the question of whether we can produce more exceptional Black people and more interested in whether Black people can ever be allowed to stop being exceptional.

I don't mean that I want Black people to stop being ambitious or that we should stop celebrating extraordinary achievement. I certainly do not think the answer to what has happened around Jason Arday is for universities to abandon attempts to tackle racial inequality, any more than Wayne Brown's story is an argument against Black leadership in public institutions. If anything, I think the mistake is that we have set our ambition much too low if success means finding a sufficiently brilliant, sufficiently resilient Black person who can enter an institution, survive being made into a symbol and then never make a mistake significant enough to disappoint the people who invested meaning in their presence.

I want there to be enough Black professors that one Black professor can be mediocre without their mediocrity becoming sociologically interesting. I want there to be enough Black chief executives that one of them can make terrible decisions, ruin a perfectly good business and become nothing more profound than the story of a chief executive who was bad at their job. I want Black people to be able to have a difficult year, say something stupid, change their mind, need help, make the wrong career choice, fail at something and try again without the knowledge that their individual failure might be picked up and carried into an argument about whether people who look like them deserved the opportunity in the first place.

In other words, one of the greatest privileges available to a group that genuinely belongs is not simply the opportunity to be extraordinary. It is the freedom to be ordinary.

Perhaps representation has really succeeded when the Black professor can become just a professor and the Black chief fire officer can eventually become just the chief fire officer, when there are enough people in the room that nobody's individual success is required to prove that diversity works and nobody's individual failure can plausibly be offered as evidence that it does not.

I will probably still click on the next headline announcing that somebody has become the first Black something. Firsts still tell us where a door has remained closed for far too long, and there is still something joyful about watching somebody finally open it. What has changed for me is that I now see more clearly the social work we ask the person on the other side of that door to perform, and I think about the leaders we worked with who were given the tools to become more visible, looked carefully at what visibility required of other Black people, and decided that they would rather keep their peace.

At the time, I thought our job was to prepare them better.

I now think they may have understood the problem more clearly than we did.

Maybe our work is not simply to convince more Black people to step forward and become exceptional enough, visible enough and resilient enough to challenge the status quo.

Maybe we need to change the conditions under which they are being asked to do it.

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Our deepest condolences to the families, friends and loved ones of Wayne Brown and Jason Arday. May they both rest in peace.