Reflecting on Jason Arday's untimely death, this essay explores right to disappoint as a refusal of the requirement that Black people must be exceptional to maintain their humanity. Accountability may explain the proportionate response to an alleged wrong. Racialisation helps us understand the punitive surplus: the additional scrutiny, humiliation and degradation that the allegation of wrongdoing alone cannot explain.

The project of emancipation in our time is the movement from representation to authorship and the refusal by individuals, nations and regions to remain scaffolding for visions conceived elsewhere when they possess the capacity to construct their own.