The Right to Disappoint: Black Excellence, the Punitive Surplus and what accounts for the Extra Nine Minutes.

Over the past few months, the story of Professor Jason Arday reached our feeds and rose to a fever pitch before closing with the tragedy of his untimely death at 41. Since then, there have been numerous commentaries from different parts of the Black community and a statement from the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. I have reflected on his death and want to share my perspective. It starts with my childhood but the story comes together if you stay with me.

My mother was a primary-school teacher. So, like most children burdened with having a teaching parent at home during the summer holidays, the idea of excellence; working hard, doing well and taking pride in what I produced was woven into my childhood. But these standards, or even being a “good child” never felt like a condition of being loved or belonging.

Excellence can be an internal standard; a commitment to the quality of our work and the fullest use of our capacities. It shows up as the satisfaction of a job well done and the drive to finish what was once a difficult or seemingly impossible feat. But excellence can also become an external demand: the price some of us are required to pay for legitimacy, our humanity being recognised and continued belonging.

That brings me to this reflection on the tragedy of Professor Arday’s death, and what I now call the right to be devastatingly disappointing.

Claiming the Right to Disappoint

For several years now, when someone has told me that I am amazing or exceptional, I have responded by declaring that I reserve the right to disappoint or annoy them. In the wake of Professor Arday’s death, I have begun calling it the right to be devastatingly disappointing. It means that I reserve the right to produce something ordinary. To make an error, exercise poor judgment, fall short of my own capacities and be unremarkable on a given day.

The right to be devastatingly disappointing is not an embrace of mediocrity or a defense of wrongdoing. It is my refusal of the requirement that Black people must be exceptional to occupy spaces in which others are permitted simply to exist.

I have long concluded that my pursuit of excellence is mine; it is driven by my own internal standard. It is not the rent I pay for existing in the world or having my humanity legitimised or my voice matter. The condition of my being here cannot be that I must be superhuman.

That stance requires a delicate double being; striving for excellence as my own internal standard while refusing excellence as the condition under which I am permitted to exist. The condition of my being here cannot be that I must be superhuman.

The condition of my being here cannot be that I must be superhuman.

I have been thinking too about this double being more deeply following the untimely death of Professor Arday.

From accountability to punishment

In the face of allegations facing Professor Arday (the merits of which is not the subject of debate here) there are legitimate conversations taking place about academic standards, plagiarism and institutional due diligence. Black scholars are not beyond criticism, and Black communities do not have to call wrong right in order to protect one another. But legitimate scrutiny does not, by itself, explain the scale of what happened to Professor Arday.

In Professor Arday’s case, he was hounded mercilessly: Newscord reports that there were 249 national press articles about him across 15 UK media outlets in a 22-day period leading up to his untimely passing(1). Of that number 188 articles were published in his last nine days alive. Nine days after his death, the press had moved on: only 10 articles were published in three days. The allegations concerning his work did not remain questions about his scholarship as an academic. Rather, they became the basis of a much larger ideological argument about diversity, institutional standards and whether Black people had been admitted into spaces they were not qualified to occupy.

I argue that these questions are not about ordinary accountability. True accountability asks: Did the work meet the required standard? If not, what is the appropriate institutional response? This was, I contend, racialised judgement. Racialised judgement asks a different question: what does this alleged failure reveal about who this person really is, and whether people who look like them should be admitted into these spaces.

Jack Warner and the Selective force of Scrutiny

I have encountered this pattern before. Years ago, when I lived in Trinidad and Tobago, I watched the treatment of Jack Warner, the Trinidadian former president of CONCACAF and vice-president of FIFA, amid serious allegations of corruption in the 2015 FIFA Corruption Scandal. International journalists descended upon the island and the United States government sought Warner’s extradition under a sweeping racketeering and corruption indictment.

My point is not that Warner should have been protected from investigation, or that he was innocent. It is to question the racial undertones in the accusations pitted against Warner compared to other european FIFA officials accused of corruption. And question the breathless coverage of his case considering that then FIFA President Sepp Blatter also faced corruption allegations and was forced to resign days after his re-election as FIFA President.

What Accounts for the Extra Nine Minutes?

What struck me then, and what the treatment of Professor Arday brings back to me now, is the question of excess. Not whether investigation or accountability was warranted, but what explains the additional humiliation, the relentless pursuit, the transformation of one person into a spectacle and the apparent inability of punishment ever to reach its completion?

I do not invoke lightly the nine minutes and 29 seconds Derek Chauvin held his knee on George Floyd’s neck(2). But invoke them I must because those nine minutes and 29 seconds confront us with a fundamental question: when the legitimate grounds for restraint or accountability have been exhausted, why does the knee remain on the neck?

When legitimate grounds for restraint or accountability has been exhausted, why does the knee remain on the neck?

Where Disproportion Measures Racialisation

I would argue that the disproportionate response, the excess, is where we witness the embodiment and weight of the burden of racialisation. Accountability may explain the portion of the response that is proportionate to the act. Racialisation helps us understand the excess, what I call the punitive surplus. The punitive surplus takes the form of the additional scrutiny, the insistence on complete degradation and duration of punishment that the alleged wrongdoing cannot adequately explain.

That excess is not incidental; it tells us how much more the Black person is made to carry. The excess, the punitive surplus reveals the point at which an individual wrong is no longer treated as an individual wrong but is made to confirm a prior story about Black incapacity or illegitimate Black presence.

This is not an argument that every criticism of Professor Arday was racially motivated. I am making a more precise proposition: once the legitimate grounds for scrutiny have been acknowledged, we must still explain the excess, the punitive surplus. Why this person becomes the singular face of a systemic failure. Why the (alleged) wrongdoing moves beyond the individual and becomes racially representative. Why no degree of punishment appears sufficient to satisfy the crowd.

Reclaiming the Right to Be Human: Excellence without Captivity

The punitive surplus is not always about invented guilt. The demand that guilt must be entirely invented belongs to an older politics in which we believed we had to be impeccable in order to demand fairness and justice. The punitive surplus can operate in response to real, disputed or alleged wrongdoing.

This is why the right to be devastatingly disappointing matters.

My insistence on the right to be devastatingly disappointing, to be less than perfect, is the right to have wrongdoing, even when true, met with a response proportionate to the act. It is the right to due process, correction rather than annihilation, and individual accountability rather than bearing the weight of the racial indictment of an entire group. Above all, it is the right to retain one's humanity after one has ceased to be exemplary.

The right of Black people to be disappointing...is the right to retain one's humanity after one has ceased to be exemplary.

The right to disappoint refuses the idea that excellence is the entrance fee to humanity. It refuses the idea that wrongdoing erases that humanity or that accountability requires spectacle or the surrender of someone’s humanity to the appetites of a crowd.

Black people must remain accountable, and we must also remain human. That means retaining the right to be excellent alongside the right to be devastatingly disappointing without our disappointment being used to decide our humanity or whether anyone else who looks like us deserves to be in the same space.

References

1. "The press wrote 188 articles at Jason Arday in his last nine days alive. Nine days after his death, it had moved on: 10 articles in three days".https://newscord.org/editorials/jason-arday-moved-on. Newscord. August 23 2026. Retrieved August 26, 2026.

2. "George Floyd: What happened in the final moments of his life". BBC News. May 30, 2020. Retrieved August 26, 2026. https://bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52861726?