José Tiago de Sousa is an economist, a PhD candidate in Climate Change and Sustainable Development Policies at NOVA FCT—in partnership with the University of Lisbon’s Institute of Social Sciences—and an ESG strategist. Hailing from Mindelo (Vila do Conde), he holds a Bachelor’s in Economics and a Master’s in Finance from the University of Porto’s Faculty of Economics (FEP). He has twice received the U.Porto Volunteer Award (2017/2018 and 2018/2019) and was honoured with the Active Citizenship Award in its humanitarian category, presented by the then-President, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa. He founded the association Solidarity Soul, took part in European Solidarity Corps humanitarian missions in Italy, Poland, and Turkey, and contributed to European projects on sustainability and gender equality. He has worked as a Senior Specialist in Social Responsibility and Sustainability at FEP and, among others, as ESG Officer at TLG Global.
In the opinion piece that follows, Tiago argues that ESG governance will only earn its credibility when it dares to confront the biases embedded in its own metrics. Using the Jason Arday case as a lens, he puts the “S” and the “G” through a radical stress test—exposing how Western notions of “rigor” often serve as armour for the status quo, wounding those who were never meant to fit the mould.
Jason Arday and the NeuroRacism – The ESG Perspective (Opinion by José Tiago Sousa)
Yes, he broke the rules. But… who wrote those rules, and for whose benefit?
I have watched the Jason Arday affair unfold not as a distant scandal, but as a profound stress test for everything we claim to believe about diversity, governance, and justice. We cannot afford to look away, and we certainly cannot afford to pick a single, comfortable side.
Let me start by being brutally honest: from a governance perspective—the “G” in our beloved ESG scorecards—Jason Arday failed. The inconsistencies in his curriculum vitae, the unattributed passages in his thesis, the embellished biographical details that crumbled under scrutiny; these are material facts. In any robust compliance framework, these errors trigger red flags. Accountability is not optional, and transparency is non-negotiable if we are to maintain the trust of our stakeholders—our students, our peers, and the public who funds our intellectual pursuit. To deny this would be to engage in the very greenwashing of merit that we claim to despise. Arday stumbled, and that stumble must be acknowledged. But here is where my anguish truly begins, because acknowledging that failure does not require us to ignore the scaffolding upon which that failure was judged. The moral framework we use to measure precision, accuracy, and even honesty was not forged in a vacuum; it was forged in the crucible of whiteness. The Cartesian, hyper-rigid paradigm that dominates Western academia is a colonial inheritance, designed to catalogue, categorize, and ultimately control. It demands a purity of performance that historically has been used as a barrier to exclude Black and neurodivergent bodies.
When we apply this ruler to Arday, we are applying a benchmark that was never calibrated to measure someone who learned to read at eighteen, who communicated non-verbally until eleven, who navigated the world through the lens of autism…
And yet, the smoke of his missteps does not justify the fire that raged around him. This brings me to the point that keeps me awake at night: the accusations, however substantiated in parts, were weaponized with a purity of racist intent that is impossible to ignore. Look at the provenance of the primary accuser, Nathan Cofnas—a figure who has openly aligned himself with race realism, a pseudoscientific ideology that posits the biological inferiority of Black people. When such a figure trains his microscope on a young Black scholar, he is not conducting a dispassionate audit; he is hunting.
He is using precision as a baton to beat back a body he believes does not belong in the temple of Cambridge. The allegation had factual grounds, yes, but the campaign—the intensity, the relish, the public flaying—was fueled by something far darker than academic integrity.
This is where we must confront the ugly truth that precision is deeply, irrevocably identified with whiteness. When a white academic inflates a biography or commits a citation error, the market typically treats it as a forgivable lapse—a “youthful mistake” or a “minor oversight.” It is a low-risk blip on the governance radar. But when the body is Black, young, and neurodivergent, the same transgression becomes a material risk of catastrophic proportion, justifying endless column inches and a global pile-on. The standard of “precision” is applied asymmetrically; it is a gatekeeping mechanism, not a universal virtue. We are witnessing the grotesque spectacle of the meritocracy myth being used to dismantle the very diversity it was supposed to foster.
Which brings me, inevitably, to the heart of the matter: intersectionality. We cannot evaluate Arday as a monolithic entity. He is a convergence of marginalized identities that the system has refused to accommodate. He is young, entering a space that venerates tenure and grey hair. He is Black, entering a space that criminalizes his presence. And he is autistic, entering a space that demands neurotypical social navigation and linear self-presentation. Where were the reasonable adjustments? Where was the psychological safety? The “S” in ESG demands that we care for our human capital, that we provide scaffolds for neurodivergent talent to thrive. Instead, we offered Arday a stage, watched him perform, and then handed him a sword to fall on when he missed a step. The damage inflicted on his mental health, and the chilling effect this will have on future Black and autistic scholars, represents a far greater liability to the academy than any CV embellishment ever could.
So, what do we do with this messy, painful reality? We must demand a just transition. We need to separate the wheat from the chaff—correcting genuine compliance failures without indulging in the racist theatre that has surrounded them. We must build new benchmarks that value atypical trajectories, that acknowledge the resilience required to simply survive in hostile environments. We need a governance model that is strict on harm, but compassionate on context. Jason Arday paid a steep price, and he paid it on a scaffold built by whiteness. As I reflect on his resignation, I feel a profound sense of loss—not just for his career, but for the opportunity we squandered to model what true intersectional leadership looks like. Empathy is not a soft cost; it is an impact investment in the sustainability of our collective intellectual future. Let us honor this moment not by gloating or grieving blindly, but by recalibrating our social scorecards. The “S” in ESG will only ever be credible when it is willing to look squarely at the color of its own biases and find the courage to change them. That is the accountability we truly owe.
