This morning I woke up thinking about Unilever.
It’s hard to focus on structures right now. The heartbreak of Jason Arday – who was hounded by the right - is overwhelming.
The narcissism of Nathan Cofnas, the academic who prompted the witch-hunt against him. His response to Jason Arday’s moving vigil in London, was to re-characterise it as an ‘anti-Cofnas hate rally’.
Cofnas said he would possibly “be murdered” if he attended Trafalgar Square last night. There were no reports of violence or threats to kill. Could it be that someone whose so-called ‘scholarship’ essentialises race, had adopted racial stereotypes about the threatening nature of black people?
But this is when the structures of racism really matter.
We Need To Talk About Nathan Cofnas
There are plenty of fringe, narcissistic, racists on the internet. What makes Nathan Cofnas different is that he has been supported by no less high profile institutions than the University of Oxford, where he did his DPhil at Balliol College, the University of Cambridge, where he was a member of the Faculty of Philosophy, and Emmanuel College, where he was a College Research Associate, until his removal in 2024.
During this period, Cofnas had the support of the Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. - the foundation created from the wealth of William Lever, who founded the company that became Unilever.
By the time Cofnas received this fellowship, his views were already well-known.
For example in 2019 he published “Research on group differences in intelligence: A defense of free inquiry” in the journal of Philosophical Pyschology
To explain Cofnas’s views, a bit of background.
During the eighteenth century, ‘scientists’ attempted to rank racial groups according to their supposed intelligence, using metrics like skull shape and measurement, and racist assumptions about their evolution.
Developments in genetics and other fields of biological inquiry later proved that there is in fact no such thing as biological race. There is more genetic variation within so-called ‘racial groups’, than there is between them. Pseudo-scientific racism was discredited, not because of ‘wokeness’, but because of actual science.
The first thing about Cofnas is that he joined a small but motivated group of people in academia who want to prove that there are in fact race differences in traits like intelligence. This group point to studies of hereditability, which examine adopted children and twins for example, and claim to show that not all differences in intelligence are due to environmental factors. Some differences - Cofnas argues -such as the so-called ‘Black-White IQ gap’, could have a genetic cause.
The second thing about Cofnas, which comes across equally clearly in his work, is his sense of victimhood and – ironically – oppression. He is angry more of his colleagues are not validating this line of inquiry. Scientists, he alleges, “claim to be absolutely committed to truth while at the same time advocating or tolerating varying degrees of suppression of controversial work.” They are suppressing that work because they too scared to research it, for fear of furthering racist agendas.
Emmanuel College eventually took disciplinary action against Cofnas. It found that his work was written in a “careless” and “reckless” manner, adopting a “confrontational and aggressive” tone. He sued the college in the Peterboroguh County Court, and lost.
He was also subject to separate disciplinary proceedings by the University, which found that his work was widely regarded as offensive but was protected by its regulations protecting free speech.
None of that changed Cofnas’ narrative of oppression. But like so many ‘victims of cancel-culture’, the reality is that he has had a surprising degree of support.
And even then, Leverhulme Trust stands out.
Unilever
The link between Cofnas and Leverhulme was brought to my attention by the investigative journalist alimcforever – who publishes accessible, evidence-led explainers on power and history and shared a detail Instagram reel about this earlier this week.
William Lever was the archetypical British colonial. Born in Bolton, he began manufacturing soap in the 1880’s and by the time of his death in 1930, had built the company that would become Unilever into the largest company in Britain.
Soap had been revolutionised by a chemical discovery which used a base of palm kernel oil in its manufacturing. Africa had already long been a source of palm oil for Europe – during previous centuries it had been brought to Africas coasts by African traders who had prepared palm oil and kernels, and then sold it onwards to European merchants, who would ship it to the major centers for processing and manufacturing; Liverpool in England and Hamburg in Germany.
But Lever revolutionised the process. By extracting special privileges from Britain’s Colonial Office, he beat his rivals and competitors by setting up production plants at the source of palm oil, in African countries like Congo - where a handful of industrialists who controlled an area larger than the entire size of Belgium - Sierra Leone and Liberia.
Lever relied on land theft, coerced labor, and a monopoly enforced by the colonial regime to grow his profits, subjecting Africans to notoriously squalid conditions. The details make for horrific reading. But to Lever they made perfect sense, given his racial world-view: that “it would serve no useful purpose… for the white man to go and reverse the Divide Order under which intellect and mental power” ruled over “inferior nations”.
Journalists continue to report on how the political, economic, social, cultural and ecological impact of regimes like Lever’s have remained without repair, and continue to cause harm. Violence, kidnapping and looting continue to be alleged as a result of company practices and local authorities in Congo to this day. Historians often narrate the roots of this suffering, in the intimate relationship between capitalism, colonialism and racism.
But I would add to that list, philanthropy. History’s most nefarious wrongdoers have funnelled parts of their fortune into trusts, which help launder their founder’s reputations and continue, in usually subtler ways, to advance a particular agenda today. And that agenda is often most visible in academia.
The Sacklers, who made their fortune from manufacturing and aggressively marketing addictive painkillers that helped create America’s opioid crisis, are a good example. Their philanthropic foundation funded a mulitutude of activity at Oxford; two galleries at the Ashmolean Museum, a university library, and several staff positions. Oxford cut ties with the family in 2023.
The Rhodes Scholarship, funded by the racist colonialist and exploitative diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes, continues to bear his name today.
And Jeffrey Epstein, the paedophile financier, convicted sex offender and all-round monster, used philanthropic donations to buy social legitimacy and fund research in evolutionary biology, artificial intelligence, and physics. He was particularly interested, like Cofnas, in biological race. He wanted to start a ‘super race’ of humans impregnating multiple women with his DNA, and funded the evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers who was conducting genetic research on elite Jamaican sprinters.
I called the Leverlhulme Trust this morning, and was surprised that this was, apparently, the first inquiry they had had about Nathan Cofnas. I asked why they were enabling research into biological race difference, and how that aligned with their values as a Trust founded by someone whose ideas were disturbingly aligned with Cofnas.
There is a terrifying circularity to this story. Cofnas, helped by funding from a Trust whose founder believed in the inferiority of black people, uses the language of modern day ‘science’ and ‘wokeness’ to advance his theory about the inferiority of black people.
Lever, whose exploits caused intergenerational violence against black bodies, created a legacy that helped Cofnas, campaign against the late Professor Ardy. Whatever the specific causation, we can all see that this campaign has had fatal consequences.
The irony is that Cofnas presents himself as someone attempting to save academia from taking a dangerous turn. But it’s his voice, exponentially amplified by the right-wing media in its witch hunt of the late Professor Arday, which is sinister.
When Cambridge held disciplinary hearings into Cofnas, he was supported by Steven Pinker, the Harvard professor whose work also attempts to rehabilitate previously discredited models of a biologically determined racial hierarchy.
Pinker wasted no time this week attempting to leverage the tragic death of Jason Arday to sell copies of his own recent book.
We live in a world where old school racist colonials, have been replaced by tech bros, populist leaders and eugenicists whose wealth would make even William Lever blush. That the ‘academics’ these groups fund are holding themselves out as victims is probably the least harmful of their extreme ideas. This week has been a warning of their power, the willingness with which the media will disseminate their ideas, and the structures, with pockets are ancient ideologies, that support them.
Afua, you don’t say how Leverhulme responded to your phone call? I’d be so interested to know what their position was (if anything?). Thank you
Yes the link between pillage and abuse with philanthropy is a strong one. Thank you.