From the New York Times op-ed page:
Originally entitled “The Racist Tinge to These A.I. Scandals”
Oct. 11, 2026
By Doyle D. Calhoun
Mr. Calhoun is an assistant professor at the University of Cambridge.
I hear there is an opening for a full professor at Cambridge. But Assistant Professor Calhoun is white, so good luck with that. Especially because his specialty is black literature.
The novel “C’était Ça ou Mourir” (“It Was Either That or Die”), by the Haitian Canadian writer Thélyson Orélien, was meant to be a standout of the French literary season. Instead, it became a fiasco that has unleashed some of the worst elements of French political hypocrisy and racism, all over questions that have exercised the publishing world in recent years: What to do about writers who use artificial intelligence? How much is too much? And can we even tell for sure?
But another story is emerging here: The five literary scandals around A.I. that I consider most significant this year have all focused on Black and brown writers.
As I wrote in my September 27, 2026 post:
Another Black Writer Caught Cheating
Lately, a lot of black professional intellectuals tend to get caught plagiarizing and/or using artificial intelligence to write works that come out under their names: Jason Arday, Claudine Gay, Kerri K. Greenidge, novelists Jerry Falade, Mia Ballard, and HM Wolfe, and so forth.
One popular theory is that all these blacks getting caught at cheating their way into highbrow positions must be due to a vast white racist conspiracy to hunt them down. …
On the other hand, Occam’s Razor suggests that the previously popular dogma during the DEI Era that there must be countless underemployed black geniuses ready to step into prestigious positions (especially in the publishing industry) turned out to be … just not true.
There really weren’t lying on the sidewalk million dollar black Bills (and Jasons and Jerrys and Kerris and Claudines) ready to be picked up by institutions that finally had gotten over their white supremacist prejudices. In reality, blacks have enjoyed affirmative action for a couple of generations now, so society was already scraping the bottom of the black barrel before DEI demanded, in effect, that we scrape right through the bottom of the barrel and into the ground underneath.
Now, in the New York Times news section, yet another black-intellectual-caught-cheating: … Thélyson Orélien
But it couldn’t possibly be that the pessimistic race realist forecast has turned out to be empirically vindicated while the optimistic race fantasist assumption has suffered humiliating reversals. No! There must instead be a giant white racist conspiracy that keeps catching prize-winning black authors plagiarizing and using A.I. Thus, Professor Calhoun conspiracy-theorizes:
So why the attention on this novel and this writer? It seems driven less by questions of technical (or technological) literary merit than by the workings of anti-woke vigilante activists claiming to defend the purity of literature.
None of this absolves an author of allegations of plagiarism (and I agree that A.I.-generated writing is a form of plagiarism that undermines the very value of literary creation). The accusations against Mr. Orélien are considerable and alarming. But they have been leveled by groups with clear political agendas. …
This is a familiar playbook. Reporting in France and Canada has pointed to similarities between the denunciation of Mr. Orélien and other attacks on Black intellectuals, in particular the Cambridge sociologist Jason Arday, who was found dead at his home this past summer shortly after resigning amid reports and mounting evidence that he had plagiarized and fabricated parts of his life story. In Mr. Arday’s case, a “race science network” linked to the right-wing Cambridge professor James Orr and the conservative billionaire Peter Thiel used their connections to fuel the media campaign against him.
… Unmasking Black writers will cease to be a blood sport only when it fails to find so many spectators.
Or when fewer black writers cheat.
But, we can hardly ask them to do that!
So, not surprisingly, today in The Atlantic:
Paywall here.
