In Politics and the English Language, George Orwell famously made the case for clear, simple and functional prose in public writing instead of “pretentious diction” and “meaningless words”. That meant abandoning all unnecessary or overly complicated words, and especially jargon where plain English will do.

In this vein, a common line of attack against academics — especially those in the humanities and social sciences — is that they intentionally use incomprehensible language. They use convoluted phrasing which alienates and bamboozles the average reader to signal how supposedly clever and sophisticated they are; but, really, all they are doing is trying to obscure the hollowness of the ideas they are talking about.

An unexpected defender of such a critique last week was the academic Kehinde Andrews, Britain’s first Black Studies professor. At the Hay Festival, he echoed Orwell’s position, lambasting academic writing as a “con” and calling on his colleagues to ditch the opaque lingo and make it simple. His benchmark was that if you can’t translate your ideas in a way even a seven-year-old could understand, then you’re failing.

As a university dropout, I have an instinctive sympathy with his argument. Much of my experience with academic writing is that rather than inspiring me and igniting curiosity, its pretension and overly complicated jargon put me off. It felt exclusionary rather than inclusive. It also reminded me of the truth — which Orwell didn’t quite express — that there are some ideas so stupid only intellectuals could believe them. At the same time, while we do need to be wary of pretentiousness, it shouldn’t mean regressing to the other extreme of philistinism. Some scholarship requires more technical language. You can’t explain everything adequately to a seven-year-old. The call to “make it plain” can quickly slide into dumbing down, which is infantilising and condescending.

But there is a distinct irony in Andrews making this point. The academic and his co-thinkers have been a huge part of the problem he’s now criticising. His own writings on race have achieved zilch in enlightening the public or creating a fairer world. At best, they have contributed considerably to the culture war outrage industry. His reputation has been made mainly as a talking head brought onto shows such as Piers Morgan Uncensored and Good Morning Britain to debate the latest non-story that reveals Britain to be the most racist society on Earth. His “role” is to be the angry black radical and get Middle England riled up by how this “woke” academic is defaming “our” history and identity, and thus the cycle goes on.

Andrews, in fairness, isn’t as opaque in his style as some of his fellow race scholars. But catchphrases like “psychosis of whiteness” and “white privilege” — not to mention peppering his books with “colonial logic” and “the ladder of white supremacy” — can be alienating to the uninitiated general reader, as they are part of an approved terminology.

Andrews is a less distinguished imitator, or epigone, of Malcolm X, who he takes as his model for “making it plain”. Malcom X, like him or loathe him, was a great orator who could make himself understood to a working-class audience.

Andrews’s primary audience, in contrast, is basically people like him: activists, academics, intellectuals and those whom the writer Musa Al-Gharbi calls “symbolic capitalists”. These are people whose wealth and status derives from their manipulation of symbols, such as language, ideas and data — in contrast to capitalists who produce physical things. This is how a “radical” like Andrews can accept an invitation from Deloitte to promote his book — before it was cancelled by online uproar — but not have much purchase among the working class and other “marginalised” people he wishes to empower.

The “anti-racist” academic Left of which Andrews is a part has started to realise that its langue du bois (or “wooden language” to you and me) is offputting to most people, including many who may be curious, even sympathetic, to the issues they discuss. People are now fatigued with the culture war landscape those academics helped make inescapable. But like the concessions made to the common man in prominent progressive journalist Ash Sarkar’s new book, it is too little, too late.

Left-wingers who used overcomplicated language to make race their defining issue are only now realising their tactics were all wrong. While highfalutin concepts may win you status in the right circles, they don’t win hearts and minds.

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Ralph Leonard is a British-Nigerian writer on international politics, religion, culture and humanism.

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