Earlier this week, the government published a new report into racial disparities in the UK. The report was commissioned by Downing Street in the midst of the Black Lives Matter movement, growing racial tensions, and increased awareness about the persistence of systemic and institutional racism as a significant social issue. But yet it seems to downplay these issues at every turn, instead laying the blame at the door of culture and individual agency, not structural factors.
The report states, for example, that the system is not "deliberately rigged against ethnic minorities" and that our education system "should be regarded as a model for other White-majority countries".
That same education system recorded more than 60,000 racist incidents in the last five years, excludes Black Caribbean students at five times the rate of those who are White in some areas, and just this week led to protests by students at Pimlico Academy over the banning of afro hair and colourful hijabs. And yet the report lauds it as some great success story, which provides more equal opportunities for all than ever before.
The report even manages to put a positive spin on colonialism, suggesting it should be taught in schools in a way “which speaks to the slave period not only being about profit and suffering, but how culturally African people transformed themselves into a remodelled African/Britain”. What is the point of an 'inclusive' curriculum if it only serves to keep justifying past British imperialism, which exploited and devastated peoples across the world? The issue is left begging.
The crime and policing section of the report reads equally poorly - despite substantial evidence of racial disparity in the criminal justice system, with Black people in particular more likely to be stopped and searched, arrested, and sentenced to prison than White people, the report hardly touches on this, instead focusing only on a narrow area of policing. It broadly supports stop and search powers, with only a few tweaks, like wearing bodycams, apparently needed to eradicate any persisting issues - that's it. Nothing about the Met Police, for example, who were described recently by former officer Leroy Logan as "still institutionally racist", twenty years after the Macpherson report found exactly that, and certainly nothing about why people of colour are killed by police at disproportionate rates.
It is also particularly critical of the Black Lives Matter movement, who it suggests promote "pessimistic narratives about race" that "claims nothing has changed for the better", and will end up alienating the "decent centre ground". Why ever would us "well-intentioned young people" be pessimistic about racial equality when we read the stories of people like Jimmy Mubenga, Sarah Reed, Trevor Smith and all too many more? Things may have got better - but that doesn't mean the problem no longer exists, not when the same issues that plagued us twenty or more years ago are still an issue today. As for the "decent centre ground" that we are supposedly alienating - if they cannot see how unjust the deaths of the names listed above are, then perhaps the label "decent" is wrongly applied.
One of the few reasonable claims the report makes is about the term 'BAME' (Black and minority ethnic), which they rightly suggest should be scrapped. It is often used to lump all minorities together to make a sort of White/BAME dichotomy, conflating the diverse experiences of different ethnic minorities as universal - which it absolutely isn't. An East Asian person in Britain's experience of racism is very different to a Black person's, or a South Asian's, or a Romani Gypsy's, and so on. But, as Dr Halima Begum (chief executive of the Runnymede Trust) points out, "if the best this government can do is come up with a style guide on BAME terminology...then I'm afraid this government doesn't carry the confidence of Black and ethnic minority communities any longer, certainly not on race."
The overarching issue with this report is where it lays the blame for the disparities it outlines. Instead of properly analysing institutional racism, it dismisses the term as "sometimes wrongly applied", and "sort of a catch-all phrase for micro-aggressions or acts of racial abuse", instead describing the factors of "geography, family influence, socio-economic background, culture and religion" as more important in determining life outcomes. Aside from the obvious point that socio-economic background (and arguably geography) are directly impacted by ethnicity, which the report fails to acknowledge, blaming disparate outcomes on family, culture, and religion sets a dangerous precedent, and one which has been pushed by the right for decades. Thatcher herself famously stated in 1978 that "people are really rather afraid that this country might be swamped by people with a different culture".
The suggestion that culture, or even worse individual choice (the report calls for more focus on "the extent individuals and their communities could help themselves through their own agency"), is to blame for racial disparities in crime, education, employment and elsewhere in society is an incredibly harmful myth, pushed by the right, which has slowed progress for years. Professor Kehinde Andrews (Birmingham City University) describes the report as:
"Complete nonsense. It goes in the face of all the actual existing evidence. This is not a genuine effort to understand racism in Britain. This is a PR move to pretend the problem doesn't exist."
I, along with many others, am severely disappointed by the findings of this report, which was a real opportunity to highlight how far we still have to go in achieving a racially and ethnically equal society. Instead, in the words of Dr Halima Begum, we got "a whitewash and a script that has been written to 10 Downing Street" - a pat on the back for the government, giving them the green light to continue ignoring the problem of systemic racism, making only the occasional token gesture to quell concerns when they do flare up.
One thing is clear - when our government fails to even acknowledge the extent of the problem, as with climate change, misogyny, and now institutional racism, it falls to us to fight for change. And fight we must.
i like how i'd just called out the model minority myth two days ago and that's exactly what they used to prove systemic racism doesn't exist