It’s official! According to the government’s report on racism in modern Britain, it hardly exists, is mostly imagined and Britain is a beacon for racial harmony setting the standards for other countries to follow. This article is not an April Fool’s joke. It is all in the government’s ‘Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities (March 2021). Championed by a handpicked panel of Black and Asian contributors, but when you look deeper into the findings you will find the report itself is dangerously racist.
The government’s report into racial equality ‘Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities (March 2021) will have surprised many people from all BAME communities. Chaired by Dr Tony Sewell, a British educational consultant.
According to the report, “Put simply we no longer see a Britain where the system is deliberately rigged against ethnic minorities. The impediments and disparities do exist, they are varied, and ironically very few of them are directly to do with racism. Too often ‘racism’ is the catch-all explanation, and can be
simply implicitly accepted rather than explicitly examined.” (p.9)
It continues, “The evidence shows that geography, family influence, socio-economic background, culture and religion have more significant impact on life chances than the existence of racism. That said, we
take the reality of racism seriously and we do not deny that it is a real force in the UK.” (p.9)
The report mentions that people from BAME backgrounds now occupy senior positions in government, in law and in medicine. (p.9) From this perspective Britain is perceived as a more racially tolerant and inclusive society than it has been in the past.
Educational failures, specifically amongst the Afro-Caribbean community is down to “…different experiences of family life and structure…” (p.12)
People from BAME communities are actually “…do better overall than the White population and actually have better outcomes for many of the 25 leading causes of death.” (p.12) So in effect there racial disparities in the NHS is not as stark as previous reports have stated.
THE CORPORATISATION OF RACE RELATIONS
Regular readers will already know that I am very sceptical of the modern race relations industry, because it has become an actual capitalist industry without an emphasis on addressing modern European imperialism in Africa and other parts of the non European world (See Uncritical Race Theory & The Corporate Commodification of the Black Civil Rights Movement). It is interesting that the report takes its definition of institutional racism the late from Sir William Macpherson, a British High Court Judge, who attended the fee paying, Summer Fields preparatory Boys School in Oxford (Summer Fields School), and a member of the Inner Temple, a professional association of barristers and judges in London whose name derives from the Knights Templar and goes as far back as 1388. (Inner Temple) I wonder what this man had in common with the communities that he spoke about?
Macpherson’s definition of institutional racism is:
“The collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate
and professional service to people because of their colour, culture,
or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes
and behaviour which amount to discrimination through unwitting
prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping
which disadvantage minority ethnic people.” (Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities: The Report: p.35)
I believe this definition is very revealing because it deals with organisations and institutions rather than individual behaviour. It reads more like a company code of conduct rather than seeking to change people’s behaviour and attitudes on an individual level, something that would really tackle racism in society.
Recommendation 13 of the commission’s report states, ‘Build social and cultural capital – enrichment for all” (P.21)
This is not the language of racial equality, it is the language that you can hear in corporate boardrooms and marketing seminars. Corporate led race relations focuses on numerical representation rather than general racial equality. The emphasis is on high-flying, ambitious and career-minded individuals from the BAME community. There is no interest in equality for all, the only interest it seeks is numerical equality in the boardroom. So if you have a good number of people from BAME backgrounds in top positions this is racial equality. Most people would agree that that is nonsense, but this is actually what is being sold by this report.
IDENTIFYING THE RACISM IN THE REPORT
When I was studying in higher education I took a course in Feminist Studies, and my female lecturer taught me to spot gender bias with a very simple but highly effective technique of detection. She said that when I/men read a magazine, newspaper or digest the news on television change the term she to he and see how the narrative and language is very different when it comes to women. This way of thinking changed my perception forever of how I digested media information and I have adapted this to race with very interesting results.
Consider the below statement from the commission:
“Racism is both real and socially constructed. Society has ‘defined racism down’ to encompass
attitudes and behaviours that would not have been considered racist in the past. This is one
reason for the rising sensitivity, the language of microaggressions and safety, and stretching the
meaning of racism without objective data to support it.” (p.46)
Now let us change the term racism to sexism:
“Sexism is both real and socially constructed. Society has ‘defined sexism down’ to encompass
attitudes and behaviours that would not have been considered sexist in the past. This is one
reason for the rising sensitivity, the language of microaggressions and safety, and stretching the
meaning of sexism without objective data to support it.”
Can you imagine the furore if the commision’s statement was referring to violence against women?
Let’s take another example:
“Antisemitism is both real and socially constructed. Society has ‘defined antisemitism down’ to encompass
attitudes and behaviours that would not have been considered antisemitic in the past. This is one
reason for the rising sensitivity, the language of microaggressions and safety, and stretching the
meaning of antisemitism without objective data to support it.”
I hope that you now see my point, when viewed through the lens of other groups in society the statement is very offensive.
If genuine racial equality is to be pursued in this country and elsewhere it cannot be driven by a corporate agenda and it most certainly cannot be championed by the present so called BAME leaders that we have in our communities whose pursuit of their own career ambitions has distored and perverted the real aims that all BAME communities should strive for.
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For further research:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_Fields_School
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inner_Temple
