Britain never, never, never shall be slaves!
This is what freedom means!
The UK is free of institutional racism
and is a shining model of diversity.
That’s according to a recent report
commissioned by the British government
after last year’s Black Lives Matter protests.
But if this utopia feels unfamiliar to you
as a person of color currently living in Britain,
you are not alone.
The report has caused outrage across the country,
not just among the public but experts and academics too,
with some saying it could endanger people's lives.
All in all, I just thought it was a dreadful document,
potentially very, very dangerous.
UN experts have called it an attempt “to normalize white supremacy.”
It is mind-blowing that a report that was seeking to understand
the nuances and the extent
and the nature of racism in this country
has willfully overlooked it.
So how did the British government get it so wrong?
And has the UK become more or less racist
a year on from the BLM protests
kick-started by the murder of George Floyd?
This government—
who not only has little interest in improving anti-racism in Britain
but actually has actively increased racism in Britain—
is trying to publish something which can justify
the kind of racist policies that it’s been implementing
since it gained power.
Choose your side!
[The Sewell Report]
The Sewell Report, as it became known,
was published by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities [CRED]
in March 2021.
It stated that institutional racism doesn’t exist in the UK’s education,
housing, or health systems
and that people should look to find the positives
in the country’s shameful history with slavery.
The timing wasn't great.
The UK was still struggling to escape a pandemic
in which ethnic minorities were far more likely to die,
become seriously ill,
and lose their jobs than white people.
If you’re a Black male,
you’re up to four times greater risk of death,
and if you’re an Asian male,
you’re up to three times higher risk of death from Covid-19.
It's easy to see why many took the report as an insult.
In truth, though, it seemed doomed from the off.
The British government has already published at least three reviews
in the last four years investigating racial disparities.
People weren’t in the streets after George Floyd’s murder
screaming for more research initiatives.
They wanted action.
F**k the police.
Institutional racism!
One of the things that we’re doing
is putting up this cross-governmental commission
to look into what more can be done.
But when the government said who’d be leading the inquiry,
eyes rolled again.
Heading it up was Boris Johnson's policy adviser, Munira Mirza,
someone who'd previously described institutional racism as a myth
and attacked multiculturalism.
And the chairman who gave the report its name was Dr. Tony Sewell.
He got a lot of stick when the report was published.
Someone on Twitter even compared him to
the Nazi puppet master Joseph Goebbels.
This seems a bit strong.
However, given Sewell had spent a decade
claiming institutional racism doesn’t exist in Britain,
it came as no surprise
the report ended up reaching that same conclusion.
The interesting thing about this report
is that it doesn’t find those disparities landing in racism.
What's even more troubling, though,
is how the findings seem to directly contradict
the experiences of many people
working in health, education, and criminal justice.
It has cherry-picked data.
It has used the data selectively,
in some cases very old data from a decade ago.
Its findings on criminal justice and education
appeared equally flawed.
The report said that racism can’t explain
unequal outcomes in the criminal justice system
because it’s simply due to Black people
living in high levels of poverty or high levels of deprivation.
Even though they found nothing on us,
they still proceeded to search my entire car.
But of course,
Black people living in high levels of poverty and deprivation
is also an example of institutional racism.
So even within their own logic,
they’re explaining away evidence of institutional racism
with other evidence of institutional racism.
The report is unable to fully grasp the extent and nature of,
for example, teachers’ low expectations of some BME communities,
the over-representation of some communities
in terms of school exclusions,
as well as the fact that a number of children of color
simply can go through their education
without seeing themselves represented in the curriculum
and in texts that are read and studied at school.
We’re doing a peaceful protest.
We told everyone, “Just sit down and don’t listen anymore.”
Like, we had enough. We need a change.
Maybe what’s most jarring
is that the report doesn’t just deny Britain has a racism problem—
it actually blames people of color for creating tension in society
by seeing racism when apparently it isn’t there at all.
It also seems to try to play different ethnic minority groups
off against each other.
It was extremely unfortunate and dangerous
that the report seemed to pit groups against each other.
For example, saying things like
some BME communities are performing better than other BME communities,
therefore making a kind of false leap
that therefore racism is not a factor.
Another issue it did was pit race against class
when we know that these are two concepts and ideas
that are intimately entwined.
Some critics of the report have called it
an attempt to “gaslight” ethnic minority communities
living in Britain today,
given how far away from their experiences it is.
Others believe there’s a simple explanation for this:
that the government never truly wanted to reflect
the everyday experiences of those people at all.
The conclusions that they have reached
looks like they were predetermined
and they were trying to look for any evidence
in order to support those conclusions.
Something to be really clear about with this, the CRED report,
is that it had a very clear ideological intent.
It wasn’t interested in the research evidence,
in the academic base of research that exists on educational inequalities
and inequalities in other sectors.
So reading the report, you really see how it had nothing to do with
a thorough, rigorous, and fair review of evidence.
The question is:
when you have angry, emotional people in the streets,
protesting against racist killings,
why would a government bother to do this?
I saw it very much as a document
which was to placate particular constituencies
which are precious and close to the current government.
And what it gives is the message that,
as this government is failing
to deliver tangibles to its core voter sets,
what is being prepared is some sort of payoff
in terms of the culture wars,
in terms of what it means to be British, particularly white British.
You know, the hypocrisy of it,
when nobody here is here to cause trouble.
We’re just here to make sure our history...
and all of Europe’s history is preserved.
“Institutional racism” is a phrase that can be traced back to
a speech by the US civil rights activist Stokely Carmichael
in the 1960s.
A policeman in a Black community is a licensed killer.
Is a licensed killer.
A Black man attacking a policeman is a rioter.
Yeah.
That’s because the Black man don’t have the license to kill.
But in Britain, certain politicians, activists, and commentators
have been working to discredit the idea ever since 1999.
That was the year the Macpherson Report came out,
another government race inquiry,
this time looking into how the Metropolitan Police
handled the murder of Stephen Lawrence.
At the heart of this inquiry
is the allegation from the Lawrences and their lawyers
that racism permeated the police investigation into Stephen’s death
and permeates the society in which it happened.
In 1993, a Black British teenager from London
was stabbed to death in the streets by a gang of white racists
as he waited for the bus.
Unlike the Sewell Report,
the Macpherson Report did find evidence of institutional racism.
Macpherson and his team say racism was the cause—
the pernicious racism,
which was more a state of mind among the officers involved
than overt racial hatred.
It said this had affected the way
the Met handled the murder investigation from start to finish.
I don’t see how
the Metropolitan Police is going to move on from today.
Without admitting to what has been going on,
there is no way they can move forward.
From the moment the police had arrived on scene
and didn’t administer first aid or pursue the assailants,
to the investigation they launched into Lawrence and his family,
the victims of a brutal racist murder
still sending shockwaves through the UK today.
Many of those who condemned the Sewell Report
see it as a shameless attempt
to shut down the conversation around institutional racism
and roll back the progress made in the wake of Lawrence’s murder.
In this sense, I think what the report has done
a great disservice to the kind of conversations about race and racism
that are urgently needed in this country.
But the dangers of the Sewell Report
go beyond encouraging nasty old racists to lash out at people online.
If a report ignores the real root causes
of why minorities suffer more in British society
than the white majority,
it’s going to give the UK government flawed advice.
And if you’re in charge of deciding a country’s education,
crime or health policy,
that flawed advice you’re basing it on
is going to start seriously messing with people’s lives.
That is why many health experts, including ourselves,
have said that it will worsen health inequalities
and it will put many ethnic minority lives at risk.
In Britain, institutional racism is real.
And it has consequences for real people.
[Black Lives Still Matter]