Professor of Anthropology and Cultural Studies, University of Sussex
Professor Emerita of Violence Against Women Studies, University of Bristol
The widely contested report has caused outrage across the UK. But is it inaccurate?
Confusion and outrage greeted the UK government’s Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities report. As opponents grapple with some of the more alarming findings, such as its assertion that there is little evidence of institutional racism in the UK, critiques and questions about the validity of its claims have begun to circulate widely on social media.
So, what does the report get wrong about racism in the UK, and does it get anything right?
The main arguments
From start to finish, the race commission puts huge emphasis on the “agency” of people from racial and ethnic minority groups, explaining away racial inequalities based on the choices of certain groups, or in favour of other social factors like class.
Despite the findings of other reports, it suggests that hate crime isn’t worsening but that perceptions of an increase have been influenced by internet trolling. It claims that the term “BAME” should be abandoned because it obscures specific issues among different groups; and that structural racism in work, education and elsewhere is hard to prove.
This finding on structural racism runs contrary to earlier findings such as the 1999 Macpherson inquiry report into the murder of Stephen Lawrence and other more recent evidence that is yet to be adequately addressed.
Perhaps the most blatant issue is the report’s reliance on tactics that the government appears to have employed time and again: using Black and Asian representatives to minimise the credibility of racism in its many forms.
The commission was handpicked by Munira Mirza, the director of the Number 10 Policy Unit, who has been said to dismiss institutional racism as “a perception more than a reality”.
The commission’s chair, Tony Sewell, has previously dismissed the existence of systemic racism. Co-author Samir Shah has expressed similar views, and so has Mercy Muroki. Another member, Dambisa Moyo, is in favour of ending foreign aid to Africa because it creates a dependency culture. And Kemi Badenoch, the minister for equalities that the commission directly reports to, has also previously denied the existence of systemic racism. It is of little surprise then than institutional racism has been dismissed in the evaluation of the commission’s findings.
A selective view
Certain racial and ethnic groups have become wealthier in the UK in recent decades, and the commission is right to highlight that. Calls to prioritise social class are also important. But while the report appears to back an approach that looks at how class, race, gender and other social identities overlap, it stops short of accounting for how race intersects with gender, sexuality and disability.
Singling out white underachievement in education throughout the report is striking. Yet it doesn’t account for what happens afterwards in terms of employment and increasing wealth (long-term outcomes tend to be better for white graduates, for example).
Pitting white underachievement against outcomes for ethnic minority groups also echoes arguments often touted by the extreme right. Race equality think tank, the Runnymede Trust, describes this as playing “into cultural readings of inequality, which pitch [white people’s] interests squarely against those of ethnic minorities, and simultaneously allows middle class commentators to blame the ‘underclass’ for their own misfortunes”.
Continue reading: Race commission report: the rights and wrongs
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