The Race-Baiting Race Report
It would be slipshod if I did not speak up on this government’s oft-delayed #RaceReport. The Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities published its highly anticipated racial and ethnic disparities report commissioned in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests of June 2020. The 264-page report controversially suggests that institutional racism does not exist in the UK; however, suggests disparities remain at the top of public and private sectors but argues that inequality is due as much to social class as ethnic background.
After enduring (and appreciating) life in Britain for the best part of a century. I have far too many examples of #LivedExperiences that undo this post #InstitutionallyRacist country the government is trying to peddle through this report. However, I am not going to lament the backwards experiences I have had, instead, I am going to talk to our allies to the #BlackCommunity and give them the tools with which to address this major government failing and state-sponsored #GasLighting
Before I go off half-cocked, Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock, a member of the commission, said the report was not denying institutional racism existed but said they had not discovered evidence of it in the areas they had looked.
Then what, pray tell, was the purpose of the report?!
And why is this report getting coverage when other recent reports still need concern and action. The approach to this report is divisive as it shows a complacent attitude to this issue. The conclusion offers a clue to this, noting that in contrast to most Black Lives Matters protesters, the bulk of the commission are from “an older generation whose views were formed by growing up in the 1970s and 1980s”. That could be a key divide: just because there is less overt racism than 40 years ago, should it be viewed as no longer a pressing problem?
So just who’s on the commission? It was chaired by educationalist Tony Sewell, who worked with Johnson at City Hall … and its panel was made up of educator and TV presenter Maggie Aderin-Pocock … Chair of the Youth Justice Board for England and Wales Keith Fraser … former BBC journalist Samir Shah … Judicial Appointments Commission Chair Ajay Kakkar … economist Dambisa Moyo … academies boss Martyn Oliver … school governor Naureen Khalid … businessman Aftab Chughtai … and commentator Mercy Muroki. And on the government side: The commission was set up by №10 policy chief Munira Mirza … and the sponsoring minister was Equalities Minister Kemi Badenoch.
Many of those on the Commission panel, including Tony Sewell, who chaired the report, have an education-focused background. Indeed, the report pointed to the “success of minorities in the education system”, and the British economy should be the “model” for other countries in Europe and the western world.
Notably, author and campaigner Kehinde Andrews wrote that Johnson gave the game away when he declared how proud he was ‘to lead the most ethnically diverse government in the history of this country, with two of the four great offices of state held by a man and a woman of Indian origin’. The problem is that diversity has never been a solution to racism. The British army in colonial India was incredibly diverse, with more troops from India than Britain. That did not prevent the diversity of British troops from committing the Amritsar massacre in 1919. The tiny island of Britain was only able to rule a quarter of the world with the cooperation of countless Black and Brown collaborators. Diversity should never have been the goal and it is being used as a fig leaf by this government to hide their naked racism. The Sewell report is just the latest example of putting a Black face on White racism.
The chair of Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) England has been outspoken joining a number of other high profile business leaders who have also responded to the report’s findings, Adah Parris added: “I am truly saddened, frustrated and angered by Dr Tony Sewell’s ‘findings’ in his report for the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities. His comments in the press, interview on BBC Radio 4, and the media reporting only serve as a trigger that compounds the racial trauma experienced by Black and Indigenous People of Colour (BIPOC). She’s not far wrong.
I mean, how dare they declare in the report that its findings “present a new race agenda for the country”, when it has patently ignored reports that came out last year decrying the inequalities in Britain across all sectors of life, and not just within education? The report’s findings are controversial, given that the results oppose several reports citing evidence of structural inequalities, including the Public Health England review of disparities in the risk and outcomes of Covid (2020), the Lawrence Review (2020), Windrush Lessons Learned Review (2020) and the Joint Committee on Human Rights report on Black people, racism and human rights, published in November 2020.
Even the BMJ has come out on record saying that the 30-page section on health in the report claims to undo several decades of irrefutable peer-reviewed research evidence on ethnic disparities, previous governments’ reports, and independent reviews all reaching similar conclusions: ethnic minorities have the worst health outcomes on almost all health parameters. The report’s conclusions, recommendations, and cherry-picked data to support a particular narrative show why it should have been externally peer-reviewed by independent health experts and scientists. Furthermore, we would expect that a report with such lofty ambitions of presenting a “new race agenda” would have at least one health expert or a biomedical scientist on the commission. It included a space scientist, a retired diplomat, a politics graduate, a TV presenter, and an English literature graduate, but no one with an academic background in health inequalities.
This report is being torn to shreds for the poor way it uses the data-set to make a selective narrative. Whilst this may be the modus operandi for Tories in general, this time they didn’t bank on the entire country paying attention. The BMJ go on to point out the report says that health data are inconsistent and incomplete, but still concludes that life expectancy is improving for ethnic minorities. This is not true. It cites two reports on life expectancy in Scotland where only 3% of UK ethnic minorities live. The Marmot Review in England shows that health inequalities have widened overall, life expectancy has stalled, and the amount of time people spend in poor health has increased over the past decade. The situation is much worse for ethnic minority groups, who have higher rates of deprivation and poorer health outcomes. The report’s data, which shows lower life expectancy in Black and South Asian people compared to people with White ethnicities, does not support its own conclusions.
I am not going to touch on aspects of policing, the criminal justice system or education, because those are headliners elsewhere, most notably in David Lammy’s impassioned speech on LBC. Data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), published last month, showed that the unemployment rate for Black people, at 13.8%, is triple that of White people at 4.5%. TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady said the pandemic had “held up a mirror to the structural racism in our labour market and wider society.” Further “When BME workers have held on to their jobs, we know that they are more likely to be working in low-paid, insecure jobs that put them at greater risk from the virus. This is evidence of the structural discrimination which has led to a disproportionate BME death rate from coronavirus.”
Ultimately structural and institutional racism is defined by how embedded it is in the institutions and structures of British social life. This type of racism significant in creating and maintaining the disparate outcomes that characterise the landscape of racial inequality and is far from absent in the UK. The largest disparate measure can be evidenced through the wealth gap. The Resolution Foundation found that people of Black African ethnicity typically hold the lowest wealth at £24,000 family wealth per adult — less than one-eighth of the typical wealth held by a white British household. That includes their share of any property owned (including property with a mortgage), as well as pensions and savings.
By contrast, someone of white British ethnicity has £197,000 family wealth per adult on average, the report “A Gap Which Won’t Close” found, meaning the gap between the ethnic groups with highest and lowest median household wealth has grown to £173,000. Those of Bangladeshi ethnicity hold £31,000 family wealth per adult on average, whilst those with mixed white and Black Caribbean ethnicity typically hold £41,800, the report added.
The aforementioned Public Health England report published in June last year; Covid-19: Review Of Disparities In Risks And Outcomes, found the increased risk of death involving Covid-19 for people from a Black ethnic background was two times greater for males and 1.4 times greater for females compared with white people.
Finally, if this report didn’t give enough of a slap in the face to people of colour, one section of the report — on teaching about Britain’s colonial past — says this should include material about the Caribbean experience “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”. Is this government trying to repackage slavery in the Caribbean for a holiday brochure? Labour said the government “must urgently explain how they came to publish content that glorifies the slave trade”.
Halima Begum, at the equality thinktank the Runnymede Trust, said: “I’m absolutely flabbergasted to see the slave trade apparently redefined as ‘the Caribbean Experience’, as though it’s something Thomas Cook should be selling — a one-way shackled cruise to purgatory.
“The cultural deafness of this report is only going to become clearer in the coming days and weeks.”
Can you believe that those involved in the report said that they hoped that the data published today would take some of the heat out of the debate on race? Well, they’ve failed on that front, that’s for certain. I’ve come out swinging!
One take-away, I deem mildly positive, the report recommends that the term BAME — “Black, Asian and minority ethnic” — should no longer be used by the Government as the report considers it outdated and failing to distinguish between different groups. If this government’s intention was to quell any feeling of inequality felt by Black and other ethnic people in the UK, then they missed the target. The experience of racism in this country is insidious, surreptitious and this report, whilst being fronted by people of the same hue as me, only serves to show that they wish to remove the box that this country has been forced to tick.
…and even that wasn’t enough.
