I'm having a read of the report and making comments as I go.
For bios of the Commissioners these two articles are helpful: This one from the
Independent is from yesterday though only covers 4 of the commissioners, and this is from the
BBC last year when the commission was first announced. As has been widely noted, the Chair has spoken of his belief that institutional racism is overstated. His piece in
Prospect Magazine in 2010 states that "Much of the supposed evidence of institutional racism is flimsy."
Of course, everyone has biases and it's better to be aware of them than pretend impartiality when it doesn't exist. However, if you're asking people to write a report on whether there's still institutional racism then picking people who don't believe there is before they've even looked at the evidence isn't exactly inspiring confidence in their ability to identify ongoing institutional racism.
Forward from the Chair (p6-8)
The word mistrust was repeated often as some witnesses from the police service, mental health, education and health services felt that the system was not on their side. Once we interrogated the data we did find some evidence of biases, but often it was a perception that the wider society could not be trusted. For some groups historic experience of racism still haunts the present and there was a reluctance to acknowledge that the UK had become open and fairer.
I can't help but read this as "it's your own fault for thinking there's still racism".
The data also revealed many instances of success among minority communities. These have often been ignored or have been seen to be of little interest (to the media). But we wanted to understand the reasons for the success and whether there were any lessons to be drawn.
Successes are important, but this feels like an attempt to diminish any problems - individuals can succeed so if you don't it's because you didn't try hard enough and you're just blaming your failures on your race because you don't want to admit you didn't. I don't doubt that the media have ignored success stories in minority communities and I would be interested to know if they examine why this is. Could it be, possibly, that institutional racism makes these stories less appealing to editors and publishers?
Another revelation from our dive into the data was just how stuck some groups from the White majority are. As a result, we came to the view that recommendations should, wherever possible, be designed to remove obstacles for everyone, rather than specific groups.
I'm surprised at how surprised they are at this "revelation". Underachievement for white working class boys in particular has been a constant source of hand-wringing for years now. Here's just some of the reports I found over the last few years:
Impetus (2014) -
Digging Deeper: Why white working class boys underachieve and what can be done about it,
The Sutton Trust (2016) -
Class differences: Ethnicity and disadvantage and
Kings College London (2016) -
The underrepresentation of white working class boys in higher education. The government even has an
inquiry that is currently running titled "
Left behind white pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds". The inclusion of this observation seems reminiscent to me of the "What About the Menz!?" comments that are so popular whenever people try to talk about issues facing women. It is a distraction and a way of diminishing the importance of the topics under discussion. To see this so early on in the report really doesn't bode well.
As our investigations proceeded, we increasingly felt that an unexplored approach to closing disparity gaps was to examine the extent individuals and their communities could help themselves through their own agency, rather than wait for invisible external forces to assemble to do the job.
Pull yourself up by your bootstraps!!
this report speaks to a new period, which we have described as the era of ‘participation’. We can only speak of ‘participation’ if we acknowledge that the UK has fundamentally shifted since those periods in the past and has become a more open society. We have spoken in this report about how the UK is open to all its communities. But we are acutely aware that the door may be only half open to some, including the White working class.
Another explicit reference to the white working class.
Participation, however, is not just about opening the doors, we also speak to the need for communities to run through that open space and grasp those opportunities. We have found that some ethnic minorities have been able to ‘participate’ better than others.
Another attempt at blaming individuals for failing to succeed.
The new challenge of ‘participation’ is best illustrated in the policies that face police recruitment. The police need to demonstrate that they are truly a more welcoming organisation and Black communities need to overcome the legacy of mistrust.
Black communities need to overcome the legacy of mistrust??? When the police have been beating up protestors and vigil attendees all over the country I'm not sure that asking people of any race or ethnicity to stop mistrusting their police is a great look.
In health, we need more Black and Asian people to participate in health trials so that medical research will be based on data that comes from the whole population.
This is a fair comment, but I'll be curious to see whether they examine the reasons for racial disparities in participation. Are there barriers to entry that make it harder for Black and Asian people to take part compared to white people?
The ‘Making of Modern Britain’ teaching resource is our response to negative calls for ‘decolonising’ the curriculum. Neither the banning of White authors or token expressions of Black achievement will help to broaden young minds. We have argued against bringing down statues, instead, we want all children to reclaim their British heritage. We want to create a teaching resource that looks at the influence of the UK, particularly during the Empire period. We want to see how Britishness influenced the Commonwealth and local communities, and how the Commonwealth and local communities influenced what we now know as modern Britain. One great example would be a dictionary or lexicon of well known British words which are Indian in origin. There is a new story 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 re-modelled African/Britain.
Oh god. There is so much to unpick here I don't know where to start.
Right. Ok. So, calls to 'decolonise' the curriculum are not "negative" and to portray them as such betrays the Chair's bias. Decolonising the curriculum is about broadening the range of narratives that children are exposed to rather than the hagiographic version of history they are currently presented. No-one has, to my knowledge, called for a banning of white authors. No-one has, to my knowledge, asked for tokenistic additions of Black achievement. What people have asked is that we reduce the teaching the same few long-dead authors who speak of a Britain that hasn't existed for, in some cases centuries, and introduce a more diverse range of authors who are more relevant and provide a diversities of experiences not just in the stories they tell but the way they tell them. I might have found English literature a bit more interesting if it wasn't just a load of stories about women in long dresses trying to find husbands.
An examination of the impact of the empire on the lands that it colonised is a worthy endeavour, providing it is not a hagiographic "we brought them civilisation" misrepresentation of events. But where's the examination of the impact of the empire back in the UK? The wealth that it brought - so many stately homes have links to the
slave trade [PDF], the new people it brought - the fact that the
first Indian restaurant in the UK opened in 1810, for example, or that there was a
black musician in King Henry VIII's court. We seem to think the British Empire happened 'over there' and ignore the massive impacts it had 'over here'.
The suggestion of a dictionary of British words of Indian origin is insultingly tokenistic. The suggestion of a "new story about the Caribbean experience" is just plain insulting.
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.
I'm curious to see the evidence that supports this claim.
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.
I'm curious to see how they separate these factors out, given the obvious links between geography, family influence, socio-economic background, culture and religion and ethnicity/race.
That said, we take the reality of racism seriously and we do not deny that it is a real force in the UK.
We'll just spend the next 249 pages downplaying that reality. (yes, my biases are showing too).
The Commission was keen to gain a more forensic and rigorous understanding of underlying causes of disparities. However, we have argued for the use of the term ‘institutional racism’ to be applied only when deep-seated racism can be proven on a systemic level and not be used as a general catch-all phrase for any microaggression, witting or unwitting.
I am definitely curious to see how they define institutional racism.
There are still real obstacles and there are also practical ways to surmount them, but that becomes much harder if people from ethnic minority backgrounds absorb a fatalistic narrative that says the deck is permanently stacked against them.
Yet another expression of the Chair's belief that people only have themselves to blame for any sh.t they experience in their lives.
Right, I'm done. That's taken me far too long to unpick and I need to go and do real work.
I'll try and go through more of the report over the next few days but if anyone else wants to have a go then please do! It would be good if we could tag-team it.