Everyone who knows anything about politics knows that the government's new report on race discrimination that dismisses the idea that there is institutional race discrimination in the UK was pre-determined to deliver that outcome.
The PM's adviser, Munira Mirza, who chose the Commission that prepared this report has said she does not think that there is institutional racism, but that there is a culture of grievance instead.
Tony Sewell, who headed the Commission, is known to share that view.
It's the outcome the Mail wanted, of course.
But there is a problem. No. 10 knows it is not true. That's because its own senior race advisor has been saying so, and quit on the day the report was issued. As Politico reports this morning:
Boris Johnson's most senior Black adviser has resigned, Playbook can reveal. Samuel Kasumu, who is No. 10's special adviser for civil society and communities, informed colleagues of his decision yesterday morning – just as the government released its controversial report on race and ethnic disparities.
As they note, Kasumu had the job within Downing Street of reaching out to ethnic minority communities and played a key role in this week's Lenny Henry vaccination campaign encouraging Black Britons to get their shot. He had, however, been suffering “unbearable” tensions within No. 10, believing the government was pursuing “a politics steeped in division.”
It did not take a rocket scientist to work that out. It has taken courage to say so, and act.
This government is pursuing a brand of politics steeped in division. It is trying to foment that division. It wants to divide and rule. It believes it can do that. A supine Opposition lets it get away with it.
And in the meantime real lives are impacted, the hurt runs deep, and the knowledge that it is being willfully inflicted will add to the anger.
It is very hard to imagine policy more callous, more stupid, more designed to break down society and more intent on creating lasting harm than this. But that's the type of government we have. And I will say so whilst I can, in the expectation that one day I may not be able to do so.
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It seems that Mirza’s rejection of ‘institutional racism’ chimes with this Government’s attitude towards it – maybe because its origin was created by representatives of those who have suffered it, rather than some white bloke?
To reject a victim’s definition of what they endure is just negation – nothing else. But women suffer this in rape cases too I feel.
I know it’s controversial but my BME friends and colleagues have a phrase for those members of their community who endorse stuff like this – it’s related to the fruit of a certain tree that tends to grow in the tropics. Their wording BTW – not mine – for I am not entitled to use it. There are some very disappointed equalities professionals out here.
Looking at the ethnic minority people involved in the production of the report , there is a fair smattering of MBE/CBE’s so one can safely say that favours are owed, loyalties have been created. None of them look poverty stricken or done down – they’re all eminently photogenic and not short of a bob or two I bet.
Maybe this is how ‘Neo-liberal’ race relations works: race only ceases to be a problem when high amounts of money and status comes into play? This explains ethnic minorities in the Tory party. In the Tory party, Sunak is not a man with brown skin, but a RICH man – and THAT is what matters. His wealth melts away his ethnicity in the eyes of his fellow white high rollers. Status and net worth somehow makes Neo-liberalism blind to race, because race is forgotten in the face of wealth and position (markers of Neo-liberal success) and all is well with the world. But God help you if you have neither status or money or are just like Neil Kinnock’s ‘ordinary’.
Although I agree with the concept of institutional racism, I agree with the other comments about the report in that it is not fine grained enough – we need new ways of looking at this issue and unpick it – even create a new language.
Because we (black and white) are being duped.
Undoubtedly Sunak will have been the target of racism throughout his life – even with two professional parents, and Winchester, Oxford, and Goldman Sachs, and his billionaire father in law. But he thinks it is just individual “instances” now, and “if I think about the things that happened to me when I was a kid, I can’t imagine those things happening to me now.” https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-56592331
It happened to him in the past, but he can’t imagine it now – just one-off “instances” – so it does not exist. But if you ask people about their own current experiences, this is the sort of thing they report – https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-56253480
Perhaps the best you can make of this report is that there are indeed important intersectional points to be made about family and wealth and class and gender and health and other inequalities that broad brush categories of “BAME” and “institutional racism” do not capture. Sunak is in a privileged position, as a rich man of middle class South Asian heritage, that would not apply to (for example) a 16 year old person of working class African-Caribbean heritage growing up in a single parent family in Brixton. Or even to Kwasi Kwarteng (professional parents, Eton, Cambridge, JPMorgan) or Priti Patel (family with a chain of newsagents, Watford, Keele, Essex, PR at Weber Shandwick). Just because racism is a multi-factored thing that affects different people in different ways does not mean there are no institutional or structural issues to address.
Perhaps they all consider that their own families “made it” as a result of their own innate talent and hard work, and can’t understand why others don’t too. So everyone else must be lazy, feckless, good-for-nothings, just looking to blame someone else (or a faceless society that does not exist) for their own inadequacies, when they just need to pull themselves together, roll up their sleeves, and get on their bikes.
None so blind as those that refuse to see.
Agreed