2021
Yet Another Muddled Report on Race & Ethnicity that Blames the Victims!
ukiedadmin / 0 Comments /I have watched the unfolding anger and disappointment which has emerged from the publication of the United Kingdom’s Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities Report (Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities – Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities: The Report – March 2021 (publishing.service.gov.uk)) which was released at the end of last month.
The Commission was established last year by Prime Minster Boris Johnson under the chairpersonship of Dr Tony Sewell CBE. The Commission was made up of 10 people, all but one from the Black Asian Minority Ethnic (BAME) community. The Chair described the group as “drawn from a variety of fields spanning science, education, economics, broadcasting, medicine, and policing.” In my view the composition of the Commission was flawed. The stated purpose of the Commission’s Report “is to lay the ground for a country built on the full participation and trust of all communities”, which seems somewhat timid and vague. The report’s timid purpose and limited composition made it inevitable that it would produce the kind of inaccurate, unhelpful and distorted report it has produced. The Commission’s composition lacked equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) specialists, people who have a deep and developed understanding of the ‘science’ of EDI. Instead the Commission overwhelmingly consisted of people from the BAME community as it was assumed by Prime Minister Johnson and his civil servants (who are overwhelmingly not from BAME backgrounds) that being a member of the BAME community inevitably makes you an EDI or racism expert. Had the government set up a Commission to look into VAT they would not have put together a Commission body made up of people based on the fact that they all have experience of going shopping. Because the Commissioners may have had personal experience of ethnic and racial discrimination does not mean that they have a detailed broad understanding of this human condition and the broader EDI underpinning knowledge required to deconstruct race, racism and racialism in their various forms.
David Olusoga in his Guardian piece (The poisonously patronising Sewell report is historically illiterate | Race | The Guardian) described the Commission’s Report as a disaster and historic illiterate. I have no doubt that the Commissioners were well intentioned and driven by laudable motives; my criticism is that they lacked the relevant expertise to enable them to properly:
- Understand the relationship between EDI and the various outcomes they were looking at
- Critique the data and avoid over simplified conclusions
- Ask and focus on the the right questions/issues and avoid going down cul-de-sacs.
The nearly 260-word report seems to be embarrassed about calling out the government(s) or confronting the truth that racism is entrenched within the psyche of the UK as a nation, the latter being all too apparent during the Brexit debate and vote, when for example, outright racism was portrayed as ‘freedom of speech’. Instead the Commission’s Report consistently downplays the impact which racism has on the lives of the BAME community in the UK, whilst overstating the agency people from BAME communities have. The Commission’s Report claimed that the situation in the UK has improved over the last 50 years – this is hardly news and certainly does not need a Commission Report to show this. 50 years ago it was perfectly legal to discriminate against someone on the basis of their ethnicity/race. However, 28 years ago Stephen Lawrence, a Black British teenager, was murdered by a racist gang and it took a further 19 years for his family to get partial justice; and 3 years ago 83 people from the West Indies who came to the UK as part of what is referred to as the Windrush Generation were wrongly deported from the UK after living there in most cases for several decades, because of former Prime Minster Theresa May’s ‘Hostile Environment’ policy she instituted when she was Home Secretary. 85% of the victims that lost their lives in the Grenfell Fire Disaster in June 2017 were from the BAME community. A cursory examination of Covid-19 death rates indicates disproportionally higher death rates for people from BAME backgrounds as compared to the majority community.
It is therefore important when talking about improvements in the lived lives of people from BAME communities that proper consideration is given to the speed and nature of this improvement and that this is set against the everyday realities experienced by members of the BAME communities. To do anything else is disingenuous and calls in question the integrity of the Commission’s Report.
The Commission’s Report has been met with resounding criticism domestically and internationally in terms of its analysis and recommendations, many claiming it is “divorced from reality”, and risks pushing the fight against racism back 20 years (Dame Doreen Lawrence). Many have argued that the recommendations generally let the government off the hook and shift too much of the responsibility and blame onto the BAME communities themselves by essentially criticizing their so-called lifestyle choices and culture. The Commission had an opportunity to lead Europe and the world, as they claimed, by producing a report that moved the discourse decidedly forward, that came up with recommendations which would be seen as brave and innovative, and that placed responsibility and accountability on the shoulders of those with the real power to make the necessary corrective changes. Instead the Commission has come up with 24 recommendations that fail to address institutional racism and the general sense of powerlessness experienced by the majority of BAME communities in the UK, and that have left many leaders within the BAME communities feeling deeply disappointed, frustrated and deflated.
A key lesson for governments and non government organizations around the world thinking about setting up similar Commissions: it is essential that the composition of any proposed group contains relevant EDI expertise and is expert led. The group should clearly have people in its membership who are able to contribute their lived experience of ethnic and race based discrimination, however it is essential that the group has EDI expertise capable of applying the science of EDI to what has been one of the most challenging aspects of human relations that continues to scar ‘modern’ societies – ethnic and racial discrimination.
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