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| Black Lives Matter |
It was the 18th-century English poet, painter and printmaker William Blake who said, "It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend." And so it is with our black 'friends' who work inside and alongside the current Government. But as we are coming to find out, the tokenistic policy of black faces in high places does not an antiracist administration make.
This week saw the Government doubles down on anti-racism and gender equality campaigners in its efforts to advance a ruthless ideological ground war. The extreme right-wings new version of "political correctness gone mad" is the Black Lives Matter movement and Women rights groups otherwise known in Tory circles as the "woke army".
There were two interventions of note; one in the form of a letter from controversial Chair of the Government's Commission on Race and Disparities Tony Sewell to Minister of Equalities Olukemi Olufunto Badenoch (or Kemi as she likes to be called by her English friends).
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| Tony Sewell: Chair of the Government's Commission on Race and Disparities |
You may remember this Commission being launched by Prime Minister Boris Johnson in the summer of this year in response to the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement and the disproportionate impact of Covid19 on black communities.
In launching the Commission, Boris declared that he wanted to "change the narrative" concerning racism in Britain.
Tony Sewell was appointed by Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Tony was selected precisely because he is a) black and b) does not believe in the existence of systemic institutional racism preferring to blame black disadvantage on black communities citing our lifestyle choices and the 'dysfunctionality' of some of our cultural traditions.
This blame the victim approach is the tired old narrative of the long-dead past, now refreshed by this Government. Sewell is a man perfectly suited for the job. A man who blames black mothers for raising dysfunctional sons as a means of explaining black school exclusions and underachievement in British schools.
The second intervention was from Trade Minister Liz Truss, who in a speech on the 17th December 2020 launched a blistering political attack on what she described as "fashionable" race and gender issues. The Minister set out a set of "new conservative values" surely a contradiction in terms? These old values will focus on traditional liberal ideas of "freedom, choice, opportunity, individual humanity and dignity."
The problem for Black Britons and people of colour is, of course, these universal values do not generally apply to us.
Truss also quoted the Sewell letter to Olukemi who singing the Governments song stated that there is a "perception of racism that is often not supported by evidence".
To have a black man speak these words was no doubt music to Tory ears. To the black community and no doubt the vast majority of the country, Sewell's words and the Trade Ministers speech sounded like the routine and practised chorus of white denial and black betrayal.
All we need now is a Tick Tock video of Truss and Sewell signing Kumbaya.
The speech came as the Trade Secretary faced criticism after it was revealed that of the 253 trade advisers she had appointed, 75% were men and 95% were white,
Her statement that equalities issues were "dominated by a small number of unrepresentative voices, and by those who believe people are defined by their protected characteristic." was absolutely right. Those people are of course, mostly white, male pale and stale.
Truss went on to speak about the "narrow focus" of the 2010 Equalities Act demanding that class and social mobility (i.e. white working-class communities) should also be considered. This is deeply ironic given that at the time of the Act's introduction, I and others argued for precisely that, whilst it was the Tories who vigorously opposed its inclusion.
All of this follows the opening salvo in this political onslaught we saw in faithfully delivered by Minister Olukemi Olufunto Badenoch in Black History Month,. During a Parliamentary debate, she somewhat incredulously suggested that teaching "critical race theory" in schools and universities is illegal and in breach of the 2010 Equality Act.
Tony Sewell's letter to Olukemi also sets out a series of dangerous assumptions and not unsurprisingly arrives at some startling preliminary conclusions.
In the letter, Tony sets out his pseudo-intellectual, inelegant theory of what he describes as the "binary white/BAME" distinctions that determine that "all racial disparities are negative" and the "narrow policy focus" that seeks to reduce rates of racial inequality.
He sets out the differential rates of racial inequality amongst distinct ethnic groups. An issue that quite rightly deserves to be highlighted. He then goes on to suggest specific ethnic disparities are less related to racism and more a result of "age, sex, class and geography".
He concludes that "cultures within institutions, and also communities, can produce racial disparity" figuring that analysing racial and ethnic equality is a "complex…including multiple factors". Using a combination of accepted facts, supposition and conjecture he unskilfully explains away the realities of systemic racism
Of course, in the real world, all of these issues are linked. Still, it is, without doubt, a stone-cold fact that ethnicity and race are a compounding an aggravating factor in determining and analysing rates of ethnic and racial inequality and disadvantage.
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| Systemic Racism. |
No doubt we will eventually be presented by a hugely complex interrelated statistical analysis that will conclude that no conclusive determination can be made, but on the balance of the evidence individual lifestyle choices, culture and failure to access opportunity are as much to blame for racial disadvantage as anything else.
Yet examples that conclusively disprove this point are so easily found.
Stop and search; disproportionate black graduate unemployment; racism in employment and recruitment and the ethnic pay gap which is said to be twice as large as the gender pay gap; sentencing disparities in our courts; the Windrush scandal, all provide substantive and objective evidence of the realities of systemic institutionalised racism.
Identifying the dynamics of racism is always complicated for the perpetrators and its Zip-a-dee-doo-dah, black apologists.
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| Zip-a-dee-doo-dah. This is even though the Equalities and Human Rights Commission, the Equality Trust and the Runnymede Trust, and thousands of academic reports that analyse racial inequality, taking into account the variables of age, sex, class and geography" the overwhelmingly vast majority of which have concluded that systemic racial disadvantage and inequality that is a reality in modern Britain. |
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| Structural disadvantage. |
But let's be clear this is not just some meaningless exercise in political posturing by this Government and its appointed lackeys. As the Covid-19 pandemic has all too vividly and tragically demonstrated, these are matters that constitute the literal life and death for African, Asian and ethnic minority peoples here in the UK.
Structural racism has a material impact on health mortality, wealth and well-being of black people. Recently it was reported by USA Today News that racism had been declared a public health issue in 145 cities and counties across 27 states in America.
Whilst a new study published in the American Journal of Preventative Medicine (hardly a hotbed of cultural Marxism) determined that structural and systemic racism leads to a 'marked erosion of health' among African Americans among others.
This Governments favoured tactic is as old as British colonialism itself - divide and rule.
The strategy relies upon a combination of routine denial of institutional racism and the deployment and or employment of African and Asian people as external black cladding providing black cover to an institutional racist superstructure. This is the core strategy of this Government divide the nation and the promotion of regressive and dangerous libertarian illiberalism.
This is a government that is smart enough to decry individual acts of flagrant racism while simultaneously denying the realities of the much more insidious and harmful, structural and systemic racism responsible for wholesale discrimination and widespread disadvantage.
Here in the United Kingdom, institutional and systemic racism is no joke.
Black and Asian communities are under acute economic and political pressure, The consequences are increased stress, that most notable silent killer, alongside increased mental ill-health. Black communities are now in the grip of the entrenched and harmful effects of generational poverty and discrimination, all of which combine in a powerful vortex of disadvantage.
In American President-elect Biden and Harris manifesto includes the most detailed policy commitment to achieving racial equity. It acknowledges systemic racism and sets out a dynamic and detailed, economic and legislative strategy designed to bring about equality for all Americans. We will need to make strategic links with Biden administration to ensure they bring the importance of recognising racism to the table with a British Government who remains stuck in the past.
Those of like Tony Sewell who do us such grave disservice in our greatest hour of need should be rightfully condemned as the useful idiots of this extreme right-wing administration.
There will be no forgiveness for those who mouth the spineless platitudes of their masters in explaining away the realities of racism.
As we enter 2021, we have to ensure that the next generation of Black Lives Matter activists working with existing black organisations constitutes a new radical black civil rights movement. A movement that takes this fight to the steps of number 10 Downing Street and demands not equality of opportunity but racial equity, not an apology but reparation.
In any ideological ground war against black people demanding human rights and justice, we expect to be betrayed. Let those who do so enjoy no quarter of comfort.
Come the new year watch out for the call to action.
The struggle is real.
