Report not released yet but read this and it has made me absolutely irate and scared about how it is going to be used to justify cutting services, funding etc.
Issues around race and racism were becoming “less important” in explaining inequalities, the commission concluded, and in some cases were not a significant factor.
However, it noted that some communities continued to be “haunted” by historic racism, which created “deep mistrust” and could be a barrier to success.
A complete refusal to accept the role that structural and societal racism plays in poverty, healthcare, criminal justice. Not to mention the reference to ‘family structure’ being a main cause of inequality which is both highly racist and misogynistic. And then goes on to blame Black and Asian communities for being “haunted” and that they are their own barrier to ‘success’.
Organisations should stop funding unconscious bias training, with government and experts developing resources to help advance workplace equality
I know this was said by the Home Office previously, but how on earth can the Home Office dictate what training should and should not be provided? And seemingly mandating their own racism-isn’t-real training instead.
This report is going to be incredibly damaging, and used for years to come to gut services and threaten anyone in the public sector speaking about institutional racism. The summary of the report seems to be “no issue here, let’s divert resources to white people instead”.
And they just don’t care. They’re openly admitting using Black Lives Matter as a springboard to deny racism and create a justification for cutting services, most of which are hanging on by their fingernails anyway.
Several years ago I was naive enough to think that equality and progressive values were essentially an upwards curve, sometimes slight and other times sharp. It’s hard to imagine how I was able to think like that now.
Honestly don’t know what the reaction should be. To say the uk is an exemplar in racial equality and should be a model for other “majority white nations” (a term which feels dog whistly in itself) is so clearly a deliberate provocation.
I can’t imagine why Tony Sewell was picked to do the report
In 2010, Sewell wrote an article in Prospect magazine in which he argued that “much of the supposed evidence of institutional racism is flimsy”. Speaking in July 2020, Sewell explained that he did believe that “racism exists in structures”, but added: “I do think some of the disparities there may not have origins in race. They could be rooted in class, different geographies, or different powers”.
It’s not that I necessarily have an issue with his 2020 comments there but he’s definitely the guy you’d pick if you wanted not to find institutional racism.
Came here to start a thread about this and delighted @wileycat is on it. Not really delved into the report but the beeb report on it threw up some absurd details.
The article points out that there were like five or so reports from 2017 that threw up very different conclusions, so are we to conclude that the UK has had a total sea change in just 3 years?
