How racist is the UK? The Sewell commission says it has answered the question. Instead, it has chosen easy polemics
Britain is less racist than it was 40 years ago. Many minority groups in Britain still face racism. Both those claims can be (and are) true. So are these two claims: racism exists in Britain; racism does not explain all the disparities faced by minorities. We live, though, in an either/or culture. You accept one or the other, but not both. The report of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities self-consciously seeks to bridge that gap and bring complexity to the debate. That it fails should concern us all.
The commission was set up by the government after the Black Lives Matter protests last year. Its chair, Tony Sewell, writes in the foreword that Britain has “fundamentally shifted” in recent years when it comes to racial disadvantage. Racism remains “a real force in the UK”, but “too often ‘racism’ is the catch-all explanation and can be simply implicitly accepted rather than explicitly examined”. I agree. I have long questioned the contemporary narrative about racial disparities, arguing we need to think more carefully about the complex interplay of race, class, gender and geography. The Sewell report is, however, a flawed piece of work, its polemical needs distorting its empirical analysis.
