You might have seen some stories in the news about the new ‘Race and Ethnicity Disparities Commission’ that came out this week – also referred to as the ‘Sewell report’ because it was headed by Tony Sewell.
If you live in the same echo chamber that I do, then it’s probably all you’ve seen or been thinking about for the past week (did something happen in the Suez canal? #BoatyMcStuckFace?).
So lets go back in time a bit to explain what this whole Sewell report is about.
Last summer, the disproportionate effect of Covid-19 on people from ethnic minority communities and the horrendous murder in the US of George Floyd at the hands of the police, along with similar murders of many other Black people, prompted all of us to take a good look at our society and country and start seriously addressing racism.
There was a call to action – the overwhelming majority of people in the UK wanted the country to make real changes that address and dismantle the racism that underpins our institutions in the UK.
Now as we all know after watching the way our government handled the first outbreak of the Coronavirus (#HerdImmunity), we have a very competent government that knows what it’s doing, without a hint of cronyism or imperialism going on. Our prime minister would never think of referring to Black people as ‘picanninies with watermelon smiles’ or Muslim women as ‘letterboxes’ because he takes racism seriously.....
There have been many detailed reviews that have been done looking into the various areas in our country that are subject to systemic and structural racism.
These include the Parker Review and McGregor-Smith review that look at race in the workplace representation at board level in Industry, the Lammy review that focuses on institutionalised racism in the criminal justice system and the Macpherson review (also known as the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry) that did a deep dive looking into institutionalised racism in many areas such as education, healthcare and the criminal justice system following the horrific murder of Stephen Lawrence.
Each of these studies have set out a set of practicable, clear actions that need to be made in order to change things and dismantle racism in these institutions.
The Lammy review is fairly recent, published in 2017, and the McGregor Smith and Parker review have both been updated recently to reflect more up to date information as at 2017 and 2020 respectively. The Macpherson review was first published in 1999 and then updated 20 years on in 2019.
So what the government did was to look at all these very clear, practical actions and start implementing them.
LOL JK.
The government did none of that.
That would be far too sensible.
Instead of taking the country’s collective call to action on board and actually enacting some of the actions laid out in previous reviews, they decided they were going to undertake yet another commission to look into whether racism is an issue in Britain (I mean I, or pretty much any other person with some idea of what it’s like here could have told them that the answer is a resounding yes).
But wait!
This time it’s going to be different!
Unlike the other reviews that started by posing questions and then collecting data to answer them, BoJo came up with this amazing idea for this new commission. In this commission, we were going to decide what we wanted the conclusion to be…BEFORE WE EVEN DID ANY RESEARCH!
It’s amazing right! Magical!
And what was this conclusion going to be? It was going to be to ‘reframe the narrative around race’ – because that’s what we all want, Black women don’t care about the fact they are more likely to die in childbirth than their white counterparts, East and South East Asian people don’t care about the fact that hate crimes against their communities have increased by 300% since the start of the pandemic. Noooooo – what we want to see is the way people talk about racism change – that’ll fix everything!
BoJo wanted the conclusion to be that racism wasn’t an issue in the UK, and in fact the issue was that people of colour were too busy thinking of themselves of victims. Why didn’t I think of that!? Clearly I would never have had people come up to me and spit at me or call me a Paki if I had just said very clearly to them – ‘oh mate, you’ve got the wrong lady, I’m not a victim pal’.
Now BoJo is a very busy man, and between breaking promises about Brexit and working on his professional hairstyle, he did not have time to personally write the report. So he needed to find a panel of people to write the report who also agreed with his conclusion that the UK is not racist.
But for some reason that he didn’t quite understand, it wouldn’t have full credibility if he got his pals to write it – somehow if Jacob Rees-Mogg says that based on his experiences of being an aristocratic white man, the UK isn’t racist, people probably weren’t going to buy it.
So he needed to find someone who was * gasp * ethnic to lead the report and a panel of other ethnics to collaborate on it.
But how on earth was he going to find people of colour that live in the UK and have actual eyes to say that the UK wasn’t racist?
Well there’s only one logical way of doing this – a way inspired by the movie Get Out. BoJo was just going to have to find 9 people of colour, send them to the sunken place, and get his cronies to possess their bodies and put their names and faces to this outrageous work.
OK that last bit might not be true.
Although it may be hard to believe, there are people of colour out there who say silly things like ‘racism doesn’t exist’ – just like there are women out there who say feminism isn’t necessary, or that a women’s place is in the kitchen. It’s hard to get myself in the mindset of these people - perhaps they genuinely believe these things? I wonder if part of the reason they say stuff like that is they know they will get approval from the opposition, they will be seen as the acceptable person of colour that the racist white folk can get on board with because they agree with their views – and perhaps this is a safer way to live your life.
This idea is often referred to as ‘racial gatekeeping’ – the idea that no one would believe that a person of colour would allow anything racist to happen, so if you get a person of colour to say something about racism it must be true.
Sadly when the statement is something as preposterous as ‘the government is competent’ or ‘Britain is not racist’ or even * shudder * that we should ‘reframe the way we view slavery’ to focus on the positive aspects (genuine rhetoric that was used a lot in the report that I’ll come to later) – we have to accept that even if these words are coming from the mouths of those with melanin, they are still not true.
So anyway, that’s the backdrop to why the report was commissioned and how the committee for the report was chosen.
This week we saw the actual report come out.
On Wednesday morning I woke up at 6.30am because I wanted to study before work (am I showing off? Yes, yes I am. Is it the first time I’ve attempted to study in the morning before work for over a year? Yes, yes it is). As I made my morning coffee, I scrolled through BBC news and saw the headline: Race report concludes that Britain is not institutionally racist and that it is a model for other white majority countries.
My heart dropped.
This is on the BBC, a mainstream media source. Is this what people are going to believe?
We have done so much work over the last year to get people to take racism seriously, to learn about institutionalised racism, to commit to doing more than not being racist but instead to be actively anti-racist. The Multicultural Network that I chair at my firm has done so much work on this over the past year and it’s managed to make some real changes to our policies and our culture.
When I read the news article I thought: well, that’s all that hard work undone.
Every one of us people of colour who have spoken out about our experiences, spoken on diversity and inclusion committees, driven for change over the last year – that was all for nothing.
Every white person who started to learn about what white privilege means, about how they benefit from white supremacy and racist systems, every white person who had difficult conversations around race with family members and stood up for their friends – that was all for nothing.
Gutted does not even describe how I felt, and in fact I couldn’t find the word to describe how I felt until I started reaching out to other anti-racism activists and hearing their views.
And I realised that what I felt was gaslighted. Gaslighted by my own government.
The government was telling me and every other person that has experienced the deep-seated effect of institutionalised racism in this country that actually – these experiences weren’t real. They can’t be real because the UK isn’t institutionally racist. So we must be making it up. Imagining things. Playing the victim.
The other thing that was difficult with the report was, at 6.30am, all I could read were the headlines and I wasn’t able to read through the actual report. The report came out at 11.30, and once I read through that in full it was very clear how tenuous the conclusions were that the report came to based on the very same data that had been included in that report.
So reading the report reassured me a bit – although I was also aware that the average person who reads a headline on this report perhaps wouldn’t go through and read all 256 pages of the report and check out the underlying data and its sources like I did (yeah my studying has been non-existent since the report came out).
But the other thing that reassured me was the overwhelming response that was coming from other anti-racism activists, from groups like the Runnymede Trust and Business in the Community and individuals like Renni-Eddo Lodge and David Lammy. And that response was basically that the report was so much of a whitewash, and so out of touch, that it was almost (and that’s ALMOST) laughable.
Now am I saying that this report is the biggest white wash since colouring pencils started labelling the pinkish colour as ‘skin colour’?
Am I saying this report is the biggest white wash since Emma Stone was cast as a Chinese/Hawaiian character in the film ‘Aloha’?
Am I saying this report is the biggest white wash since many European artists mysteriously ran out of the brown paint while they were painting Jesus?
No of course I’m not saying any of those things.
I am thinking them however, but that’s fine – we live in the West where there’s no such thing as Thought Police, right!? After all, it’s not like we live in an Orwellian 1984-esque world where Big Brother always has an eye on us with its constant surveillance via smart phones and social media …. Right?
But yeah, getting back to the point and ignoring my latent conspiracy theorist personality, the report was a bit of a whitewash – even though it had people of colour on its committee (which it mentioned many many times in the report – in case you don’t know, Boris Johnson can’t be racist cos he has a Black friend called Tony Sewell).
Now in terms of the actual timing and context of the report, there were a few big issues.
The first is that this report was very much published in response to George Floyd and the affect of Covid-19 on minority communities, yet there was little discussion on the latter and virtually no mention of the former.
The second is that the timing of the report’s conclusion being published during Derek Chauvin’s trial (the police officer who murdered George Floyd) and following some horrendous news stories about violence towards the east and south east Asian communities was really not great. It just doesn’t really make sense when you see a news article titled ‘Britain is not racist’ between two other articles about racist attacks towards Asians in Britain…
In terms of the content of the report, there were a few big things that were missing.
There was very little discussion of the Windrush generation and nothing about refugees, Islamophobia or anti-Semitism. One of the statements the report made was that people should stop using the term BAME, something I think most people of colour have been saying for a while because none of us actually identify as BAME.
The report concluded that we should dissagregate different racial groups because they have different experiences and I wholly agree with that – I think grouping us all into one category can be used to smooth the relative disadvantage of some communities with the relative advantage of other communities – like my own, the Indian community, who tend to have more access to privilege than some other minority communities.
So I was happy to see that conclusion made by the report (yes that’s right, there was something I agreed with in there!)
But then as I read the report I realised that they hadn’t even taken their own advice for most of the report. They had picked and chosen when to aggregate and disaggregate racial groups based on which helped them to come to the ‘UK isn’t racist’ conclusion, and had often times just left out huge communities.
And in terms of my biggest issues with the themes of the report – there were quite a few.
The first was the language and rhetoric used around slavery – and to be honest this was nothing short of disgusting. It was an insult to everyone whose ancestors dealt with the first hand effects of these brutal endeavours.
The report argued against pulling down statues and instead encouraged people to think about ‘a new story about the Carribean experience which speaks to the slave period not only being about profit and suffering but how culturally African people transferred themselves into a re-modelled Africa/Britain’.
I’m not even making that up.
We live in a world where many people still bear the surnames of their slave owners, where segregation laws were rife in our lifetimes and where the British taxpayers only finished paying off the debt to slave OWNERS to compensate them for their loss of property (HUMAN PEOPLE) when slavery was abolished in the LAST DECADE.
Yet apparently we shouldn’t be focussing on the fact that immense suffering happened during this period and there is lived generational trauma in many communities as a result of this.
We shouldn’t focus on the fact that the UK only has the money and resources that it has today, that it is only able to be in the economic position it is today, because of this horrific exploitation.
We should instead focus on the fact that Black people who were originally from Africa did a great job of losing their African roots and becoming more British during the slave trade – didn’t you know, the British did them a favour by putting them through those disgustingly horrific conditions because now they don’t have to be so culturally African anymore.
I genuinely felt sick reading that statement, along with many others made to a similar vein in that report.
I wondered how my great grandfather, who was involved in the independence movement in India, would feel knowing that his great grandchild was growing up in a country where the government wanted us to view everything he fought against as a good thing – as though the freedom he fought for was unnecessary.
My next biggest issue with the report was the rhetoric that alluded to the model minority trope.
It talked about how ‘some ethnic minorities have been able to ‘participate’ better than others’ – a phrase that encourages ethnic minorities to be pitted against each other and completely ignores the different circumstances that people in different migrant groups faced.
Of course it’s going to be easier for me to perform better in school when my parents, like many other Indians, were already educated and qualified as a doctor and dentist before they moved here and were able to enter British society as fairly middle class citizens.
This is completely different to what it would have been like for the Windrush generation and the situation they met when they came to this country, which is of course going to have a knock on effect on future generations.
It depicts the ’Chinese’ population as a model minority that only experiences positive stereotypes (I put Chinese in inverted commas because the report seems to use Chinese as a way to describe the whole diaspora of people from east and south east Asian origin) – this language completely belittles the very real racism and violence these Asian communities face.
But my biggest issue with this report – and this is an issue I have with lots of statements and reports that argue against anti-racism activism – was the fact it tries to pit the white working class against communities of colour – even though people of colour, especially those from Black and Pakistani communities, are more likely to be considered working class than their white counterparts.
The report talks about how issues are more complex than just being about race and are also related to things like social class – which of COURSE is true, no one is saying that race is the only issue out there = OF COURSE social class, gender, sexuality, disabilities and MANY other factors also affect people.
But somehow it then manages to spend the report comparing the white working class to ethnic minorities and not doing anything to address the fact that ethnic minorities are overrepresented in the working class and face the same issues that the white working class do.
The report present this false dichotomy that we can either focus on race or class – but the two are so hugely interconnected that no one actually involved in anti-racism activism thinks that at all, we have to focus on all of these issues and that will make everyone in our society better off.
Well, everyone except a few very wealthy white people, who are able to hold on to their privilege by ensuring that other people aren’t able to access it – aren’t able to take their fair slice of the pie.
Everyone except people like… Boris Johnson.
The very person who commissioned this report.
It’s almost as though he didn’t want the white working class to focus on how he and his government are letting them down, but instead try and ‘change the narrative’ as he keeps saying – so that the white working class could instead focus on those gosh darn ethnic minorities who keep playing their race cards and acting like victims.
Strange coincidence, that.