Over recent years, I have noticed when I speak at schools or universities, many youth BAME people increasingly interpret a range of grievances – from exam results and bullying to Grenfell Tower - through the prism of racism. Any attempt at suggesting that racist discriminating is declining, is often dismissed as proof of my unconscious bias or more aggressively – ‘how would you know – you're white'. So I should welcome the government's long-awaited audit into racial disparities in public services; some objective data at last.
However, I fear this audit has muddied the waters and is likely to result in the false conclusion that all race differences in outcomes are the result of ‘institutional racism'. While the audit is likely to lead to frenetic policy-itis by those who run councils, schools, workplaces, hospitals and prisons, with a myriad of lobby groups demanding more money, laws and patronage, I doubt it will lead to a fairer society.
Theresa May has concluded that: ‘this audit means that for society as a whole – for government, for our public services – there is nowhere to hide. These issues are now out in the open. And the message is very simple: if these disparities cannot be explained then they must be changed.' Her doublespeak phrase is worrying. If there is no explanation, how on earth can they be tackled?
Confusion about what the data means has not stopped lurid headlines – as though racial prejudice is de facto an everyday, institutionalised reality. But as MP Chris Bryant dismissed the audit as ‘a load of sententious, vacuous guff', because ‘unless serious analytical work is done to check whether the statistics are a matter of correlation or causation, there is no value to this work whatsoever'. Confusing correlation and causation – a schoolboy error - gives us a misleading picture.
Also, the statistics tell a complex story, often as much about poverty, class and cultural expectations as discrimination. Yes, black Caribbean pupils are permanently excluded from school at three times the rate of white British pupils. Almost nine out of 10 white Gypsy and Roma children do not reach the expected standard for reading, writing and maths at 11. But surely we might consider explanations beyond racist schooling, especially as the historic educational attainment gaps between ethnic minorities and their white British peers have disappeared over the last decade. In many areas, such as university entry or recruitment into the professions, a number of ethnic groups are actually doing better than white British people. Some minority groups – such as those from British Indian and Chinese backgrounds – have closed the socio-economic gaps almost entirely.
Statistics always need interpreting and often defy simplistic conclusions. For example, the government-commissioned report into BAME employment by Lady McGregor-Smith's published in February claimed that ‘people from BAME backgrounds are still being held back in the workplace because of the colour of their skin'. But as former deputy mayor of London Munira Mirza explained in a recent article in the Spectator, to conclude that British businesses are discriminating against BAME people would mean assuming that all workplaces should have at least 14% ethnic minority staff, reflecting the percentage of ethnic minorities in the population. She notes ‘this ignores that almost half of the non-white population in the UK are immigrants, and many of these have arrived recently with poor English and low qualifications'. Is it institutionalised racism if that group does not have exactly the same outcomes as non-BAME groups within only a few years of their arrival to Britain?
When officialdom plays the race card, it threatens to stir up divisions and racialise grievances. Theresa May might ponder what issues are out in the open when transgender model Munroe Bergdorf cited the audit as proof that Britain is a ‘deeply racist society' on BBC's This Week, concluding that ‘the white race is the most violent and oppressive force of nature on earth'. Conversely, in the wake of Brexit ‘left-behind' debate, some campaigners cite the audit's stats about white boys faring badly to demand their fair share of political attention and resources.
I tend to agree with those prominent BAME activists who wrote in a letter to The Times that the government's ‘crude and tendentious' approach and official endorsement of widespread institutional racism is more likely to corrode ethnic minority communities' trust in public services than reassure them. If the teenagers I referred to at the start are repeatedly fed a narrative by those in authority that their schools/employers/the police are institutionally racist, they will inevitably feel more aggrieved and disaffected, even in the face of contradictory data and ambiguous evidence. We owe it to that generation to avoid weaponising race in this way, and to treat today's auditing of discrimination with more sceptical enquiry.
Claire Fox is convening the Battle of Ideas at the Barbican Oct 28-29. See: www.battleofideas.com
