How to have a meaningful debate about racism?

The conversation is stuck: you’re either ‘playing the race card’ or ‘in denial’. But here’s a way to break through writes Nina Kelly in The Guardian
 

The national conversation on racism seems to be stuck in an endless loop. We all know the routine: a public debate is sparked by a news story that features a case of alleged bigotry. It might be reports that an Asian cricketer was nicknamed “Bomber”; or that a member of the royal family is said to have questioned a baby’s skin colour. Whatever it is, the inciting incident then sets the parameters of all the discussion to follow. An array of loud and angry voices appears on media panel shows or radio phone-ins, suggesting what might or might not have occurred (no one knows for certain), and whether or not any of it is racist (everyone is certain that it either is, or it isn’t).

And so, instead of the nuances of racial inequality being understood, the issue is portrayed as a simple matter of people saying or doing bad things to each other, and we get a tiresome to and fro between those “playing the race card” and others “in denial”. Many of us just tune out, while the overall issue of racism in society – a real problem in need of an urgent solution – remains unaddressed.

That is why, six years ago, the Reframing Race initiative was set up. It is an attempt to fix this broken debate. We have spoken to 20,000 people in England and Scotland, testing more than a dozen ways of talking about racism. With our unprecedented bank of data, we now dare to answer the question: what actually works to change the conversation?

We discovered – plainly – that words make a difference. New ways of talking about racism lead to new ways of listening.

The first problem we found was that people don’t agree on what the basic facts mean. For instance, “black people are stopped and searched at seven times the rate of white people”: some will believe this indicates a racist bias in policing; others will simply say it’s a sign of criminality in the black population. It is therefore important to tell the full story, which is that the over-representation of black people in the criminal justice system does not imply they are more inclined to commit crime. Instead, the data reveals a complex social structure – involving prejudice in the justice system, poverty, school exclusion and insecure housing – that stacks the odds against black people.

‘We found that people don’t agree on what the basic facts mean. For instance, ‘black people are stopped and searched at seven times the rate of white people’.’ Photograph: John Stillwell/PA


This explanation is not as eye-catching as the headline statistic, but we did find one particularly effective way to communicate the problem of racism: namely, a CV investigation that showed recruiters were biased in favour of white applicants. In telling the full story of this study, we were able to rule out any explanations other than race-based discrimination. Choosing to represent structural racism in this way allows a mainstream audience to see it for themselves, and leads the discussion away from the “Is it racist?” ping-pong game.

And where facts don’t work, sometimes metaphors do. We discovered that using the image of a birdcage to represent a racist system that traps some people inside was powerful. Everyone can understand the way in which each bar of a cage combines to deny freedom and opportunities. The birdcage metaphor also appeals to people’s values, rather than their logic. Unlike stop-and- search statistics, the concept of freedom is universally understood and agreed on.

Another thing we found is that showing some intention behind structural racism – even naming a “perpetrator”, such as a government department – leads to a more fluent discussion about how to address it. This approach is also more likely to inspire hope that things can be changed; if something was designed in a way that disadvantaged certain racial groups, it is reasonable to suppose we could redesign it. 

Surprisingly, our research also tells us that it is possible to be bold – even radical – in challenging racism, so long as your ideas are explained well enough. For instance, we found most people agreed with the idea of investing in mental health services so that police did not have to do the job of mental health professionals, and for teaching schoolchildren of all backgrounds their shared history. I doubt the phrases “defund the police” or “decolonise the curriculum” would have generated the same support.

Overall, we found it is not easy for people to feel confident about tackling racism when its finer details are constantly being argued over. But we do know we all have the potential to make a positive change. So if you find yourself trapped in an argument about what is or isn’t racist, consider how you could change that conversation. What could you say differently? None of us has the perfect answer, but we can all choose not to be part of the problem.

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English cricket’s reign of shame exposed with devastating admission of guilt

Damning report must act as a brutal wake-up call and a line cannot be drawn under this with prejudice rife within the sport writes Jonathan Liew in The Guardian 



You may want to sit down for this part. Turns out – no, seriously – that a sport created and codified for the purpose of allowing rich white landowners to bet against each other, and then exported around the world at gunpoint with the promise that it would civilise savage peoples, may not actually be that progressive.

How can this possibly have happened? Who do we see about this? And who’s asking, anyway?

The publication of the Independent Commission for Equity in Cricket’s report into systemic discrimination in the English game will doubtless be described as many things. A wake‑up call. A line in the sand. A humiliation. What it represents to those who have been arguing the point for many years is, rather, a kind of historical artefact: documentary proof that English cricket’s in-built prejudice against women, people of colour and people from poorer backgrounds is not some fey liberal invention or a jaundiced troublemaker’s charter, but a lived reality for many people for many years, perhaps even generations. 

It is above all a devastatingly frank document, both in its analysis of the problem and its proposed solutions. The England and Wales Cricket Board’s first‑look response, a wide-ranging apology for the injustices that have occurred on its watch, may feel instinctively like so much corporate whitewash. But even a few years ago the very idea that the national governing body would admit its complicity in a racist, sexist system would have felt fanciful. In this case, diagnosis really can be the first step of the treatment.

And here the ICEC helpfully provides the hard data to back up decades of hunches and anecdotes. A staggering 87% of respondents of Pakistani and Bangladeshi heritage, 82% with Indian heritage and 75% of all black respondents reported encountering discrimination in the game. The real kicker, though, is the deficit of trust that the vast majority felt with a game that was supposed to protect them: a feeling that cricket’s authorities, the white male captains and coaches and chief executives and board chairs who hold all the power in the game, would instinctively lean towards the status quo.

South Asians make up 28% of the game’s recreational pool, but just 2.8% of the sport’s executive-level positions. Black participation was measured by a Sport England survey to be so low as to be statistically irrelevant. The percentage of England male cricketers who were privately educated was 58% in 2021, compared to 7% in the population at large. For years anybody pointing this out has met a wall of complacency and silence, a modern version of the classic Henry Newbolt poem: “Play up! Play up! And play the game!” This is, after all, England. We don’t talk about these things.

The debate sparked by Black Lives Matter has been steered away from meaningful change. Photograph: Reuters


The first thing to note is that there are certain people – many people – for whom all this is evidence that the world is simply working as it should. Your one black friend makes you an ally. Your one female cricket writer makes your publication diverse. Your one British Asian prime minister makes your country progressive. And your one working-class men’s Test captain makes your team representative. For these people there has long been a kind of selective blindness at work here: an image of English cricket as a kind of idyllic safe space, a world of village greens and good chaps, one of whom is called Khan, actually, so stick that in your pipe and smoke it.

It is a malaise almost as old as England itself, and perhaps the most devastating parts of the report are those that deal with cricket’s historical baggage, the legacy of Victorian Britain and the slave trade, the inequities that were built into the game from its very foundation.
Nobody gets to draw a line under this. Nobody gets to move on until everybody gets to move on

“Cricket needs to engage more frankly with the fact that [its] history is replete with tensions and social conflicts, even histories of brutality and oppression,” the report states. For some this will be nothing more than a statement of the obvious. But it is also perhaps the first time anybody remotely near a position of power has dared to utter it.

And of course you do not need to go back centuries to glimpse how cricket’s original sin continues to inflect it into the present day. It was in 1995 that the Independent lauded the fact that England’s (all‑white) pace attack “did not for once look like a United Nations strike force”. The same year, Surrey’s chief executive Glyn Woodman trumpeted the measures he had taken to deter British West Indies fans from attending the Oval Test.

“Twenty years ago parts of the ground were almost no-go areas,” he said. “They could sit wherever they liked, and they can’t do that now because of pre-selling of tickets.” And lest you regard even this as ancient history, then consider that one of the most bitter debates in the game at the moment is whether Eton and Harrow should be the only two schools who get to play at Lord’s.

West Indies fans celebrate during the fifth Test between England and the West Indies at the Oval in August 1976. Photograph: Fresco/Evening Standard/Hulton Archive/Getty Images


Similarly, the debate catalysed in 2020 by Black Lives Matter and Azeem Rafiq has been maliciously steered away from a conversation about meaningful change towards the more headline-friendly territory of witch hunts, who said what to whom, and who is a racist, whatever that means. One of the report’s more understandable blind spots is the role of the media and political class in actively seeking to derail the cause of diversity in an attempt to validate and provoke the prejudices of its older white male constituency (or “Type K individuals”, as the report so deliciously categorises them). But you get a flavour in the commission’s decision to anonymise all evidence to ward against “the impact of media reporting on those discussing discrimination in cricket, [which] was often alarming and profound”. The merciless hounding of Rafiq by the right-wing press springs to mind here.

Doubtless many of the same people will now call for a line to be drawn under English cricket’s reign of shame. Sorry. Nobody gets to draw a line under this. Nobody gets to move on until everybody gets to move on. Nobody gets to plead “stick to cricket”. This stuff is cricket. Are international ticket prices too high? Should we call them “batters” or “batsmen”? Is your county’s membership really representative of the area at large? How do we prevent age-group selections from being defined by whose parents can afford a set of pads and gloves? When your fast bowler with a history of racist tweets verbally abuses a Muslim opponent in an Ashes Test, do you start asking questions, or do you simply assume you already know the answers?

The hounding of Azeem Rafiq by the right-wing press is one of the report’s blind spots. Photograph: House of Commons/PA

And of course the backlash to this report will be severe and merciless. Those who wish to remain blind will do everything to avoid seeing. But the time for squeamishness has long passed. From its very earliest days English cricket was conceived as a Type K pastime: a game run by well‑off white men, for the benefit of well-off white men, defined and written about by well-off white men. Unsurprisingly, those well-off white men quite like things the way they are. But in many ways, English cricket brought this fight on itself. The very least it can do by way of recompense is to win it.

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English football: why are there so few black people in senior positions?

Simon Kuper in The FT

Possibly the only English football club run mostly by black staff is Queens Park Rangers, in the Championship, the English game’s second tier. 

QPR’s director of football, Les Ferdinand, and technical director, Chris Ramsey, have spent their entire careers in the sport watching hiring discrimination persist almost everywhere else. Teams have knelt in protest against racism, but Ferdinand says, “I didn’t want to see people taking the knee. I just wanted to see action. I’m tired of all these gestures.”  

Now a newly founded group, the Black Footballers Partnership (BFP), argues that it is time to adopt compulsory hiring quotas for minorities. Voluntary measures have not worked, says its executive director, Delroy Corinaldi. 

The BFP has commissioned a report from Stefan Szymanski (economics professor at the University of Michigan, and my co-author on the book Soccernomics) to document apparent discrimination in coaching, executive and scouting jobs. 

It is a dogma of football that these roles must be filled by ex-players — but only, it seems, by white ones. Last year 43 per cent of players in the Premier League were black, yet black people held “only 4.4 per cent of managerial positions, usually taken by former players” and 1.6 per cent of “executive, leadership and ownership positions”, writes Szymanski. 

Today 14 per cent of holders of the highest coaching badge in England, the Uefa Pro Licence, are black, but they too confront prejudice. Looking ahead, the paucity of black scouts and junior coaches is keeping the pipeline for bigger jobs overwhelmingly white. Corinaldi hopes that current black footballers will follow England’s forward Raheem Sterling in calling for more off-field representation. 

There have been 28 black managers in the English game since the Football League was founded in 1888, calculates Corinaldi. As for the Premier League, which has had 11 black managers in 30 years, he says: “Sam Allardyce [an ex-England manager] has had nearly as many roles as the whole black population.” The situation is similar in women’s football, says former England international Anita Asante. 

Ramsey, who entered coaching in the late 1980s, when he says “there were literally no black coaches”, reflects: “There’s always a dream that you’re going to make the highest level, so naively you coach believing that your talent will get you there, but very early on I realised that wasn’t going to happen.”  

Reluctant to hire 

He says discrimination in hiring is always unspoken: “People hide behind politically correct language. They will take a knee, and say, ‘I’m all for it’. You’re just never really seen as able to do the job. And then people sometimes employ people less qualified than you. Plenty of white managers have failed, and I just want to have the opportunity to be as bad as them, and to be given an opportunity again. You don’t want to have to be better just because you’re black.” 

When Ferdinand’s glittering playing career ended, he worried that studying for his coaching badges might “waste five years of my life”, given that the white men running clubs were reluctant to hire even famous black ex-players such as John Barnes and Paul Ince. In Ferdinand’s first seven years on the market, he was offered one managerial job. “People tend to employ what looks, sounds and acts like them,” he shrugs. Yet he says he isn’t angry: “Anger’s not the right word, because that’s unfortunately how they see a lot of young black men, as angry.” 

He suspects QPR hired him in part because its then co-chair, the Malaysian Tony Fernandes, is a person of colour. After the two men met and began talking, recalls Ferdinand, “he said, ‘Why are you not doing this job [management] in football?’ I said, ‘Because I’ve not been given the opportunity.’ The conversations went from there. Had he not been a person of colour, I perhaps wouldn’t have had the opportunity to talk to him in the way that I did.” 

Szymanski can identify only two black owners in English football, both at small clubs: Ben Robinson of Burton Albion, and Ryan Giggs, co-owner of Salford City. 

Szymanski believes discrimination persists for managerial jobs in part because football managers have little impact on team performance — much less than is commonly thought. He calculates that over 10 seasons, the average correlation between a club’s wage bill for players and its league position exceeds 90 per cent. If the quality of players determines results almost by itself, then managers are relatively insignificant, and so clubs can continue to hire the stereotype manager — a white male ex-player aged between 35 and 55 — without harming their on-field performance. 

For about 20 years, English football has launched various fruitless attempts to address discrimination. Ramsey recalls the Football Association — the national governing body — inviting black ex-players to “observe” training sessions. He marvels: “You’re talking about qualified people with full badges standing and watching people train. And most of them have been in the game longer than the people they’re watching.” 

Modest though that initiative was, Ferdinand recalls warning FA officials: “A certain amount of people at St George’s Park [the FA’s National Football Centre], when you tell them this is the initiative, their eyes will be rolling and thinking, ‘Here we go, we’re doing something for them again, we’re trying to give them another opportunity.’ What those people don’t realise is: we don’t get opportunities.”  

Rooney Rule 

After the NFL of American gridiron football introduced the Rooney Rule in 2003, requiring teams to interview minority candidates for job openings, the English ex-player Ricky Hill presented the idea to the League Managers Association. Ramsey recalls, “Everyone said, ‘God, this is brilliant’.” Yet only in the 2016/2017 season did 10 smaller English clubs even pilot the Rooney Rule. Ramsey says: “We are expected to accept as minority coaches that these things take a long time. I have seen this train move along so slowly that it’s ridiculous.” He mourns the black managerial careers lost in the wait. 

In 2019 the Rooney Rule was made mandatory in the three lower tiers of English professional football, though not in the Premier League or anywhere else in Europe. Clubs had to interview at least one black, Asian or minority ethnic (Bame) candidate (if any applied) for all first team managerial, coaching and youth development roles. Why didn’t the rule noticeably increase minority hiring? Ferdinand replies, “Because there’s nobody being held accountable to it. What is the Rooney Rule? You give someone the opportunity to come through the door and talk.” Moreover, English football’s version of the rule has a significant loophole: clubs are exempt if they interview only one candidate, typically someone found through the white old boys’ network. 

Nor has the Rooney Rule made much difference in the NFL. In 2020, 57.5 per cent of the league’s players were black, but today only two out of 32 head coaches are, while one other identifies as multiracial. This month, the former Miami Dolphins coach Brian Flores filed a lawsuit against the NFL and three clubs, accusing them of racist and discriminatory practices. He and other black coaches report being called for sham interviews for jobs that have already been filled, as teams tick the Rooney Rule’s boxes. 

Voluntary diversity targets 

In 2020 England’s FA adopted a voluntary “Football Leadership Diversity Code”. Only about half of English professional clubs signed it. They committed to achieving percentage targets for Bame people among new hires: 15 per cent for senior leadership and team operations positions, and 25 per cent for men’s coaching — “a discrepancy in goals that itself reflects the problem”, comments Szymanski. Clubs were further allowed to water down these targets “based on local demographics”. 

The FA said: “The FA is deeply committed to ensuring the diversity of those playing and coaching within English football is truly reflective of our modern society. 

“We’re focused on increasing the number of, and ongoing support for, coaches who have been historically under-represented in the game. This includes a bursary programme for the Uefa qualifications required to coach in academy and senior professional football.” 

A report last November showed mixed results. Many clubs had missed the code’s targets, with several Premier League clubs reporting zero diversity hires. On the other hand, more than 20 per cent of new hires in men’s football were of Bame origin, which was at least well above historical hiring rates. 

Do clubs take the code seriously? Ferdinand smiles ironically: “From day one I didn’t take it seriously. Because it’s a voluntary code. What’s the repercussions if you don’t follow the voluntary code? No one will say anything, no one will do anything about it.”  

The BFP and the League Managers Association have called for the code’s targets to be made compulsory. Ferdinand cites the example of countries that set mandatory quotas for women on corporate boards of listed companies. 

Asante says it takes minorities in positions of power to understand the problems of minorities. “If you are a majority in any group, when are you ever thinking about the needs of others?” Corinaldi adds: “When you have a monoculture in any boardroom, you only know what you know, and it tends to be the same stories you heard growing up.” He predicts that once football has more black directors and senior executives, they will hire more diversely. 

The BFP’s model for English football is the National Basketball Association in the US, a 30-team league with 14 African-American head coaches. For now, that feels like a distant utopia. Ramsey warns: “If there is no revolutionary action, we’ll be having this same conversation in 10 years’ time.” And he remembers saying exactly those words 10 years ago.

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It seems black lives don't matter quite so much, now that we've got to the hard bit

Many who were quick to support Black Lives Matter protests are fading away as it becomes clear what real change demands writes Nesrine Malik in The Guardian

 

Black Lives Matter mural in Shoreditch, London. Photograph: Amer Ghazzal/REX/Shutterstock


It didn’t take long. The wheels of the Black Lives Matter movement are already starting to get stuck in the mire of doubt and suspicion. A few short weeks ago, politicians were eager to be photographed taking the knee in solidarity with the movement; now they’re desperate to distance themselves from what the movement demands – such as moving funds away from policing and into mental health services and youth work to prevent crime occurring in the first place. After a respectful period during which it would have been tone deaf to object to public support of the cause of the day, the BBC banned its hosts and presenters from wearing Black Lives Matter badges because it is seen as an expression of some sort of “political” opinion.

Everyone applauds a movement for social justice until it “goes too far” – when it starts making “unreasonable demands” in the service of its “political agenda”. This moment, where sympathetic onlookers start shimmying away from their earlier expressions of solidarity, was always inevitable. It is easy to agree that black lives should matter. But it is hard to contemplate all the ways the world needs to change to make them matter – and for most people, it’s simpler to say that the goal is admirable, of course, but that these particular demands from these particular protests at this particular moment are just going too far. We project our failures of imagination on to the movement, and we decamp from the cheerleading stands into the peanut gallery. “Defund the police”? How about we come up with a less provocative slogan, for a start? These Black Lives Matter protesters, they don’t make things easy for themselves, do they?

We tend to think that protest is confrontational, and change is consensual – first, a painful moment with marches in the streets and impassioned orations, followed by something less dramatic, a softer path of negotiation and adaptation. But the opposite is true. Protest is the easy bit. More specifically, protest is a smooth part sandwiched between two very rough ones.

Before protest there is a oppression, lack of popular support, and the hard work of awareness-raising. After that comes the high-octane action, the moral clarity – and allies hop on board. But once the first blood rush of protest subsides, the people who are still on the streets are mocked by their erstwhile allies, impatient to find fault with the movement and get back to their lives without any further disruption. What was universally celebrated a few weeks ago is now faintly embarrassing: too radical, too combative, almost comically unrealistic. You might think of the trajectory of the Black Lives Matter protests so far as like that famous quote misattributed to Gandhi, but this time in reverse: first you win, then they fight you, then they laugh at you, then they ignore you.

We have a great knack for supporting victims once the injustices are out in the open – when David and Goliath have been clearly identified, and a particularly British sensibility of fair play has been assailed. In the Windrush scandal, popular anger and support for the victims of the Home Office is what put a stop to their deportations and led to the resignation of Amber Rudd. National fury, at the peak of the coronavirus pandemic, managed to pressure an obstinate, bunkered government into scrapping the outrageous NHS surcharge for NHS staff, and extending residency rights to all the bereaved families of NHS victims of coronavirus. If it hadn’t been for Boris Johnson’s terror of losing him, the country’s disgust at Dominic Cummings would have turfed him out too, so mortally had he wounded the nation’s sense of justice.

But when it comes to the underlying injustice – to making the links between the deportation and death of a Windrush citizen, the NHS worker impoverished by Home Office fees and unsettled by cruel hostile environment policies, the unelected special adviser breaking lockdown rules, and the political party we keep voting in – we’re not so good.

The same is now happening with the Black Lives Matter movement. Everyone is on board with the principle, but when it comes to the change that is required, the idealistic passengers the movement picked up along the way suddenly come down with a case of extreme pragmatism.
Part of the reason for their belated reluctance is that the course of actual change is unflashy. After the first moment passes, the supportive ally has nothing to show for their continued backing for the cause: there are no public high-fives for your continuing solidarity. You can’t post it, you can’t hashtag it; most of the time you can’t even do it without jeopardising something, whether that’s your income, status, job prospects or even friendships.

But the main reason for the ebbing support is that change is just hard. If it wasn’t, the long arc of history that allegedly bends towards justice would be a very short one. And change is supposed to be hard. It is supposed to be political.

Movements such as Black Lives Matter aren’t hobbies or social clubs or edgy pop culture moments to be accessorised with. Change is supposed to have an agenda, otherwise it’s just a trend. When we hear that liberal politicians think the goals of the Black Lives Matter movement are nonsense, or that wearing a badge is political, or that support needs to be scaled back because it looks like there might be other, more nefarious forces at play, what we are really being told is: this is hard – and we are retreating to our comfort zones.

We can't talk about racism without understanding whiteness

To dismantle racial hierarchy, we need to start by discussing the power it grants those on top writes Priyamvada Gopal in The Guardian
 

 

Manchester City and Burnley players - and the referee, Andre Marriner - take a knee before their match at the Etihad Stadium last month. Photograph: Michael Regan/NMC/EPA


When it comes to race and racism, we focus on those at the sharp end of discrimination – from black people routinely subjected to police brutality to people of colour missing from positions of influence. Progressive ideals invoke “inclusion” for ethnic minorities, or special bias training. These measures may be necessary, but they put the focus squarely on those subjected to victimisation – rather than the system that perpetuates racism.

What results is a form of benevolence whereby some people of colour get “included” as part of diversity measures, even as social hierarchies and habits of thought in white-majority societies remain largely unchanged.


There is no point in declaring that race doesn’t make a difference or that equality exists when it clearly doesn’t


The truth is that there is nothing pleasant about confronting the reality of an acute racial hierarchy. If the racial order is really to change – and there are those who don’t want it to – it is not just black lives or racial minorities that should be the topic of discussion, but the racial ideology that currently calls the shots in western societies.

This is what brings us to “whiteness” – which is not a biological category so much as a set of ideas and practices about race that has emerged from a bedrock of white supremacy, itself the legacy of empire and slavery. Confronting the idea of whiteness involves far more uncomfortable discussions than “inclusion”, especially for people deemed white, since it involves self-examination and acknowledging ugly truths, both historical and contemporary. It is simply easier to try to shut it out or down. 

I found this out to my cost last week when I tweeted a response to the racially inflammatory “White Lives Matter” banner flown over the Etihad Stadium after Manchester City and Burnley footballers had “taken the knee” to honour George Floyd. My tweet, deliberately playing with the wording of the banner by qualifying it, made the point that white lives cannot be deemed to matter because they are white, that it should not be whiteness that gives those lives value. In addition to the tsunami of racist sewage that immediately came my way, littered with N-words and P-words along with sexist slurs, rape fantasies, death threats and open declarations that “white lives matter more”, I was repeatedly asked why, if white lives did not matter as white lives, do black lives matter? Was that also not also racist?

No, it is not also racist. White lives already matter more than others so to keep proclaiming they matter is to add excess value to them, tilting us dangerously into white supremacy. This doesn’t mean that all white people in western societies are materially well-off or don’t experience hardship, but that they don’t do so by virtue of the fact that they are white. Black lives remain undervalued and in order for us to get to the desirable point where all lives (really do) matter, they must first achieve parity by mattering. It’s not really that hard to understand unless you choose not to.

Studies of “whiteness” are not new. Respected scholars, such as the late Noel Ignatiev, author of How the Irish Became White, and David Roediger, have studied the history and sociology of whiteness in great detail. Ignatiev, who was Jewish, wrote about the “abolition of whiteness”, not as a call to eliminate white people but a system of racial entitlement that necessarily relied on the exclusion of those deemed to be lesser. For Ignatiev, whiteness was not a biological fact so much as a kind of ideological club where “the members go through life accepting the benefits of membership, without thinking about the cost” to others.
Over time, people have been added to the club and aspire to membership of it, from the Irish and European Jews to many Asians today. One distinctive feature of whiteness as ideology is that it can make itself invisible and thereby make its operations more lethal and harder to challenge. Science and the humanities are largely in accord that “race” is not a biological category, but a way of creating power differentials, which have practical consequences. If that power differential in western societies is to be removed, then the ideology at the top – whiteness – must be abolished. Only then can the abolition of all other racial categories – and the post-racial world we so often claim to espouse – actually follow.

Although in Britain I am racialised as “non-white” or Asian, in my birth country of India I have some experience of what it is like to be a member of a powerful but invisible ruling category. As a Brahmin (the “highest-ranking” tier of the deeply hierarchical Hindu caste system), I belong to a social grouping that operates much like whiteness does. It rules the roost, is not disadvantaged by virtue of caste (though there are those who might suffer from poverty or misogyny), and it treats any challenge to its power as a form of victimisation or “reverse oppression”. For the record, there is no such thing: oppression only operates downwards. This is why, at the same time as I reinforced Ignatiev’s call for the abolition of “whiteness”, I repeated that Brahmin supremacy in India must also be abolished.

One of my less discourteous correspondents last week asked me, using only one expletive, why people “need a manual for race relations” when we could just respect each other. Unfortunately, until we get to a point where all lives really do matter, there is no point in declaring that race doesn’t make a difference or that equality exists, when it clearly doesn’t. “White lives matter” implicitly suggests whites matter more than others. “Black lives matter” is saying those lives need to matter more than they have, that society needs to give them more weight. Until we square up to the ugly realities of how whiteness operates – lethally, invisibly, powerfully – we are doomed to fighting a toxic and pointless culture war, where the only winners are those who want hatred to prevail.

Waking up to the realities of racism in the UK

Gary Younge in The FT 

Every now and then much of Britain discovers racism in much the same way that teenagers discover sex. The general awareness that it is out there collides with the urgent desire to find out where. People talk about it endlessly and carelessly, unsure of what to say or think or whether they are doing it right. They have lots of questions but, even if they did know whom to ask, they would be too crippled by embarrassment to reveal their ignorance. Everyone has an opinion but only a few have any experience. The interest never goes away, though its intensity wanes as they explore other things. 

The trouble is not everyone gets to move on. Black people, and other minorities, do not have the luxury of a passing interest in racism. It is their lived reality. A YouGov poll of black, Asian and minority ethnic Britons surveyed over the past two weeks reveals the extent to which prejudice and discrimination is embedded in society. 

It found that two-thirds of black Britons have had a racial slur directly used against them or had people make assumptions about their behaviour based on their race. Three-quarters have been asked where they’re “really from”. (When I once told a man I was born in Hitchin, he asked, “Well where were you from before then?”). 

More than half say their career development has been affected because of their race, or that they have had people make assumptions about their skills based on their race; 70 per cent believe the Metropolitan police is institutionally racist; and the proportion of black people who have been racially abused in the workplace (half) is almost the same proportion as those who have been abused in the street. 

Little wonder then that two-thirds of black people polled think there is still a “great deal” of racism nowadays. This is not a substantial difference from the three-quarters who say they think there was a great deal around 30 years ago.  

As the public gaze shifts from the Black Lives Matter protests, these experiences will endure. They may be tempered by greater sensitivity; but heightened consciousness alone will not fix what ails us. The roots are too deep, the institutions too inflexible, the opportunism too prevalent and the cynicism too ingrained to trust the changes we need to goodwill and greater understanding alone. 

I applaud the proliferation of reading lists around issues of race and the spike in sales for the work of black authors — people could and should be better informed. But we did not read our way into this and we won’t read our way out. The racism we are dealing with isn’t a question of a few bad apples but a contaminated barrel. It’s a systemic problem and will require a systemic solution. 

This is a crucial moment. The nature of the protests thus far has been primarily symbolic — targeting statues and embassies, taking a knee and raising a fist. That ought not to be dismissed. Symbols should not be disregarded as insubstantial. They denote social value and signify intent. But they should not be mistaken for substance either, lest this moment descend into a noxious cocktail of posturing and piety.  

Concrete demands do exist. All Black Lives UK, for example, has called for the scrapping of section 60, which gives the police the right to stop and search, and the abolition of the Met police’s gangs’ matrix, an intelligence tool that targets suspected gang members. It also wants measures to address health disparities, particularly relating to black women and mental health, and the implementation of reviews that already exist, including the Lammy Review (on racial disparities in the criminal justice system), the Timpson Review (on school exclusions), and the McGregor-Smith review (race in the workplace). 

But the only demand that has cut through has been the push for the education system to more accurately reflect our colonial past and diversity. The poll finds this has the support of 81 per cent of black people — the same percentage that approved of removing a statue of the slave trader Edward Colston in Bristol. (Far from wishing to “photo shop” our cultural landscape, as the prime minister claims, they want their kids to learn more about it. They just don’t want the villains put on a pedestal.) 

This is great, as far as it goes but, given the size of the constituency that has been galvanised in the past few weeks and the awareness that’s been raised, it doesn’t go nearly far enough.  

 The solemn declarations of intent and solidarity that flooded from corporations and governments will leave us drowned in a sea of racial-sensitivity training unless they are followed up by the kind of thoroughgoing change and investment that seeks to genuinely tackle inequalities in everything from housing and education to recruitment, retention and promotion. That costs money and takes guts; it means challenging power and redistributing resources; it requires reckoning with the past and taking on vested interests. 

“When people call for diversity and link it to justice and equality, that's fine,” the black radical Angela Davis once told me. “But there’s a model of diversity as the difference that makes no difference, the change that brings about no change.” 

The governing body of Oxford university’s Oriel College did not resolve to take down its statue of Cecil Rhodes because they suddenly realised that he was a colonial bigot. They did so because it had become more of a liability to keep it up than to take it down. Similarly, it was not new information about police killings that prompted the National Football League in America to change its position on taking a knee. They did that because the pressure was too great to resist. We have to keep that pressure up, albeit in different ways. 

 “If there is no struggle there is no progress,” argued the American abolitionist, Frederick Douglass. “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”  

Britain's persistent racism cannot simply be explained by its imperial history

It played its part, but empire does not explain all of Britain’s record of elitism, exploitation and discrimination writes David Edgerton in The Guardian


 

Enoch Powell electioneering in his Wolverhampton constituency, 1970. Photograph: Leonard Burt/Getty Images


The question of empire has become central to discussions of Britain’s national past. Some see residual imperialism as the prime element in a deficient, delusional, racist culture. Others think emphasising the dark underside of empire is an attempt to erase British history. The problem is that although long historical tradition sanctions criticism of imperialism, national history has proved far more resistant.

Talk of empire is now omnipresent, but it was previously written out of history. In the 1940s the unashamed imperialist Winston Churchill didn’t offer an imperial history of the second world war, or even a national one, but an Anglo-American, cold-war version of events in his six-volume work, The Second World War. Subsequently, what’s striking about postwar historiography is the lack of imperialist histories and the absence of condemnation for nationalist and anti-imperial forces. At most there were sotto voce claims that the British empire should have done a deal with Adolf Hitler in 1940 to keep itself alive.

More importantly, national histories ignored empire altogether. The reason is easy to find: after the war, a new nation arose that wanted to tell a national, not imperial, history of itself. This story was about the dawn of the welfare state, the Labour party and the National Health Service. This country’s ancestry lay in the industrial 19th century, but it only became a true nation in 1940, during the Battle of Britain and the blitz.

Putting the empire in its proper historical place is hugely important for understanding the sheer scale of slavery, the racialised nature of the imperial project, and how this project shaped the Conservative party into the 1950s. For much of the elite, the UK was seen as a part of something far bigger: the empire. This is why we have an Imperial War Museum and an Imperial College, and why the head of the army was called the chief of the imperial general staff. Britain’s second world war, as it was understood at the time, involved the whole British empire (and many, many allies). In 1940, no one in authority could say “Britain stood alone”. If anything was alone, it was the entire empire.

It’s also important to remember the important role anti-imperialism played for radical liberals and socialists. Radical liberals in 19th-century Britain criticised imperialism as the cause of unnecessary wars, and for sustaining a useless elite. More recently, the British centre-left has cited imperialism as the cause of war, militarism, nuclear weapons, economic decline, the failure to join the common market in the 1950s, and the failure to adapt to it since. For some historians, the demons and ghosts of empire are the spectres driving contemporary racism and Brexit, too. The UK, according to these critics, seems perpetually trapped in an Edwardian imperial mindset.

Blaming empire is a deep-seated reflex that feels reassuringly progressive. But it has also been a way to avoid confronting things that lie a little closer to home. It has long been easier, and less morally and intellectually contentious, to castigate the actions of the British state and elite in faraway colonies than confront their actions at home. Far too many ills of past and present are lazily laid at this door.

To make empire the dominant story in British history is to misunderstand the nature of Britain, its elite and its exploitative power, and its persistent racism. The racism of Oswald Mosley and Enoch Powell, for all its roots in the past, was a self-consciously post-imperial nationalist one. Imperialism reluctantly granted British Caribbean people UK citizenship. These rights were stripped away by nationalists, right down to Theresa May – this was the essence of the Windrush scandal. People voted for Brexit not because they were imperialists, but because they were nostalgic for a national Britain. They were certainly not voting for the return to free immigration from the old imperial territories. The history that seems to matter most to Brexiteers is a particular account of the second world war, one that is decidedly nationalist.

Empire has only ever been part of the British story, but it can never stand for the whole. Even at its peak, it represented only a fraction of Britain’s relations with the rest of the world, not least in war, but also in trade. From the late 19th century onwards, the Caribbean empire was tiny in terms of trade and population compared with Canada and Australia. In population numbers, India accounted for four-fifths of the entire empire, but trade with India was significantly less important than trade with the dominions. And the history of migration to and from the UK stretches wider than the empire, too – with people flowing into and out of the country to the US and from Europe. Britain’s global history, in other words, is not the same as its imperial history.

If we want to look for great silences in our history, empire is hardly the only one. There has been a glaring hole where the history of British capitalism and the British capitalist class should be; in its place are overwrought stories of decline and of imperial finance. The neglect of the British working class is particularly stunning. Giants of (anti-imperialist) postwar history such as EP Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm made this their field, and inspired countless others in a historical endeavour that peaked in the 1970s, but has since decayed even more rapidly than the industrial working class. Around 1900, Britain’s industrial proletariat was one of the three largest in the world, comparable to those of the US and Germany. The British working class alone accounted for roughly 30% of the population of the entire empire outside India, and a far higher proportion of those producing for capitalist markets.

There are many aspects of British history – many dark sides, too – other than imperialism. We should not admit the framing of the debate about history as a question of a dark imperial history sullying a bright national story. To do so would be to ignore a more difficult truth: all our national history needs rethinking.

‘Something is in the air’: Ben Okri on the fight against racism

Ben Okri in The FT

‘Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about the things that matter’ — Martin Luther King Jr 

My first conscious experience of race was when I was six years old. My father had come to collect me from school. As we made our way across the snow-covered fields in Peckham, south London, in the winter of 1965-66, I felt something crack my head. Then I heard the voices of boys shouting the N-word, making animal noises and throwing packed snowballs with stones in them. 

We fought back as best as we could, father and son, but in the end had to run. When we got home we were bloodied. 

“Why were they throwing stones at us?” I asked. 

Dad struggled for words. 

“It’s because we are black,” he said. 

 At the time, what he said made no sense to me. With time, other things said didn’t make sense either. “You will never amount to anything.” “There’s no future for you.” 

I think the 12 weeks of lockdown have purified our sense of justice. They have given us time to think. I was on a short walk the other day and found myself wondering how it must be for a child to feel that the world thinks evilly of them for reasons that don’t make sense. Imagine the additional effects of being insulted, picked on, ganged up against, constantly harassed by the police, wrongly accused, mocked on TV, excluded — in short, the whole catalogue of injustices that people of colour withstand daily?

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If anyone wants an explanation for the scale of protests following the killing of George Floyd, they need look no further than the buried accumulation of racial prejudices endured for years, for lifetimes, by black people. 

A people endure and endure and then one day an event becomes a living symbol of what is being done to them, a symbol that they are perceived as less than human. How long are people meant to suffer before they cry out? 

Racism is the perception that one race is superior to another, that the colour of their skin determines their place in the human hierarchy. Pernicious and pervasive, it is supported by a matrix of power and history. For racism to be real, there has to be power. It has to be a hard and incontestable power. It is this that gives racism its vicious quality. For every George Floyd and Sandra Bland in America, there is a Stephen Lawrence, a Julian Cole, a Nuno Cardoso in Britain. 

The real question is whether racism is inherently human. Every people, in the depth of their hearts, think themselves superior to others. They think themselves the centre of the world until another people overpower them. If a people have power over other people long enough, they think themselves intrinsically superior. Soon their mythology will reflect this. Racism is merely the mythology of power seeded into the culture of a people. But racism can also be a compensatory mythology. 

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Racism does not reflect reality. It only reflects the current reality of power relations. If the western economy were to collapse today and all the financial and military power move eastward, the mythology of race would move eastward too. Mythology is often the storytelling of those who have gained power. Strip people of their power and the justification of their racism vanishes. Watch a people acquire power, and the justification of their racism emerges. 

Racism is destructive. Racism is really war declared. It is war threatened at every moment. If you remove all the social niceties, this is what racism says: “Your life means nothing to me; my life is more important than yours.” A logical conclusion of racism is genocide. 

It is amazing to me that people don’t see that it is a few short steps from polite, concealed, social racism to Derek Chauvin of the Minneapolis Police Department applying a knee to the throat of George Floyd, also of Minneapolis, for eight and a half minutes. 

But a mentality that secretly thinks one race not quite of the same level of humanity, with a bit of power, and a sense of immunity, soon finds that very mentality justifying such state-sanctioned killing. If you doubt this, have a read through the nastier chapters of apartheid or colonial history and see the things that well-educated people who thought of themselves as perfectly civilised sanctioned in the name of race. 

The aspect that causes the greatest difficulty is how a person can reconcile their sense of personal decency with the possibility of harbouring, perhaps unknown to themselves, racist tendencies. I know many good decent people who do things to their friends of colour which, if said or done to them, would fill them with outrage. Let’s call these racism blind spots. 

The forms that racism takes are legion. They can be as seemingly innocuous as being given the tables near the toilet in a restaurant, or the most isolated places at dinner settings, or the silent insinuation of having someone clutch their handbag tighter when they see you. It could be as vicious as being set upon by the police, or having someone call the cops on you when you go birdwatching in a park. It could be as indeterminate as being the first person suspected if a mobile phone goes missing in a friend’s house that you are visiting, or taking an hour to get a taxi in the 1990s, while seeing them stop a short distance away for someone of a “less threatening” hue. It could be the terrible case of John Bunn, who was wrongly convicted of murder and spent 17 years in prison. 

Racism is one of the greatest wastes of human resources. It would be useful to have a cost analysis of what is lost to nations from the effects of systemic racism, the loss of manpower that could be put to work in the great enterprise of civilisation. 

All people who endure racial prejudice just want the normal rights of human beings. They want to get jobs, have nice working experiences, enjoy friendships, fall in love, raise their kids, and make their orderly procession through life just like everyone else. 

I think it is essential that every child be educated about race. An understanding of justice ought to be a basic part of their education. Our children carry forth the assumptions we make about the world. If we leave the moral education of our children to the schools, then they simply absorb the dominant views. A sense of justice can only really come from the home. The trouble is that so many parents have no idea of the injustices into which they are raising their children. People are not born hating, Nelson Mandela once said, they must learn. The parents needed to be educated first but weren’t. 

Children can be better educated on race, most importantly by being taught history more fully. They must be taught about the slave trade and that it was an evil. They should be taught about the empire and colonialism, but they must also learn about the legitimate voices against its cruelties and how people fought for their independence. They should be taught about the civil rights movement and apartheid. Every child should know that people are equal before God and their fellow human beings. It can only make them stronger and more in tune with the future, because they stand in truth with justice and their times. Every child should be raised with the fundamental assumption that all races, all colours, are valid and equal. This single thing alone would make the world a truly extraordinary place, rich with the possibilities of our commingled genius. 

The effect of racism on education is devastating. Not long ago, I visited a prison for a BBC programme. All of the black prisoners I spoke to fell out of the educational system because of how it made them feel. 

The issue of race is more than a moral problem. It is an existential one. The reason the issue of race keeps coming back is because people cannot face the truth about what they have done to one another. They cannot face the truth about the secret thinking that is behind the strangeness of their racial actions, or about the real reason why the ideology of race came into existence in the first place. 

The modern idea of race began with Europeans coming to Africa in search of gold. When the trade degenerated from gold to human beings, it was the ideology of racial hierarchy that was used to justify that monstrosity. 

The idea of race is not just black and white. A species of racism is there in the Bible, and in most sacred texts. It is there among the ancient Egyptians. It is there in the ancient Greeks towards the Persians, and with the Persians towards the Greeks. A casual reading of Caesar’s “Commentaries” shows that the Romans believed the British tribes to be a race of barbarians. 

Maybe all mythologies of origin are by implication racist. Tribalism is the microcosm of racism. It may well be that humans are inclined by nature to their own kind but over the course of years people learnt by trade, by the fact that no one can have all the blessings or resources, that it is better to have dealings with other peoples. They discovered in the process that the other is not so very different from them, or that their difference is not apocalyptic. Without this overcoming of prejudice to some degree, civilisation could never have happened. 

It seems that the idea of tribal or racial superiority belongs very much to the primitive stage of human development. Because, ultimately, thinking yourself superior to others is bad for business and fatal for progress. It causes possibilities to diminish around you. Those who respect others do better trade with others, and win their friendship and support. All the high-minded ideas of Rome’s superior destiny could not keep it from being torn apart by the concerted effort of the Goths. 

We have really misapplied the idea of civilisation. We think civilisation is Plato, the Acropolis and the classics. To my mind, civilisation is the unleashing of the noble impulses of the human spirit for the greater good of the human race and the beautification of the earth. The real civilisation begins when people realise that being human is one of the greatest miracles of the universe. 

Racial thinking is a toxic pathology, and at the heart of it there is a kind of madness. It is the madness of a denial of a reality which the inward mind knows to be true. The house of racial thinking is a divided, unstable house. It is unsustainable. And like the Berlin Wall, it will fall. Keep in mind the image of Chauvin with his knee on George Floyd’s neck. This is a police officer who should be protecting the citizens but who is in effect being an executioner. “It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners,” wrote Camus. 

This is a clamorous age of freedom. The young, the old, women, LGBT people, the differently abled, all demand their full human rights. 

Something is in the air. In the past, the big clashes were around visible, measurable events: the Berlin Wall, apartheid. There is some of that going on now, the tearing down of the statues of the Bristol slave trader, the removal of the statues of King Leopold II in Belgium. Maybe these protests are about an idea that is long overdue, an idea that will tear through our societies and reinstate the place of true justice in all aspects of our lives. 

Maybe the human race is growing up at last, refusing the horrible shackles of racism, rejecting all of its injustices. Maybe the time of that primitive idea of racial superiority is finally over. Black people and white people are joining forces in their monumental protests to rip this evil from our societies, our institutions, our hearts. 

In which case, the real birth of modern moral civilisation began on May 25 2020, when, for eight minutes and 46 seconds, George Floyd said 16 times over that he could not breathe.

It's time we South Asians understood that colourism is racism

If you consider kalu to be an affectionate nickname and not a slur, you need to examine your internal prejudices and the systems that support it  writes Sambit Bal in Cricinfo

What should we feel, and I ask my fellow South Asians this, having heard Daren Sammy raise the issue of being called kalu by his IPL team-mates? Horror and shame?

It is easy to imagine the befuddlement among some of his former team-mates. That was racist? Weren't - and aren't - we all buddies? Wasn't someone called a motu and someone else a lambu? What about all the camaraderie, and where was the offence when we were all having a jolly time?

How horrified and ashamed are we, really? Have we not thought, even in passing, that this could be a case of dressing-room banter being conflated with racism? And can we, hand on heart, say that we are completely surprised the things Sammy says happened did happen?

Once we have played all these questions in our minds, only one remains: how do we not know that this is so horribly wrong? It's not about whether Sammy knew the meaning of the word; it's about what his team-mates didn't know.
To address this, we must first widen the scope beyond Sammy and Sunrisers Hyderabad. We are at an extraordinary moment in history where a black man being publicly choked to death by a figure of authority has not only sparked worldwide mass outrage, but has also created a heightened sense of awareness about discrimination on the basis of colour, and led to the re-examination of a wide range of social behaviours.

To find the explanation for how it became okay for a group of international cricketers to address - in terms of endearment, they may add - a black West Indian player as kalu, we must face one of the most insidious practices in South Asian culture: colourism.

The elevation of whiteness is not a subcontinental phenomenon. The idea has been seeded over centuries, through religion, cultural imagery, and most profoundly, language, that "white" connotes everything pristine, pure and fair (consider the word "fair" itself) and that "dark" represents everything sinister. Watch Muhammad Ali take this on with cutting simplicity here.

But to understand how this idea originated and grew in the subcontinent, which suffered over 200 years of colonial subjugation and still suffers caste-based discrimination, one must sift through complex layers of sociocultural conditioning based on the regressive dynamics of class, caste, sect and gender. The hierarchy of skin colour is all pervasive in the region, and it doesn't strike most as odd, much less repugnant, that lightness of complexion should be so deeply linked to ideas of beauty.

This idea has been reinforced over decades through popular culture. You need to look no further than mainstream cinema in India: how many of our successful actors, especially women, are representative of the median South Asian skin tone? In the matrimonial pages, fair skin is peddled as a clinching eligibility factor, and consequently, ads for fairness creams position them as agents of salvation and success. So organically is this drilled into the mass subconscious that the obsession has ceased to be offensive: it is merely aspirational.

Add to this another subcontinental abomination - the practice of addressing people by their physical attributes - and you have a recipe for something utterly toxic. These terms of address are demeaning but normalised by a coating of endearment: jaadya or motu for the heavy-set, chhotu or batka for the short, kana for those who squint, and quite seamlessly, kalu or kaliya for those with skin tones darker than that of the majority.

This would perhaps explain Sarfaraz Ahmed's mild bemusement at the outrage over his "Abey kaale" remark to Andile Phehlukwayo in Durban last year. Ahmed, then Pakistan's captain, was speaking in Urdu, so it was apparent that he didn't expect Phehlukwayo, the South Africa allrounder, to understand the sledge, and that anyone familiar with the culture in Pakistan would have understood that he did not intend it as a racial slur.

But it can't be emphasised more that racist utterances are no longer about intent, because intent is so organically and inextricably loaded into the words themselves that it is no longer acceptable to explain them away with "It was not intended to be racist, or to cause hurt or offence." It's for all of us to internalise, more so for public figures: offence not meant is not equal to offence not given or received. 

The silence of victims mustn't be misread. It does not mean willing acceptance. In most cases, they have no choice. They often find themselves outnumbered in social groups - or in dressing rooms - and choose to belong, rather than to confront. Former India opening batsman Abhinav Mukund brought this to light a few years ago with a poignant post on Twitter about how he had to "toughen up" against "people's constant obsession" with his skin colour. In a dressing-room scenario, where the eagerness to conform is far more acute, and where a culture of bullying isn't alien, the compulsion to grin and bear these "friendly" jibes is even more severe.

It doesn't have to be. It might take years, perhaps generations, to reform societies, but sports can do it much more easily through sensitisation and education. In Ahmed's case, it was staggering that a captain of an international team did not understand the enormity of using those words against a black South African cricketer. Cricket boards and franchises now have elaborate programmes to educate players about match-fixing and drug abuse, and in some cases, media management. Adding cultural sensitisation to the list would be a small task but a big step.

Calling somebody kalu in the subcontinent might not feel racist in the way the world understands it. But even without the scars of slavery and subjugation, colourism carries some of the worst features of racism; it is discriminatory, derogatory and dehumanising.

The right response to Sammy is not to question why he didn't raise the matter at the time. He has already explained that he didn't understand what the word meant. It is not even about establishing guilt and punishment. The whole episode must lead to an enquiry into our own prejudices. Cricketers are not only role models and flag bearers of the spirit of their sport. They are also, more than ever before, global citizens, and ignorance shouldn't count as an excuse or serve as a shield.

Britain is not America. But we too are disfigured by deep and pervasive racism

Yes, it would be foolish to see only parallels in the US and UK experience. But to downplay our own problems would be shameful writes David Olusoga in The Guardian


 

Demonstrator at a Black Lives Matter protest on 6 June 2020 in Cardiff. Photograph: Matthew Horwood/Getty Images


One of the more pertinent statements made during this past extraordinary week appeared in one of the last places I would have thought to look – in the pages of Vogue, not a publication I instinctively turn to at a moment of profound political tension.

“Racism is a global issue. Racism is a British issue. It is not one that is merely confined to the United States – it is everywhere, and it is systemic,” wrote Edward Enninful, the editor-in-chief of the magazine’s British edition. The ubiquity of racism has been brought to stark and sudden attention by the killing of George Floyd and by the unprecedented wave of protests, demonstrations and rioting that followed.

Filmed by many witnesses and now viewed millions of times, the killing of Floyd by a Minnesota policeman, a 21st-century lynching, is so sickening a crime that the revulsion it has induced has become a global phenomenon.

The demonstrators and activists who have taken to the streets have, however, been motivated by more than revulsion. They have also been stirred to action by acknowledging a fundamental truth – that the killing of Floyd has to be understood as a symptom of systemic racism. By building their campaign around that reality they have promoted radical and challenging conversations – in countries on both sides of the Atlantic – about the nature of racism and the actions that people of all races can take in eliminating it. These are conversations that we have needed for a very long time.

Led by young people, many of them inspired by Black Lives Matter, and involving people of all ethnicities, the protests have morphed into a worldwide anti-racist movement. No longer is this moment solely about police violence nor is it limited to America. Both online and on the streets it is calling out racism, wherever it exists and in whatever forms it is found. In both the US and in Europe, people are asking, tentatively, if this might be a defining moment of change.

FacebookTwitterPinterest The British actor John Boyega speaks to the crowd during a Black Lives Matter protest in Hyde Park on 3 June 2020 in London, England. Photograph: Justin Setterfield/Getty Images

Yet in the immediate aftermath of Floyd’s death there was little reason to imagine anything would be any different this time around. For African Americans, one of the most appalling aspects of Floyd’s murder was that they had seen it all before. The same story with the same outcome, all that changed was the name of the victim – Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, Sandra Bland, Tamir Rice, Philando Castile, Walter Scott.

For many black Britons, Floyd’s death stirred memories of another list of names, those of the members of their community killed or rendered disabled in similar circumstances at the hands of the British police or immigration officers. On Tuesday, the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton, south London – the closest thing we have in this country to a museum to the black British experience – tweeted the names and the photographs of some of them – Mark Duggan, Sheku Bayoh, Sean Rigg, Sarah Reed, Cherry Groce, Leon Briggs, Christopher Alder, Brian Douglas.

Yet almost instantly a predictable chorus of voices, emanating from predictable corners of British public life, rose up to dismiss the whole thing as an irrelevance. Using a familiar playbook, they accused those black Britons who see reflections of their own situation in the experiences of African Americans of making false comparisons.

The US situation is unique in both its depth and ferocity, they say, so that no parallels can be drawn with the situation in Britain. The smoke-and-mirrors aspect of this argument is that it attempts to focus attention solely on police violence, rather than the racism that inspired it. Those who make it usually point to the ubiquity of firearms in US law enforcement, as proof that the US reality is beyond meaningful comparison. But firearms had nothing to do with the killing of George Floyd. Neither were they a factor in the death of Freddie Gray or the sidewalk killing of Eric Garner, who, like Floyd, pleaded for his life, saying 11 times to the officers who pinned him down: “I can’t breathe”, the same words Floyd used in his final moments. Nor were guns involved in many of the cases when black people have died in custody or during arrest in Britain.


Excusing or downplaying British racism with comparisons to the US is a bad habit with a long history

When black Britons draw parallels between their experiences and those of African Americans, they are not suggesting that those experiences are identical. Few people would deny that in many respects life is better for non-white people in the UK than in the US. The problem is that it is not as “better” as some like to believe. Black men are stopped and searched at nine times the rate of white men. Black people make up 3% of the population of England and Wales but account for 12% of the prison population and not since 1971 have British police officers been prosecuted for the killing of a black man, and even then they were charged with the lesser crime of manslaughter and that charge was later dropped.

To say that the racism that infects parts of our police force and criminal justice system is less virulent than that which poisons the lives of 40 million African Americans is not much of a boast. Is that really the extent of our ambition – to be a somewhat less racist nation than one led by a man who describes white nationalists and members of the Ku Klux Klan as “very fine people”? Surely we who dwell in what the actor Laurence Fox recently assured us is “the most tolerant, lovely country in Europe” have higher hopes?

Excusing or downplaying British racism with comparisons to the US is a bad habit with a long history. It began in 1807, with the abolition of the slave trade and picked up steam three decades later with the end of British slavery, twin events that marked the beginning of 200 years of moral posturing and historical amnesia. The Victorian readers who rightly wept over Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for example, conveniently forgot which nation had carried his ancestors into slavery and didn’t dwell on the fact that most of the cotton produced by American slaves like him was shipped to Liverpool.

For two centuries, we have deployed American racism as a distraction. It’s as if we find it easier to recognise American forms of racism than we do our own home-grown varieties. Convenient, as pointing fingers is always more comforting than looking in the mirror.