THE conclusions of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities were written long before 10 so-called "experts" were appointed by Boris Johnson. Not a single expert was recognisable within the BAME community, in fact the inquiry faced a massive backlash the day its panel was announced.
Tony Sewell and Munira Mirza, who were hand picked to lead the commission, have a track record of the denial of institutional/structural racism and a history of blaming the community. They can be proud of the job they have done to “undermine, diminish and eradicate the struggles and gains made on race relations” as one life-long anti-racist activist described it.
With an average age of 55, those privileged, middle class commission members, remind many of us in the BAME community of the age old way that racists appointed people of colour to positions of power in order to give us a kicking, thinking it was more palatable if it was "our own" that were doing the kicking. In the late 80s those of us who were anti-racists would use the derogatory term “Uncle Toms” for such individuals.
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The only reason the Tories ordered this report in the aftermath of the huge Black Lives Matter protests, was that they needed to declare war on anyone who says Black Lives Matter - to crush the equality agenda, to crush the right to protest, to dispel any idea that people have the power to unite and bring about change.
Even in the onslaught on the term BAME, you can predict that if this bunch remain in power for another term they would love to abolish the term "racism" if they could.
Former deputy mayor of London Lee Jasper, a life long anti-racism campaigner, who had actually served under Boris Johnson called the commission’s report a "slap in the face" and said that "issues such as ethnic health inequalities, the ethnic pay gap, rising black youth unemployment, rising rates of poverty, homelessness and the scandals of systemic racism within criminal justice and the school exclusion to prison pipeline will all be superficially covered or ignored".
He’s right. The report is shallow, naive and politically motivated, it cuts and pastes. But its Tory agenda of denial is clear, where it cannot explain it avoids, when for instance it came to the disproportionate number of deaths from Covid it failed even to consider racial factors.
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The report attacks Black Lives Matter, which had galvanized a global movement against racial injustice in a way not seen since the 1960s civil rights movement. The commission insults and patronises the “idealism” of “well-intentioned young people” claiming any talk about “institutional racism achieves little beyond alienating the decent centre ground”. That comes as no surprise when that centre ground is held by the immigrant-hating likes of Priti Patel, Gove and Johnson.
The report simply fails to provide any valid explanation for the shocking disparities in education, employment, health, incarceration but concludes it is must be the fault of the BAME community.
There is a total denial of people’s lived experience. The reason that George Floyd’s (below) killing resonated with so many people of colour in the UK, was because they have lived for generations with the memories of black people being killed on our streets, in the back of police vans knowing that there is never any chance of justice.
This report was deliberately engineered to combat any concerns raised by the Black Lives Matter movement. In the main, it concentrates on education and states “in order to develop a sense of citizenship and to support integration and aspiration amongst all ethnic communities, we believe that pupils need to be exposed to the rich variety of British culture and the influences that have shaped it, ranging from the influence of classical civilisations ... the inflows and outflows of the British Empire”. The message is clear. Never mind touching our statues, don’t you ever dare question the British Empire in our class rooms.
We knew our place last summer, when we rose up to challenge mass murderers, slave traders and rapists glorified in our parks and public places. This report is simply an appendix for those “statue defenders”, when it argues that a “new story” needs to be told about the slave trade.
They actually write “the new story about the Caribbean experience which speaks to the slavery period not only being about profit and suffering but how culturally African people transformed themselves into a re-modelled African/Britain.” In essence they mean it time once more to glorify slavery.
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