The real racists.
A highly anticipated report on race equality disappoints those seeking to exploit division.
I RECOMMEND reading the report by the UK government during last year’s summer of violence. The Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities was headed by the highly respected Dr Tony Sewell, a black educator whose methods have extracted extraordinary academic results from the grittiest of inner-city London state comprehensives.
The commission consisted of 12 people, 11 of whom were black or non-white. The lone white man, Martyn Oliver, is a much-admired disciplinarian headmaster, who tirelessly lobbies for longer school days. Also there was Dr Dambisa Moyo, the Zambian-born economist and former SABMiller board member who was personally attacked by Bill Gates when she (accurately) condemned the state of the western aid model as detrimental to Africans.
The report makes 24 considered suggestions and concludes that, whilst there is anecdotal evidence of racism in Britain (like everywhere else), there is no institutional discrimination at the foundations of contemporary public life.
The response to the report from the radical far-left and its political allies has been the standard performative outrage. Moreover, international media, particularly the crisis actor CNN, leapt to the defence of its usual collaborators, including the now thoroughly discredited Black Lives Matter. ‘Celebrities’ have signed an open letter demanding the UK government scrap the report; 20000 signatures on a petition scream the same thing. A notorious Cambridge oddball with a colourful history of making racially inflammatory remarks, Professor Priyamvada Gopal, compared Dr Sewell to Goebbels.
I should point out that many, if not all the critics here boast incidents of accounting malpractice, incompetence or extreme stupidity in their respective pasts, so it would be unwise to absorb belligerent threats literally. The more interesting question is: why? Why would a man like Sadiq Khan, who, as the son of a Pakistani-born bus driver ascended to dazzling professional heights, diminish the very work that explains his own success? One possible answer is not immediately political - but can be located in the sentiments below:
A radical feminist is so enthusiastically woke that she has ventured herself off the measurement of self-awareness - and is thus unaware that her comments are not only patronising but racist too: ‘play with each other in this confined space black people,’ she unwittingly declares, ‘play for me, this is very entertaining, hahahaha, oh that was so clever, I have grown’. So accustomed to seeing things like this that we are now almost oblivious as to what happens to them as they journey.
Without disputing intentions, the end result of this kind of thinking is revealed in the carnage unfolding in America, the corporatization of race by some of the world’s dominant companies (including Foot Locker, whose donation of $200m to BLM was discarded by looters who sacked its Minneapolis store on Sunday night) and the sanctification of George Floyd.
Back in 2002 the UCT engineer Andrew Kenny examined this phenomenon for The Spectator. Nearly two decades later and the same logic not only prevails but thanks to Twitter’s politicised, inherently anti-white moderators (the same could be said for almost every single Silicon Valley firm), it thrives. We appear to have underestimated the task: nowadays it is not so much racism that needs to be defeated as the hyper-active scoundrels profiting off the non-examples of its existence.
For as long as there are people like Melinda Byerley and Sadiq Khan and Priyamvada Gopal, there will be a need for racism. Even when there is none.