Something was amiss but I couldn’t say why. I was a sixth-form student and talking to a girl who told me with utter confidence that “white people can’t be victims of racism”. Racism is about power and privilege. White people have power and privilege. Black people and Asians don’t. This means that only the latter group can be victims of racism; racism is the exercise of power and privilege against people of colour.
I nodded at the time – she almost convinced me. Almost. I admired her clarity but felt her account was too neat. I liked her passion but thought it was painfully misguided.
It has only been over the past few years that I have been able to say exactly why she is wrong; why her account of racism is provincial rather than progressive; why combating material inequalities should be based on truth rather than distorted narratives.
The year 2021 was a strange time to be alive. The interregnum between lockdown and “back to normal”. The last full year of Boris Johnson’s slipshod government. The terrifying wildfires in Australia. Amid the chaos and change, though, something else seismic occurred that year. More than 14,000 people took part in the Evidence for Equality National Survey between February and October. They came from 21 ethnic backgrounds and all parts of the country. The survey report was released last week, and it claims to be the most comprehensive account of racial inequality in Britain for more than 25 years.
The research was carried out by academics from the universities of St Andrews, Manchester and King’s College London, and published in a book called Racism and Ethnic Inequality in a Time of Crisis.
Nissa Finney is a professor of human geography at St Andrews and led the report. She argues that the “UK is immeasurably far from being a racially just society. The kinds of inequality we see in our study would not be there if we had a really just society.”
The figure from the report that has most grabbed the headlines is this: more than a third of ethnic minority people in Britain have experienced some form of racist abuse.
The standard progressive response would be that this is awful but not surprising. We all know we live in a racist society; anyone who denies this is deluded and complicit with racism. Any racial abuse against any individual is morally abhorrent, and civil society has a moral duty to oppose prejudice. We should try to get the number of people who experience racism as close to zero as we possibly can. But something again nagged at me in the way many have presented the evidence from this survey. Because the corollary of one third of ethnic minority people reporting that they have experienced racist assault is that two thirds of ethnic minority people have not.
This does not mean that there is no racism in Britain. The recent Casey report, for instance, affirmed the existence of institutional racism in the Metropolitan police. But the Evidence for Equality National Survey report complicates some of the underlying assumptions that many ostensibly progressive people espouse on racial inequality in Britain. One is a narrow idea of what constitutes racism.
Anyone who is white is privileged, we are told, and racism only affects people of colour. The problem with this view is that there are certain minorities who are seen as white and yet experience prejudice. In fact, the two groups most likely to say they have experienced racist abuse, according to the survey, are Gypsy, Traveller and Roma communities and Jewish people.
More than 60% of Gypsy and Traveller people reported that they had experienced some form of racist assault. More than 55% of Jewish people report the same.
But we also find striking differences within groups we often unthinkingly group together.
Black Caribbean people, for instance, are more likely than black African people to say they have experienced racism – nearly 50% for black Caribbean people and more than 30% for black African people. Which also means that more than half of black Caribbean people and two thirds of black African people say they experienced no racist assault. All of this from a survey many have used to conclude that Britain is far from being a racially just society.
Remarkably, the survey found that 40% of white Irish people reported experiencing some form of racist assault in their lives. This means that white Irish people are more likely to say they have experienced prejudice in Britain than black African people and all Asian ethnic groups: Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Chinese and other Asian groups.
One response to this is obvious. Some minority groups might under-report their experience of racist abuse, others might over-report. We shouldn’t take the survey as an objective account of racism in Britain. But the problem with this point of view is that the report has already been used to advance the claim that Britain is still plagued by racism – and the very same people who make this claim also emphasise only one kind of racial inequality, one that puts black and Asian people at the very bottom of society, and “white” people at the top.
If the latter is true, then we need to discard the report as useless. If the report is useful, we need to recalibrate how we think about racism. We can’t think both that the report is helpful and still cling to that narrow account of racism.
There are racial inequalities in our society. This much is true. But this should be approached with subtlety rather than simplicity. This is because ethnic minority people in this country have diverse experiences and any commitment to fighting racial disadvantage needs to incorporate this complex truth if it wants to be truly effective.
Morally speaking, racism is a black and white issue. But when it comes to how it manifests itself, it is multidimensional. The most comprehensive survey on racial inequality for nearly 30 years needs to be examined comprehensively.
• Tomiwa Owolade is a contributing writer at the New Statesman
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