LONDON: Britain is no longer a country where the “system is deliberately rigged against ethnic minorities”, a landmark review commissioned in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement has argued.
The Commission on Race and Ethnic disparities said that geography, family influence, socio-economic background, culture and religion all impact life chances more than racism.
In a foreword to the report, Commission chairman Dr Tony Sewell said some communities are haunted by historic racism and there is a “reluctance to acknowledge that the UK had become open and fairer”.
He said the review found some evidence of biases, but often it was a perception that the wider society could not be trusted. Dr Sewell wrote: “Put simply we no longer see a Britain where the system is deliberately rigged against ethnic minorities.
“The impediments and disparities do exist, they are varied, and ironically very few of them are directly to do with racism. Too often ‘racism’ is the catch-all explanation, and can be simply implicitly accepted rather than explicitly examined.
“The evidence shows that geography, family influence, socio-economic background, culture and religion have more significant impact on life chances than the existence of racism. “That said, we take the reality of racism seriously and we do not deny that it is a real force in the UK.”
The report also argues there is an “increasingly strident form of anti-racism thinking that seeks to explain all minority disadvantage through the prism of White discrimination”.
This, it says, diverts attention from other reasons for disparities of outcome.
The report was published in full at 11.30am on Wednesday, after the Government Equalities Office previously revealed selective highlights.
It follows wider discussions around racism following the death of George Floyd last year, subsequent Black Lives Matter protests, elite sports stars taking the knee before football matches, and a claim by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex in an explosive interview with
Oprah Winfrey that a member of the royal family – not the Queen or the Duke of Edinburgh – had made a racist comment about their son Archie.