LIBERAL DEMOCRACY

The real picture of race in Britain comes in shades of grey. Until we can see them, we’ll keep talking past one another— and fail to make the progress we need

SUNDER KATWALA

Asa 47-year-old British son of an Indian and an Irish immigrant, let me start with three memories. First, 1988: at Goodison Park, squirming in my seat as my fellow supporters sang “Everton are white” to celebrate being one of the few English football teams not to have any black players at the time. Second, 1999: being asked “why don’t you lot go back to where you come from?” as I got off the bus in Eltham—but, over 20 years on, that was the last time somebody was directly racist to my face. Third and finally, this month, though it could have been last month or the month before, checking my replies on Twitter and finding a swarm of abuse of the kind I’d once thought was consigned to the past.

Similar memories and personal experiences will be shared by others among my generation. What do I take from them? That racism still exists—only we have driven much of it into the shadows. But it remains there, lurking, liable to being reactivated by the opportunities for anonymous abuse that platforms like Twitter allow too easily.

So I am not content with the real progress we have made. If there is one practical lesson to distil from this mixed picture, it is that we would do well to avoid lapsing into the sort of ultra-polarised race “debate” that consumes America’s very different society. Republicans and Democrats seem to live in completely different countries to one another. For American voters, race now sits alongside guns and abortion as an issue on which there seems little scope—or indeed effort—to find common ground. Pushing race up the agenda has been double-edged for equality campaigners: the opportunity to make overdue changes is there, but it can often be hindered by the polarisation that ultimately condemned the country to four years of Donald Trump. And yet, remarkably, an awful lot of people on both sides in Britain seem oblivious to the risks of importing such polarisation.

Two truths, two tribes

This spring, the prime minister’s own race adviser, Samuel Kasumu, left his Downing Street role warning that “there are some people in the government who feel like the right way to win is to pick a fight on the culture war and to exploit division.” Although it had been set up in response to the heat of last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests, when Tony Sewell’s Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities eventually published its report this March, it certainly didn’t cool the temperature. It joined the dots between some interesting but divergent points to reach one sweeping conclusion: that Britain was no longer “systemically racist.” To some at least, the report appeared to point to the success of particular communities with the intention of challenging others to “get their act together.” Anti-racist campaigners immediately responded with a call for the government to disown the report.

In the hyper-polarised debate stoked by Sewell’s commission, the government and its critics were at loggerheads, accusing each other of operating in bad faith while dismissing the evidence concerning, respectively, the progress made in British race relations or the persistence of discrimination. This binary argument crowds out appreciation of a reality in which two things are true at once. Yes, we have indeed come a long way; but it is also true that racism and discrimination persist.