Re-Thinking Race. # 144. 23/01/2024

Out of Many, One People.

Welcome. This blog gathers up and attempts to formulate the ‘new conversation’ that I featured last summer in reviews of the books by Tomiwa Owolade and Rakib Ehsan’s ‘Beyond Grievance’ (Blogs # 125 & 126). In steering the direction of the blog it is always helpful if you can give likes, negative or positive comments, or simply thinking of friends or colleagues you can encourage to subscribe.

Re-Thinking Race.

‘We need a new conversation about race’ wrote the Nigerian born, British journalist Tomiwa Owolade. In his debut book, ‘This is not America’, Owolade spelled out the various ways in which taking the understanding of race in the United States as the ‘orthodoxy’ for understanding race in Britain consistently led to distortions, simplifications or quite simply ignoring large swathes of evidence. In the United States itself a growing number of black writers and intellectuals are arguing for a more complex, ‘heterodox’ approach to race. In Britain these views have not yet received widespread attention; however they lie behind the most explosive debate about race in Britain for several decades, occasioned by the publication in 2021 of the Conservative Government sponsored ‘Commission on Racial and Ethnic Disparities’ (CRED), chaired by (now) Lord Tony Sewell, and generally referred to as the Sewell Report.

I want to look at the debate over the central conceptual issues that lie behind this controversy, and which therefore outline the questions under debate that the ‘new conversation’ raises and which cause us to re-think race

The best way to examine controversies about race in Britain today is to look at several of the concepts which have been the focus of debate.

1. The ‘orthodox’ emphasis - Inequality of Outcome.

Any survey of multi-ethnic Britain indicates that there are massive inequalities of outcome across virtually every area of national life. In terms of educational success or failure, or school exclusions; income, employment levels, or seniority; profile in political power; or in media and academia; as regards wealth and health – there are disparities across all areas, and where usually the less favourable outcomes are to be found amongst people from ethnic minorities. This raft of social statistics leads to a number of conclusions, as follows:

* Not only are people personally racist but the operations of our society are systemically or institutionally racist. It is not merely individuals who discriminate others on the basis of their appearance, but the very ways of operating in our institutions – our educational system, our health service, the police, businesses, the church – all work in such ways that minority ethnic people are disadvantaged and fail to make the progress, earn the income, or have the recognition due to them. If the ‘Windrush scandal’ underlined the resilience of racist assumptions and neglect in British officialdom, then the recent Post Office scandal has also unearthed both the existence of ‘racial profiling’ of accused postmasters (including a disproportionate number of South Asians) as well as the bullying techniques of police trained Post Office investigators, with which too many black people will have experienced.

One consequence of recognising systemic racism is that several ‘progressive’ writers on race, such as Robin DiAngelo in ‘White Privilege’ or Ibram X Kendi in ‘How to be an Antiracist’, stress that white individuals are not being insulted by the accusation of racism, rather it is simply the characteristic of the society and thought-world they inhabit.

* In the light  of these negative outcomes those who are disadvantaged need to speak out forcefully against such injustice and claim their rights by affirming black lives matter. It is unjust and intolerable for a section of our society to live under continuing, systemic disadvantage – crystallised by the death of George Floyd – thus leading to both public demonstrations of black grievance and anger, and a more general public awakening to the disadvantages suffered by black people.

* The corollary is a corresponding emphasis on white privilege (as with DiAngelo) – that simply by virtue of their colour not only were white people unencumbered by such disadvantages, but were also willingly complicit by assuming their greater wealth and power were their deserts rather than stemming from the oppression of black people. It was insufficient for white people to be detached, neutral or ‘colour blind’ about race, they needed to both repent of their unearned privileges and consciously strive to be both less white-centred and work for racial justice. Otherwise ‘silence was violence’.

* What tied all this together was Critical Race Theory – the recognition that white superiority was baked into our societies, not only in peoples’ attitudes and in the way that society and institutions operated, but in the very roots of our thinking, our sense of what constitutes knowledge and justice, and in the language that has been formed in this matrix of superiority. However you spin the wheel it will always come down in white peoples’ favour. Only a root and branch (and most probably unattainable) revolution will change this fundamental injustice.

However, the above ‘strong’ version of Critical Race Theory was generally weakened to a more widespread position that society and its institutions were racist, and that racial justice was to be achieved by ethnic minorities demanding rights for equal treatment and for white people to recognise their responsibility to be allies in this struggle, so that eventually inequalities of outcome were ironed out, and all ethnic groups achieved levels of success, power and wealth roughly in proportion to their presence in the nation.

2. The ’heterodox’ focus - the Disparity Fallacy.

Behind the immediate rage and denunciation aroused by the Sewell Report (very often by people who had not read it with any degree of care) was that it contested the above framework, which was the orthodoxy widely accepted by academics and anti-racist practitioners or ‘activists’. The Report was from a standpoint similar to black ‘heterodox’ thinkers in the USA (such as Glenn Loury, John McWhorter, and elder statesmen Shelby Steele and Thomas Sowell), and held here by advocates of the ‘new conversation’ in Britain such as Owolade, Rakib Ehsan and the Equiano Project (with Trevor Phillips as a slightly remote elder statesman). It didn’t dispute the reality of not only individuals being racist to various degrees, but also that institutions could operate to cause racial disadvantage. An awareness that critics mostly didn’t acknowledge. But rather the Report, and the ‘new conversation’, stressed that racism in its various forms was not the only source of unequal outcomes. Put simply, the ‘orthodox’ position was not being flatly contradicted but rather depicted as too limited in its understanding of the cause of disparities. It was not setting Y in contradiction against X, but rather saying that Y needs to supplement X. Racism is indeed a serious issue, but it is not the only ingredient in the pot.

For those strongly motivated to oppose racism – either from bitter personal hurt, or from intellectual conviction – such a qualification can seem threatening as a get out clause from the accusation that this is a racist society. ‘Giving a green light to racists’ was Baroness Doreen Lawrence’s response to Sewell. The battle is thought to be too intense to allow any qualifications. But no understanding of racism can last for long if it is simply trying to hold the fort against increasing swathes of evidence that undermine its central contentions.

What, then, are the views underlying the ‘disparity fallacy’?

* Britain’s minority ethnic population is by no means a monolith but rather marked by a high level of superdiversity, indicated not just by broad distinctions between crudely assigned ‘racial’ groups (as in the nine categories in the National Census) but by a menu of other distinctions – greater recognition of significant cultural differences within broad ethnic groups, differences caused by social class and educational level, original motivations for migration , length of time and response to life in Britain, different responses by gender, patterns of family life and child-rearing. All of this meant that there were massive differences of outcome between the very varied and fragmented ethnic minorities in Britain. So whilst the children of some groups struggled educationally, amongst other ethnic groups, such as Indians, but most notably the Chinese, there were levels of academic success way above that of white people.

Amongst other consequences this affects peoples’ politics. The researcher James Kanagasoorian has written ‘Across the country the identity, beliefs and voting habits of minorities are more fractured than many realise’ (The Times 04/01/2024). Thus whilst black voters are 2x-3x more likely to vote left wing, and Muslim support of 72% Labour against 11% Conservative, but amongst Chinese voters  the Conservative/Labour balance is 40%/37%, and amongst Hindus 45%/35%.

The above differences indicate the increasing salience of class as an aspect of diversity.

On the whole the more Conservative voting ethnic minorities are those which have developed a strong emphasis on upward social mobility, in particular investing heavily in the education of the coming generations, and so in some respects develop middle class orientations. The strong upward social mobility of some ethnic groups, but not of others, means both that the Labour Party can no longer presume on the minority ethnic vote. (As similarly in the USA where the Democrats have to face the near-unthinkable reality of black voters switching to Trump).

* Racism as an explanatory factor for disadvantage, therefore, had decreasing traction – there are far too many successful ethnic minorities for it to be convincing. Rather cultural difference needed to be highlighted in accounting for different outcomes. The standard assumption in British policy-making had been the manifestly nonsensical one that people from ethnic minorities form a homogenous group, which furthermore is differentiated only by appearance from the white majority so that it is colour-based racism alone that accounts for differences of outcome. Thus in the nation’s policy discussions we are all expected to believe what we all know is simply untrue: that the differences between different cultures don’t make any difference.

Of such cultural differences marriage and parenting patterns are amongst the most significant, such that the American economist Melissa Kearney has written a book on ‘The Two Parent Privilege’ (surely a title that is a mild riposte to DiAngelo’s ‘White Privilege). It is simply incontestable both that children who grow up in two-parent homes have better outcomes across the whole range of indices those who don’t, and also that only one African-Caribbean child in three grows up in such a home. The frequency of two parent families is also an important marker between middle-class and poor homes amongst white English people, though statistics based solely on ethnicity but not class fail to indicate the difference. There is, therefore, a complex inter-twining of family patterns, ethnicity, social class and deprivation that needs untangling, but clearly a ‘univariate social analysis’ looking solely at ethnicity is in danger of highlighting ethnic disparities, when the real cause might more likely be family patterns or social class.

The ‘orthodox’ emphasis exclusively on race, therefore, misses important realities, notably the very low level of white working-class achievement. Thus as regards students on free school meals, only 14.5% of whites progress to further education (by age 19) as opposed to 26.5% of mixed ethnicity and 41.6% ‘Black’ (so unhelpfully conflating both African-Caribbean and African pupils), whilst a massive 69.6% of Chinese students did.

Any serious study of ‘race’ in Britain needs to bear in mind this significant swathe of white under-achievement compared to other ethnic groups. This does not mean that racism in Britain does not exist, but it might suggest that (like much else?) it is not very effective.

The outcome of all this is, to return to Kanagasoorian, to raise the question: ‘When some minority groups think so differently across many issues and have totally different life experiences, why do we even think of Britain in terms of race? When the relationship to income, deprivation, class is so wildly different between different ethnic groups, why do we use terms such as ‘Black, Asian and minority ethnic’?’ Ironically, just as the church is increasingly tending to focus pastorally and theologically on the matter of ‘race’, a growing number of academics and writers are starting to question its salience. At the very least the church needs to recognise that we are swimming in waters where the currents can be pulling us in confusingly different directions.

3. Temptations for the church.

In conclusion, and before going on in the next week to look at how the consequences of the ‘new conversation’ cause us to revisit our theology, it is worth spelling out two temptations that can easily distort wise Christian thinking about race.

* The temptation to attractive moralising. Christians feel a particular pressure to want to do the right thing. Of course we don’t want to be racists. Of course we want to work for racial justice. The simple binary of the old ‘orthodox’ view that pitted ‘black, poor and oppressed’ against ‘white, rich, oppressor’ made it very clear which side we should be on. But the whole burden of the above argument is that we live in a much more complex context, where who is in the right is not always clear, not least because how we perceive the reality of ‘race’ in Britain is contested. This means that being too eager to be on the side of the angels can lead us into simplistic assessments and policies which may mean doing more harm than good.

* The temptation to have a good reputation. Church leaders don’t like to seem behind the times or out of touch. Fearful of being seen as hopelessly pietistic we can eagerly seek for ‘relevance’ with the danger (which historically has been charted for more than two centuries) of picking up the values and judgements of our surrounding society a decade or so after they were fashionable. If in the short term this might buff up our public image a little, in the long term it means we are advocating policies which simply fail to address the realities of our situation.