One of the most interesting and admittedly amusing volt-face I’ve witnessed has been that of the “stay-home, stay safe” social media fervour being forgotten, seemingly overnight, in the face of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ protests.
For weeks prior to the first large-scale protests, social media was full of hashtags, stickers, selfies and stories all reinforcing the “stay home, save lives” message. Everyone was busy proving they were doing their bit and hoovering up their internet points for being good lockdown citizens. Before the “clap for carers” was over, people on my street had escalated from clapping and cheering, to banging pots, to air-horns and someone even let off some fireworks on the final night. I watched all this with a sense of bemused unease.
Then, suddenly, on the 31st of May all of that was forgotten. Or it was in terms of the News and Social Media landscape. Now, everything was “Black Lives Matter”. Everyone was flashing their “anti-racism” credentials and repeating the same mantras as if we had all attended the same lecture on Critical Race Theory the night before. Phrases like “I must do better”, “I realise I’m part of the problem”, “I will educate myself” and pleading mea culpa for being complicit in a “white supremacist system” were order of the day.
At pointing out the discrepancy between promoting a message of “stay home, save lives” one minute and then cheering on a street gathering of thousands of people the next, I was met with cries of indignation. When I made the further point that the non-protesting population had been held under effective house arrest for two months under emergency legislation and that it was an undeniable unequal application of the law to allow any protest to occur, the indignation only increased. I was, according to one person, “archaic” in my viewpoint that rule of law and equal application of said law was something worth holding on to in liberal democracy. The logic I should be subscribing to, I was told, ran thus:
- Yes, the mass protests ran the risk of exacerbating the pandemic
- Exacerbating the pandemic was justified because “systemic racism” was more of a threat and had been going on for longer
And here is the crux of the matter; the term “systemic racism” is doing all the lifting in this justification for unequal application of the law, but if you are audacious enough to push for a definition of what “systemic racism” entails you will receive all manner of reasons. The common presupposition to all the answers is that any discrepancy in outcomes along racial lines must be due to racism or, more accurately, systemic racism. There can be no other explanation, apparently.
I must be clear, here, that I am not saying racism does not exist or that society should not work towards a system void of racism. But it is an incredibly simple line of analysis to claim that “systemic racism” explains every single discrepancy within an incredibly complex and multivariate problem. It requires us to ignore a multitude of other factors which may explain the observations.
When we look, for example, at the claim that the UK justice system is unfairly biased against black people (regularly cited as being found in the Lammy report) we find that, actually, jury conviction rates are higher for white than black people. If this is a “systemically racist” justice system geared towards maintaining “white supremacy” then it’s not doing a good job here.
When we look at earnings in the UK, black people earn on average 9% less than white people (UK gov data). But Britons of Indian descent earn on average 12% more than whites. For Chinese descended Britons it’s 30%. So are we to believe the “systemic racism” is responsible for the discrepancy between white/black average earnings, yet the same “white supremacist” system is keen to have other minority ethnic Britons earning more than whites? Again, this is somewhat of a failure of the alleged “systemically racist system”.
Maybe the disparity in earnings is due to racism in the education system? Is the state school system preventing BAME groups from accessing higher education? Again, the statistics don’t bear this out.
Indeed, during a recent UK Parliamentary debate “Education and Attainment of White Working-Class Boys” some fairly stark statistical divides within the educational system were presented to the house:
“…by age five, white boys from disadvantaged backgrounds are already 13% behind disadvantaged black boys and 23% behind disadvantaged Asian girls in their phonics, for example; only around a third of white working-class boys pass their maths and English GCSEs; disadvantaged white working-class boys are 40% less likely to go into higher education than disadvantaged black boys; and in fact, according to UCAS, only 9% of these boys will go to university, compared with around half of the general population.”
Ben Bradley MP (Mansfield) HoP debate Feb 2020
Once again, if we are to believe the presupposition that every aspect of our institutions are “systemically racist”, then the “white supremacists” within the education sector really need to have a word with themselves.
This is just from a cursory look at the evidence behind the claims made by the BLM UK group, but the same is found when one looks at anything from police action to healthcare i.e. it is far more complex than suggested by BLM and, in most cases, the theory of “systemic racism” being the answer to every question simply isn’t backed by the statistics. And yet, time and time again, we see these accusations against UK society go completely unchallenged by our politicians and journalists.
Does any of this prove that racism doesn’t exist, or is something we shouldn’t, as a society, concern ourselves with? No, of course it doesn’t.
Does this prove that we live in an intrinsically racist, white supremacist society and we should frame every single issue along racial lines? No, it does not.
Should we think carefully before we buy into this narrative, upon which we are told we need violent revolution in order to “dismantle imperialism, capitalism, white-supremacy, patriarchy and the state structures that disproportionately harm black people in Britain“[1]? I would argue that, considering the evidence in no way supports their claims; yes, very much so.
References
[1] UK BLM stated “commitment” from their gofundme page as of 07/07/20
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