A fact cannot be racist, but if not properly explained it can be explosive
Offence – the right to give it and how to take it – has been the hot topic of 2015. Trevor Phillips’ C4 documentary ‘Things We Won’t Say About Race That Are True’ entered that debate with a well-intentioned forcefulness, laying the charge that our reluctance to talk about race has led to a climate of fear and enhanced segregation.
Phillips, a former chair of the Equality and Human Right Commission (EHRC) – which he partly blames for the ‘racket of multiculturalism’ – says many wise and interesting things, although the programme is not as ground-breaking as the crowing of the Mail would have us believe.
For example, he talks about how the confused mantra of political correctness, whose rules are ever shifting, has facilitated the rise of UKIP, and even more right-wing parties in Europe, because it gives them a weapon: the ability to say they are the only people who speak the truth. As Phillips wrote in a column for the Mail,
“Nothing could be further from reality. But the po-faced political correctness that cramps all the conventional parties is allowing these frauds to get away with it.”
This seems about right. The moment people feel that their opinions are suppressed they start to feel that they are victims of the state, and begin looking with renewed suspicion at their original scapegoat. This is what Phillips means when he says that political correctness is making segregation worse.
What the programme doesn’t do is explore the anatomy of racism. Phillips sets out a list of statistics that play into racial stereotypes but are, nevertheless, true: Romanians in London are far more likely to be pickpockets; black Britons are twice as likely to be sentenced for violent crime; Jewish households are twice as wealthy as the rest.
But these are behaviours, not characteristics. ‘ A fact cannot be racist’, Phillips says. This is true, but the problem is when facts lead people to conclude ethnic or racial traits. So while it is not antisemitic to point out, as Phillips does, that there are a relatively large proportion of influential Jewish businessmen in the UK, it is antisemitic to conclude that Jews must be money-grabbing. It would have been braver to explore why Jewish households tend to be richer rather than hiding behind numbers.
Similarly, Phillips does not look into the socio-economic factors behind his statistic about black Britons – he does say that we need to do this, but I think he should have used the programme to do it. Otherwise he’s just preaching to a choir who already think that black people are inherently more prone to violence, and not dismantling that connection at all.
Also: Stop and Search. Not only does the fact that black Britons are six times more likely to be stopped and searched than white ones cast doubt on Phillips’ figures about sentencing, it puts a hole in his argument. Because if all white people are so afraid of being called racist that they accord ethnic minorities special treatment, then why are black – and Asian – people so much more likely to be stopped and searched by police?
The documentary showed Phillips talking to a strangely frozen-faced Tony Blair about the failure of the EHRC. They discuss Phillips’ view that the EHRC’s work to eliminate bigotry had the unwanted effect of making it impossible to report or investigate crimes with an ethnic dimension because everybody feels too awkward about it. Blair tells Phillips he is being too hard on himself and I’m inclined to agree.
The few high-profile cases where the fear of seeming racist has hampered the pursuit of justice – the Rochdale sex abuse scandal, the murder of Victoria Climbié – have blown this idea out of proportion. What about the case of Baby P, or the Jersey child abuse investigation, or the historic sex abuse at the BBC and in the Catholic Church? There were failures and cover-ups in all these cases, but not because of concerns about race.
Ann Cryer, the MP for Keighley who accused Blair’s government of covering up the Rochdale sex scandal was decried for blaming the abuse on ‘cultural practices that have been imported into this country from Pakistan’. This is the kind of thing that we need to be able to have a debate about – is there any truth in this idea?
And afterwards, can we look at the cultural backgrounds of white sexual abusers? What do they have in common? We shouldn’t only be looking at the cultures of minorities (incidentally this programme did end up being more about culture than about race).
Phillips is adamant that the failure of the EHCR was that it assumed that if people couldn’t express their prejudices, they wouldn’t feel them. Phillips has recanted on this, but it doesn’t mean that the opposite is true. People tend to talk about race and politics with people they trust, their friends, who are likely to hold similar views, so it’s not the case that airing bigoted views will spark a debate capable of stamping them out.
But this is not to say that there isn’t truth in what Phillips is arguing. And it’s not only the perpetrators of crimes we should be talking about, but the victims. The International Development Select Committee estimated that up to 20,000 girls and women in the UK were at risk of FGM because officials wouldn’t report their suspicions in case they were accused of racism.
We need to dismantle the idea of cultural and moral relativism, which so often makes women from ethnic minorities – the very people it is trying not to offend – its victim. And as Phillips says, we need to acknowledge that it’s time to create new rules about how to live and thrive in a diverse UK.
Ruby Stockham is a staff writer at Left Foot Forward. Follow her on Twitter
24 Responses to “Trevor Phillips on race: an important argument, but nowhere near the full picture”
damon
Were eastern Europe’s Roma population still travelling about under communism?
I think they were more settled and have only started back to this wandering life as they have moved into western Europe, countries they have no recent history of travelling in, but do so now because they can get away with so much more in the west, and the rewards are so much higher of course.
When people are living in these kinds of conditions, and they are breaking the residency rules of only being in the country after three months if they are working and settled, what should governments and councils do?
https://c2.staticflickr.com/6/5099/5581112151_c65b6c5d4e_z.jpg
Maybe councils should offer all these people free housing.
Is that what you’d recommend Leon? Free flats for anyone who comes.
To Westminster and Kensington too.
Guest
Ah, you want to be like communists. To suppress people.
Right.
“Get away”. Oh, you mean they’re not kept in with soldiers and barbed wire. My my.
Keep highlighting how you think they have far too much. How it’s too good for them. As you, Lord Blagger, make up nonsense about housing as you are simply being racist as usual.
damon
This is why this Leon bloke is a joke.
How can you have a conversation with such a two dimensional fundamentalist?
The Eastern European Roma had no tradition of travelling around Western Europe.
But now there must be hundreds of thousands who have moved west.
If they had gone to make a new start and to try to put the poverty of their lives and the discrimination they faced behind them I’d have no problem with it.
But they went to countries like Ireland and carried on like they had at home. Or took the mickey in ways that they could never get away with at home.
Like with the begging and the rest. The Romanians ones in Belfast would go off from their half a dozen houses in the student accommodation part of the city where they ended up, pushing carts into which they would put in all the bits and pieces they would pick up in the day – looking in bins and skips, and sometimes taking stuff that wasn’t even meant to be taken away. (They were known to visit the charity shops before they opened and take stuff left outside the shop).
Others would spend the day selling the big issue and begging.
At night time they would pester smokers outside pubs or in the night club queues.
Selling roses and spangly bracelets.
And they would come and go from the houses that they had.
A core of people would remain, their children in school etc, and new people were always turning up, both from Romania and from other parts of Ireland and Europe.
Leon, read this. You’ll see I’m not making it up.
belfastmediagroup.com/locals-‘we’re-not-racist’/
Guest
“JEWS R JOKES”
How dare you actually discuss rather than spew hatred and blind racism, attacking people who are poor because of their race.
You then raise spectres of magical “keep coming”, Lord Blagger, as you demand the poor live on the street.
How *dare* someone not White British communicate with you, for instance.