For all our sakes, we must rid our society of racism
GEORGE Floyd was the latest in a long line of black people to be unlawfully killed by the US police. But the impact of his death has been unprecedented – with protests continuing to this day across the world.
Perhaps it’s because the footage of his death is so sickeningly brutal that he has become a global symbol of the impact of racial discrimination.
Indeed it feels as if, here in Britain, we have now become convulsed by the issue of race, with rival interpretations of both British history and the current state of race relations being thrashed around.
And much of the commentary around the protests is polarised – with the message either that there has been a mass breakdown of law and order or that we are a poisonously racist nation.
Neither of those is true. The real story of Britain today, surely, is epitomised by the actions of black BLM supporter Patrick Hutchinson, a personal trainer, who on Sunday was pictured hauling an embattled white counter-protester to safety behind police lines.
ON THE fundamental issue of racism, we need to hold two different ideas in our head. First, as the years go by we are becoming steadily less racist. Patrick Hutchinson’s behaviour is far more representative of what we are and what we should be than the polarised descriptions of British society.
But there is nonetheless deep-seated racism in parts of our society, which is why it is entirely right that its victims should protest and campaign.
Let’s consider some facts. Over the past two weeks there have been two main gatherings – the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests across the country, and last Saturday, a group in Westminster of (in the main) racists who came together looking for trouble.
Some 137,500 people took part in 200 BLM protests. Yes, there are parts of the formal BLM organisation’s agenda that are deeply troubling. It is not right that statues be pulled down by a mob. But perhaps we should not get hung up on that. The vast majority of the crowds were, entirely peacefully, simply protesting against racism.
As Home Secretary Priti Patel put it afterwards, there was a “lawless minority” among the protesters and, appallingly, 35 police were injured in London.
Across the country, however, the total number of arrests was just 135 – less than one per cent of all those who turned out.
But last Saturday, a bunch of racists turned up in central London. They fooled no one with the claim that they were there to “protect” the statue of Churchill.
As Boris Johnson put it afterwards, they were there for “racist thuggery”. During that day 23 police officers were injured and 113 people were arrested in the clashes with counterprotesters and the police.
The worst mistake we can make is to treat the last two weekends’ demos as two sides of the same coin. One was a mass protest against racism, with some violent fringes. The other was a racist ruck, intended to be violent by farRight extremists who try to sow racial divisions.
IF WE fall into the trap of equating the two, we do the racists’ work for them – and that is not who we are as a country. Patrick Hutchinson spoke for the vast majority of us when he said: “It’s not black versus white – it’s everyone against the racists.”
This is not just true, but more true than ever. An IPSOS Mori poll out yesterday found that 84 per cent of respondents strongly disagree that someone has to be white to be truly British – up from 55 per cent 10 years ago.
And asked if they were optimistic that the UK will be more tolerant and diverse in 10 years time, 66 per cent said “yes”, up from 50 per cent in 2009.
But just as it’s important not to fall for the racists’ attempts to sow division (and yes, there are some in the Black Lives Matter movement who do seek to divide us), so we need to recognise that racism does exist.
A recent study by the Chartered Management Institute and the British Academy of Management, for example, found that only six per cent of management jobs are held by ethnic minorities – less than half their proportion of the working age population.
And you will struggle to find a black person who hasn’t been repeatedly stopped by the police for no reason other than their skin colour.
It’s good that the Prime Minister is setting up an inquiry into racism. But we don’t need an inquiry to know that this is not a binary issue where we are either entirely racist or not at all. We are an open, welcoming society. But within that, we have real problems to address.
‘It’s important not to fall for attempts to sow division’