Why so many ethnic-minority Brits are proud to be British - "Being British today is often presented as a source of shame by our cultural and political elites. They cite the crimes of the British Empire as proof of Britain’s rotten history. And they characterise Britain today as a racist, hostile place that any right-thinking person would be glad to escape. As one Guardian contributor put it, ‘the notion of Britishness as a privilege and source of pride feels absurd’. But not every Brit feels this way. In fact, contrary to the Guardianista view of the UK as a racist, neocolonial hellscape, many ethnic-minority citizens are quite happy to call Britain home. And they do so with no embarrassment or shame. Indeed, the largest study on race carried out in the UK – the Understanding Society report, by the Institute for Social and Economic Research and the Institute of Education – found that ‘ethnic minorities living in Britain identify more strongly with “Britishness” than do their white counterparts’. Another report, from British Future, came to a similar conclusion. Asians in Britain, it stated, ‘have the strongest sense of British belonging, with 70 per cent saying they belong strongly, compared to 66 per cent of white Britons’. There’s a good reason why many ethnic-minority citizens, like myself, feel proud to be British. It’s because many of us emigrated from less developed, often politically unstable countries with a lower quality of life. I spent well over half my life in West Africa and, since living in the UK, I have really come to appreciate much that Britain’s elites seem oblivious to – the rule of law, universal healthcare, a developed infrastructure, not to mention Britain’s rich cultural heritage. Believe it or not, there are good reasons why so many people want to live in the UK. Not that you would know that from the portrait of Britain often painted in the media and by many privileged woke activists. They talk constantly of Britain’s ‘institutional’ or ‘systemic’ racism and of its citizens’ bigotry. British history is presented one-sidedly as a tale of wrongdoing and racial exploitation. And there are calls for statues to be pulled down and historical reparations to be dished out. Many of the often privileged activists damning British society, and shaming our national past, claim to be speaking on behalf of ethnic-minority people like me. But they’re not. They’re expressing their own brand of usually white, middle-class self-loathing. What’s more, anyone who disagrees with their self-hating vision of British society is almost always met with a wave of hostility... It seems that if you don’t toe the line, and loathe Britain with as much zeal as Britain’s elites do, then you’re seen as part of the problem."
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, No ‘actual evidence of institutional racism’, report says - "‘This is already being done. Slavery is taught. And I don't understand why we would suggest otherwise. It was the case that once upon a time, the Second World War, for instance, would be taught and we wouldn't mention the million Indian soldiers who died, who gave their lives, the hundreds of 1000s of Caribbean soldiers who did the same. That is no longer the case. If you look at the textbooks, and you look at what's actually being taught in school, you will see that that decolonization has already taken place. What's odd is that this argument keeps being put forward. Now, what's more important is the quality of our history lessons and the quality of our English lessons. We can't just say put more stuff in because there's time limitations, obviously. So the fact is that you can reduce Shakespeare if you think that's a good idea. I don't, I think Shakespeare has been influencing literature for 400 years. And that if you deny children, the opportunity to read dead white men, then you are denying them cultural literacy that will allow them to make something of their lives. And so it's extremely important that these dead white men are tools. And actually, I would say inflation's in schools, we've actually gone far too far the other way. So I think too many people in positions of power, are making decisions out of ignorance and out of a genuine concern that existed 30 or 40 years ago. And they don't recognize how the curriculum has, in fact, changed'...
'‘I got to say what Katherine says I just don't agree with them. The Guardian analyzed GCSE data last year and found that just one in 10, students are studying anything to do with Empire. And that is definitely my experience. And in terms of like deleting great white men, I don't think that's necessarily necessary. I mean, we were talking about the Tudors at school endlessly. And that continues to be the case. But we were never told that there were black Tudors, that Elizabeth I was complaining about there being too many black people in London, in the 1600s. You know, we were talking about the world wars, and it was never mentioned that there were brown soldiers involved, and that we used the resources of Empire, and also the history of post war Britain, you know, the fact that the NHS was built with Imperial labor, that is also not particularly well taught. So I totally disagree with Katherine.’
'Well, I'd say that Sathnamisn't 15 years old. I mean, the point is, things have changed since he was in school. And the more important point is, first of all, at GCSE, for instance, when the Guardian is talking about that there, they forget to say that only 40% of our children take history GCSE at all, and that there is never any testing of, of history at all throughout children's entire school career until they get to GCSE. So that means the majority of children in our schools are not tested on their history. And the biggest problem we have in our schools is poor behavior, and poor teaching methods. And so children aren't taught properly in a whole variety of different ways. And that is what we should be addressing that I would agree that perhaps there will be details that will be lost all over the place. And that's because we've got poor teaching methods and poor behavior in our schools’"
This is a common thread among those who bitch about education in white countries and how they didn't learn various things in school, pretending that things are the same today
BBC Radio 4 - Best of Today, Lord Woolley: ‘I feel anger, despair and above all sadness’ - "‘The strong reactions that there have been to the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities report that we discussed on the program yesterday, that group was made up of 10 members, nine of them people of color, their work work sparked by Boris Johnson's response to last summer's Black Lives Matter Protests. Before that, of course, under Theresa May, the race disparity unit was led by Simon Wooley, who founded Operation Black Vote in the mid 1990s’...
‘I had a whole range of feelings actually. Anger, despair, and I think above all sadness, great sadness. And it wasn't just me. I had a deluge of calls, people calling up saying, Simon, is this for real? In, in 2021? We’re still having to justify whether structural race inequality exists, rather than tackling it? One woman said to me in tears, this report could have been straight out of the 1980s, 40 years ago, when denial of race inequality was at its zenith. When dark forces pitted minority groups against each other. In this report, Mishal, I'm afraid there's much in that.’
‘And yet it does say, doesn't it? And Tony Sewell said on this program and elsewhere yesterday that he is not saying that racism does not exist.’
‘No, of course he hasn't. But he's saying that it isn't systemic. And the data disproves that. We know we're still, young men are still nine times more likely to stop, to be stopped and searched by the police, black women four times more likely to to die at childbirth, no black board members on FTSE100, the list goes on. And it's systemic. And it needs a systemic response.’
‘And the commission would probably say that in line with with what they put in their report that a lot of what you're pointing to the disparities are due to socio economic deprivation and class.’...
‘Do you think they were coming from a direction where they thought if you talk about things like institutional racism and give the sense the system is against you then are you saying to young people of color, there's no point bothering, the system is against you?’"
When you hate reports that don't support the narrative. Under the lens of equity, "racism" will never go away
The Report That Shook Britain’s Race Lobby - WSJ - "If you’re an American who worries that your country’s influence is waning, you may not be heartened to learn that it isn’t. After last year’s killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, angry demonstrators in Britain, emulating Black Lives Matter protests in the U.S., took to city streets. Some committed acts of vandalism. In the port city of Bristol, a statue of a local 17th-century philanthropist was toppled because he also traded in slaves. In London’s Parliament Square, the words “Was a Racist” were daubed on the plinth of Winston Churchill’s statue. In July the government of Prime Minister Boris Johnson responded by impaneling the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities. “We decided to step away from the heat and all that vitriol,” says its chairman, Tony Sewell, “and just take a cold look at the data on racism.” In doing so, “we examined ideas that weren’t to be questioned,” namely “the race industry’s articles of faith.”... He also detects some desperation, “not only in black lobby groups but on the white left”: “they’re frightened of the report.” Since few ordinary citizens will read its 258 pages, its opponents have busied themselves spreading “distortions” in a bid to capture public opinion. He singles out the leftist Guardian newspaper, which published a sweeping condemnation by David Olusoga, a historian of slavery, who scorns the report as “poisonously patronising” and “historically illiterate.” Born in London’s Brixton district, where his Jamaican parents settled after immigrating in 1957, Mr. Sewell says the country was harsh and racist, “harder than anything they had ever experienced.” He felt the sting of racism in his youth. But Britain has “come a very long way in the last 50 years.” The report echoes that point, observing that “there is a salience and attention to race equality in the U.K. in policy-making, and in the media, which is seldom found in other European countries” and asserting that the success of much of Britain’s nonwhite population “should be regarded as a model for other White-majority countries.” Mr. Sewell says his team was careful to take a “fact-based approach” to their examination of Britain’s racial questions. In an obvious reference to activists and lobbies of the left, the report bemoans the “reluctance” in Britain to acknowledge that the country has “become open and fairer,” and singles out for attention “an increasingly strident form of anti-racism thinking that seeks to explain all minority disadvantage through the prism of White discrimination.” The report also questions the value of some cherished racial shibboleths: Do repeated assertions that the “dominant feature” of British society is institutional racism and white privilege “achieve anything beyond alienating the decent centre ground”? If every problem in society is attributed to racism, Mr. Sewell asks, “how can Britain ever be a country at peace with itself?” The report acknowledges disparities between races in Britain. But whites aren’t uniformly at an advantage, and Mr. Sewell and his commissioners part company with the race lobby, which blames racism for all differences between ethnic groups in education, health, prosperity and crime. Instead, the report argues that many of these disparities arise from differences in economic class, geography, family patterns and culture... Race activists, he explains, “just take all questions about single-parent families off the table.” It’s a distant echo of the U.S. in 1965, when Assistant Labor Secretary Daniel Patrick Moynihan prompted controversy with his seminal report, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” But Mr. Sewell emphasizes the differences between the American and British experiences with race. “I think it’s dangerous to compare the two places,” he says. “I do think there are very specific issues in the U.S. that come out of having a society that was based on slavery inside that country. Britain isn’t built like that, and blacks here haven’t got that same length of time that black Americans have been in their own country.” He also says that the U.S. has a “significant black middle class that Britain doesn’t really have.”... Mr. Sewell says these numbers are like tinder in public debates on race. If he were to go on TV and observe that 6 of 10 black Caribbean children grow up with only one parent, he would “be shot down for stigmatizing the single parent and blaming the victim. The headlines would say, ‘Commissioner Blames Single Parents.’ Actually, no—they would say, ‘Commissioner Attacks Single Parents.’ ” Mr. Sewell stresses that he has “no problems, in and of itself, with the single-parent design,” but single parents “are not getting the support they need” and that the commission recommends they receive. Absent any acknowledgment of the sociocultural strain such families face, there is no policy to provide them with “therapeutic assistance, conflict management and educational support.” When their children underperform at school and are later incarcerated, racism is the catchall explanation... “We need to disaggregate the term ‘BAME.’ ” Mr. Sewell says. This ethnic portmanteau “just lumps everyone together.” He offers examples: “The category ‘Asian’ includes prosperous Gujarati consultants in London and impoverished Pakistani taxi drivers in Bradford.” Within the “black” cohort, the Caribbean school-expulsion rate is 3.5 times that of Africans. “The idea that all ethnic minority people suffer a common disadvantage is an anachronism,” Mr. Sewell says. Forty percent of Britain’s medical clinicians are Indian: “This last fact isn’t celebrated, by the way. This is hidden.” Perhaps the report’s most striking aspect is its emphasis on class and geography as more powerful drivers than race of disadvantage in Britain. “Of course, once you start shifting the template,” he says, “you get accused of race denial. And then you become an ‘apologist’ for racism in the eyes of the critics.” Yet with a focus on class, says Mr. Sewell, “we’re able to bring everybody together, including the white poor—what we might call the British deplorables, to use Hillary Clinton’s remark.” A race-centered narrative lumps white people together. This is a problem, he says, “especially when you talk about white privilege, and you have white people in Britain who are doing worse than everyone else in health, education and employment. . . . You can’t ignore disadvantaged whites, even if the race lobby thinks you’re watering down their issue.” Mr. Sewell isn’t surprised by the venom that’s been directed against him. A network of charities, consultants, researchers, academic departments and political activists are “literally invested” in keeping the idea of racism alive. “People have a financial stake in this area, so there’s a sense that they’ve got to protect their own base.”... He worries that Britain’s “young people are growing cynical” by internalizing the lobby groups’ insistence that “the door is closed” on the basis of race. “Our message is that the door is open”—that Britain is, or at least aspires to be, a society “where, genuinely, everybody gets a chance, where everybody gets a fair opportunity.”"
Division is the aim of grievance mongers, since it is their bread and butter. So they don't want Western countries to be at peace with themselves
Sadly, even for non-liberals in the West, it is impossible to say that single parenthood should be discouraged
Woke Left pull the ladder of opportunity up then blame racism - "What the reaction to Sewell proves is that the "woke" Left has no real interest in improving the life chances of people from underprivileged backgrounds. Significant factors identified by Sewell - such as geography - that account for disadvantage, transcend race. For example, in 2018 not a single student at a school in Thurrock, Essex, applied to study at Oxford or Cambridge and of the 15 who applied to any of the elite Russell Group universities, none were accepted. These were the lowest figures for the whole of England, yet the population of Thurrock is predominately white. If the Left was really interested in improving social mobility they would focus on improving educational attainment for all, as the Government is doing. But in practice, "wokes" are more interested in indoctrination than in seeding opportunities or growing fairness. The violent protests sparked by the "Kill The Bill" campaign similarly exposes the moral vacuity of woke warriors. The legislation that has so outraged the liberal Left is not only concerned with unlawful protests by militant groups such as Extinction Rebellion. Most importantly, it will ensure that the sentences served in prison by criminals better reflect the severity of the crimes committed. At present, jail terms are often drastically cut, with even the most ruthless criminals released early. When the Home Secretary says she wants criminals to "feel terror" at the thought of committing offences, she reflects the heartfelt sentiments of those who live on the front line of crime - a reality in stark contrast to the lives of those soft-minded bourgeois liberals who use wealth to segregate and insulate themselves from the hard reality of the disorder they tolerate... The woke protesters of Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion care nothing about the disruption their mass tantrums cause to people, for their motivating concern is a self-defined sense of victimhood. Similarly, race relations professionals and "unconscious bias" trainers are threatened by evidence-based research that exposes them as useless and worthless. More often than not, establishment guilt over race has benefited ethnic minorities who, in terms of factors such as geography and education, are already privileged. As part of the metropolitan elite they are detached from the great mass of British people. Any attempt to broaden the debate about social disparity will be fought tooth and nail because it is ultimately in their interests to present Britain as inherently racist, so releasing them from any sense of obligation to the nation. Consequently, the liberal Left can kick away the ladder of opportunity whilst simultaneously signalling their virtue."
The absurdity of snubbing Tony Sewell - "Sewell, the chair of the UK government’s Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities (CRED), revealed that Nottingham University had planned to present him with an honorary degree back in 2019... the offer of the honorary degree was withdrawn because Sewell had become the ‘subject of political controversy’... The fact that, thanks to this report, Sewell is now viewed as a figure of controversy is remarkable. This says little about Sewell himself, but it reflects very poorly on the state of the race debate in Britain. Since the report’s publication, Sewell’s detractors have preferred to smear him and the CRED committee rather than engage constructively with their findings. As the row over the degree has rumbled on, Nottingham’s justifications for the snub have become increasingly bizarre. According to reports this week, vice-chancellor Professor Shearer West recently claimed that awarding Sewell with an honorary degree would overshadow his students’ graduation ceremonies and upset their families... The idea that awarding a well-known alumnus an honorary degree would cause widespread upset among students and their families is bonkers. And the fact that Sewell’s former university continues to throw him under the bus seems all the more remarkable when you consider the kinds of individuals Nottingham University has quite happily awarded honorary degrees to in the past. One such honoree is the former Chinese ambassador to the UK, Liu Xiaoming, who received an honorary doctorate from Nottingham in November 2017. At the degree ceremony, Professor Kevin Lee, head of the university’s School of Economics at the time, praised Liu as ‘one of our world’s greatest diplomats’ and ‘a leader who has done so much to create harmony in Sino-UK relationships’. Since then, Liu has been on record referring to the Chinese Communist Party’s systematic abuse of Uyghur Muslims as ‘fake news’. Despite the overwhelming evidence of the CCP’s human-rights abuses in Xinjiang, Liu has asserted that there are ‘no so-called labour camps’ there – referring to them instead as ‘vocational, education and training centres’, which are supposedly part of China’s counter-terrorism strategy. As things stand, Liu is still in possession of his honorary degree. The hypocrisy doesn’t stop there. Others honoured by Nottingham include Fu Ying, also a former Chinese ambassador to the UK, who has similarly questioned claims of human-rights abuses against China’s Uyghur Muslims. And then there’s Chen Zhili, a former Chinese education minister, who once praised Chinese international students for their work in the ‘struggle’ against perceived opponents of Beijing. Najib Razak – a former prime minister of Malaysia who was imprisoned in 2020 after being convicted for industrial-scale embezzlement involving a state-owned investment firm – also features on Nottingham University’s list of honorary degree-holders. Yet apparently none of these figures are thought to be as controversial as Tony Sewell – the charity boss who has sought to provide opportunities for deprived, young ethnic-minority Britons who wish to make progress in STEM-related fields."
Debate and Disinformation: The Ugly Quarrel Over the UK Government’s Race Report - "Howard Beckett is the deputy leader of the largest trade union in the UK, a frontrunner in the race to be its new leader, and the elected representative of the country’s unions on the executive of the UK Labour Party. On Friday, May 14th, the party suspended Beckett, and he was reported to the police for tweeting this about the Home Secretary, a woman of Ugandan Asian descent: "Priti Patel should be deported, not refugees. She can go along with anyone else who supports institutional racism"... a senior elected representative in two of the most powerful institutions of the establishment Left has invoked the phrase to justify telling a non-white woman occupying one of the three great offices of state that she should be expelled from the country of her birth. For a segment of the self-proclaimed Left, the words “institutional racism” conjure a threat so cryptic that it requires no evidence, and so evil that it excuses overt racism. Beckett deleted the tweet, but his subsequent apology is even more revealing. “I’m very sorry for my earlier tweet,” he wrote. “I was angry to see Muslim Refugees being deported on the morning of Eid Al Fitr.” At the time of writing, the immigrants in question are believed to be Sikhs, not Muslims; but such distinctions matter little to a particular kind of crusader... In UK politics, unelected members of commissions often make bigger differences to real lives than MPs... why did those who claim to care about racial disparities obsess about what they thought the report’s authors said, especially about “institutional racism,” but ignore the things those authors wanted done? Even before the commissioners had begun their deliberations, accounts of their remit were misleading... The reaction from much of the Left was apoplectic to the point of incoherence. On Twitter, where respected public figures go to destroy their reputations, two Shadow Ministers engaged in a brief exchange that made them look like distraught teenagers commiserating on Tumblr. David Lammy was once a Minister in Gordon Brown’s government, but he couldn’t bring himself to engage with the substance of the report or its recommendations, relying instead on the kind of performative self-pity and activist jargon that is the common currency of social media virality. He was duly rewarded with nearly 9,000 retweets. If Lammy cannot even talk in public about the grave problems he claims to care so much about, God forbid he should actually do anything about them were he to find himself back in government. Priyamvada Gopal, a Cambridge University don and professor of Post-Colonial Studies who tried to get the porters at her university into trouble for failing to address her by her preferred honorific, elected to cast doubt on Dr Sewell’s own credentials. Corrected, Prof Gopal compared him to Hitler’s notorious propagandist, Joseph Goebbels... The UK’s semi-official, 2016-vintage Black Lives Matter campaigning group—not to be confused with the more recent, semi-official 2020-vintage one—branded the report’s creators “house slaves.” An article posted on the organisation’s website and bylined Janet Powe denounced “Tory racists and their little helpers”... Across Twitter, the report’s authors found themselves condemned as “coons”—a racist slur I thought had fallen into disuse by the end of the 1980s. Several ostensibly sober judgements of the report’s content tried the bold gambit of complaining that the report ignored “lived experience,” while, at the same time, objecting to its statistical approach on grounds of insufficient rigour... 'Statistics are shaped by the assumptions, theories and interests of authors. They aren’t neutral, and they can introduce unintended biases.'... The bulk of the statistical work was not, anyway, conducted by the report’s authors, but by independent academics, who sometimes repeated their analyses to show that the racial disparities they observed were robust even when likely confounders were accounted for... Given that the report also makes many interventionist policy recommendations aimed at reducing racial disparities, the irony of Portes’s description of the document as “rhetoric-based evidence making” is exquisite. The report’s authors did not use the logical framework Portes accuses them of using; they drew the opposite inferences to those he accuses them of drawing; and they concluded by recommending policies that tackle racism that he accuses them of ruling out of bounds in advance... One of the most interesting things about the Sewell report is that at least one of its contributors entered the process holding conventional views about race and disadvantage within his own field, but had them transformed by newly collected evidence... if critics were slow to engage with the substance of the report, it’s probably because many of their critiques indicated they hadn’t bothered to read it... The commissioners’ hope that public clarification might encourage their critics to be more careful and fair-minded is almost certainly forlorn. For a particular kind of anti-racist, there will never be social justice or an end to institutional racism in the UK because a faith-based belief in systemic problems cannot be shaken by measurement, especially if inspired by that modern form of personal revelation, “lived experience.”... Anyone who looks at the statistics on UK educational achievement and concludes that non-whites’ disadvantage must be attributed to racism while whites enjoy systemic advantage, no matter how inferior their performance to that of non-whites, is beyond the reach of rational argument... These race panics focus on other places and times because the revolutionary conditions required to “disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure,” abolish the police, and overthrow capitalism, (all once-declared aims of the official BLM movement), do not exist in the UK in 2021. If you say you want a revolution, you need atrocities to justify it. In contemporary Britain, racist slaughter is hard to come by... Today, the UK is a country where the National Diversity Awards can congratulate a company whose suppliers are under investigation by the US government for possible breach of forced labour rules. A constituency of anti-racism campaigners is more exercised by Western slavery abolished tens of decades ago than by non-Western slavery taking place right now. This particular row is illuminated by the fallout from Brexit, which has brought home the importance of outcomes over rhetoric in UK race relations. In a country where voters are electorally committed to a net cap on immigration, EU free movement locked the UK into an immigration policy that, by default, preferred immigration from overwhelmingly white nations to immigration from overwhelmingly non-white ones. However wholesome the intentions of those who championed it, it remained a de facto racist immigration policy. Since the vote to leave the EU, net migration into the UK has increased, non-white migration into the UK has increased, and voter concern about immigration has fallen. This extraordinary “Goldilocks zone” outcome is the result of a democratic policy choice that was widely condemned as racist across most of the UK’s establishment."
Statistics aren't perfect, so let's just believe whatever we want to believe
Anti-racism is about hating white people, which is why historical Western slavery is a concern but contemporary non-Western slavery isn't
