Thread by @opinion

At least six major inquiries in the past two decades have examined various aspects of race in Britain.

All of them found evidence of institutional racism, including four since 2017. Boris Johnson’s Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities begs to differ trib.al/EdTkKyq

The commission was launched after the Black Lives Matter protests last year.

In a new report, controversial conclusions say that while it’s too early to declare Britain a “post-racial society,” arguments of institutional racism are overblown trib.al/EdTkKyq

According to the report, the U.K. is pretty much best in class when it comes to White-majority countries around the world.

The message of “cheer up, things are better than you think” won't be the comfort the government hopes, says @ThereseRaphael1 trib.al/EdTkKyq

Such inquiries carry considerable weight in Britain. Normally led by an authority of unimpeachable impartiality, they:

🔖Gather mountains of evidence
🗣️Deliberate for ages
📑Subject their findings to peer review

Johnson’s commissioned report is different
trib.al/EdTkKyq

The report was commissioned with a clear objective to “change the narrative” on race and “stop the sense of victimization,” as Johnson put it at the time.

The fear was that Britain was copying too much of America’s race debate trib.al/EdTkKyq

Tony Sewell, who led the Commission, has in the past said that evidence of institutional racism in Britain is “flimsy.”

There was no peer review and friendly media got an early summary, ensuring positive headlines trib.al/EdTkKyq

So was the 264-page report simply a political exercise?

It’s more nuanced than one might expect. It doesn’t deny racism exists or that there is work to be done. But it argues that terms like “structural racism” are as lazy as the catch-all BAME trib.al/EdTkKyq

The report is right to encourage a more granular understanding of disparities.

But many of the recommendations point to the very structural or institutional issues that the report’s summary breezily suggests aren’t a problem trib.al/EdTkKyq

In the report, it recommends:

🚔Better policing practice
👮🏿‍♀️A representative police force
👀Improved oversight
📊Requiring employers to publish ethnicity pay figures
📌Apprenticeships targeted at the most deprived areas trib.al/EdTkKyq

It would be wrong to suggest, as some have, that the Commission — whose members, bar one, are all ethnic minorities — was out to whitewash Britain’s record on race.

But the subtext that everyone just needs more positive thinking isn’t helpful trib.al/EdTkKyq

The government believes that the ethic of woke encourages racial minorities to wallow in victimhood.

That logic is at odds with many findings and the experience of many minorities, and it leads to some absurd places trib.al/EdTkKyq

One recommendation? Revising curricula so that slavery isn't just "about profit and suffering but how culturally African people transformed themselves.”

That's like a lesson on Lincoln’s assassination focusing on how great the play was in the theater trib.al/EdTkKyq

While the report creators sought to show the multiplicity of factors that feed into race disparities, it resorted to oversimplification and alienated those it’s trying to engage.

Johnson’s Commission had its say, but lost its voice trib.al/EdTkKyq