Thread by @kenanmalik

Will probably write about Race Commission Report properly for Sunday, but a few thoughts. Having spent much of the last few years questioning arguments about racial disparities, insisting that we need to think about the complex interplay of race and class… 1/

…and suggesting that the racial categories we use are often not useful in understanding many social problems we face, I might have been expected to like the Commission approach. I don’t. It’s an odd report, marrying the polemical with the empirical to the detriment of both. 2/

Much of the controversy about the report has been about the question of “institutional racism”. That seems to me to miss the real problems with it. The report seems less interested in exposing and exploring the complexities… 3/

…than in seeing the causation of social problems as lying within minority communities themselves. This leads it to often distort the interpretation of the data. 4/

For instance, having set out the differences between different ethnic groups, the report sums this up by arguing that “it is possible to have racial disadvantage without racists” [p. 41]. 5/

It’s a strange way of framing the issue, not to mention a considerable claim, which the report does not unpack or justify or explain. The report then argues that therefore “we need to look elsewhere [than racism] for the roots of that disadvantage”. 6/

It then observes that “Racial disadvantage often overlaps with social class disadvantage” but it quickly moves on from class by asking “how have some groups transcended that disadvantage more swiftly than others?” 7/

And the answer seems to be primarily to do with “family structure” and “cultural traditions”. Which becomes a means of viewing the causation of disadvantages as lying within minority communities. 8/

Take, for instance, the question of employment and social mobility. One the paradoxes today is while minorities outperform white boys in education, and in access to university, white male working class outperform non-white in terms of income, employment and social mobility. 9/

It’s what some researchers call the “white working class paradox”: aura.abdn.ac.uk/bitstream/hand… 10/

Part of the explanation lies in labour market discrimination. Many studies in which researchers send employers cvs identical except in the race/ethnicity of the applicant have consistently shown that white applicants are more likely to get interviews than non-white ones. 11/

The report dismisses such studies because “these experiments cannot be relied upon to provide clarity on the extent that it happens in every day life”. (p. 121) The problem it claims is that minorities lack understanding of the job market and are too choosy about jobs. 12/

The report claims: “If not enough young Black people are getting the professional jobs they expected after graduating, then we need to examine the subjects they are studying and the careers advice they are receiving.” [p. 97] 13/

It also claims that black people (and minorities more generally) don’t appreciate the importance of apprenticeships because of “a mixture of prejudice and ignorance” (p. 102) 14/

In fact, figures show that black people are not underrepresented in apprenticeships (they form around 3.5% of apprenticeships, the same as their proportion in the population): ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/education-skil… 15/

(Asians are underrepresented, but the report and Tony Sewell on the @BBCr4oday programme yesterday specifically single out blacks.)16/

There are many other similar cases. The overall effect is far from looking at the complexities, the report too often simplifies the issues and ignores the data seemingly for polemical purpose. (See, for instance, the discussion of lone parent families.) 17/

I’ll write more about this later, but it seems to me an odd report, and an opportunity missed. 18/