Comments on the Report of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities

Alan Lester

Deny and Disavow

Last summer Black Lives Matter activists invited Britons, whatever our ethnicity, to reflect on the pernicious role of racism in our society. Their toppling of the statue of the slave trader Edward Colston made it clear that a reckoning with the history of British colonialism and empire should be a key part of this reflection.[1] Instead of accepting that invitation Boris Johnson’s government’s strategy has been to deny and disavow.

First, Housing, Communities and Local Government Secretary Robert Jenrick declared “We will save Britain’s statues from the woke militants who want to censor our past”.[2] Then Culture and Media Secretary Oliver Dowden instructed Britain’s leading heritage organisations, including the National Trust, that they “must defend our culture and history from the noisy minority of activists constantly trying to do Britain down”.[3] Meanwhile academic apologists for empire like the theologian Nigel Biggar appear regularly in the mainstream media complaining about having their voices suppressed.[4]

The Report of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities is the latest and perhaps most important component of the government’s strategy of denial and disavowal. It fleshes out, suspiciously neatly, the narrative that Boris Johnson first drafted as a direct riposte to the Black Lives Matter movement in June last year.[5] The Report’s authors are very clear on one point: “We have argued against bringing down statues”. It appears to be not just a response to the Black Lives Matter protests, but part of a well-orchestrated backlash.

The Report seeks to establish a clear break between past and present, and it blames certain Black people themselves for their experiences of marginalisation and exclusion. “For some groups historic experience of racism still haunts the present”, it declares. Those of Caribbean descent are particularly to blame for their failure to appreciate that “the system is [no longer] deliberately rigged against ethnic minorities”. By contrast, “it is counterproductive and divisive” to suggest that “White people’s attitudes and behaviours … primarily cause the disadvantage experienced by ethnic minorities”.

Understanding History

When it comes to teaching British history, the Report identifies very clearly what it is for and what it is against. It is for a “‘Making of Modern Britain’ teaching resource”, which shows how “Britishness influenced the Commonwealth and local communities, and how the Commonwealth and local communities influenced … modern Britain”. “One great example”, it continues, “would be a dictionary or lexicon of well known British words which are Indian in origin”. Such a resource would presumably enlighten British students about the origin of words such as “shampoo” and “bungalow”. It might be a bit more suspect about including the word “loot”, however, just in case a greater knowledge of colonial plunder generates further pressure on British museums to repatriate objects stolen in colonial campaigns.[6]

Presumably, this resource would also avoid any consideration of how the empire, which became the Commonwealth, was actually governed. Thomas Babington Macaulay’s explanation to Parliament for why India was to be governed until 1858 by the directors and shareholders of the British East India Company rather than, say, Indians, might not get a look in: “though few of” the Company’s shareholders”, he announced in 1833, “have ever seen or may ever see the people whom they rule – they will have a great stake in the happiness of their subjects.” “In Europe”, Macualay continued, “the people are … perfectly … competent to hold some share of political power”, but “In India, you cannot have representative institutions”. Forty years later, the British architect of the Indian Penal Code, James Fitzjames Stephen noted that “If the … delusion that [Govt] can be carried out by … the natives is admitted, nothing but anarchy and ruin can … result”.[7] This too, I suspect, might be omitted.

Promisingly, the Report is for a “teaching resource that looks at the influence of the UK, particularly during the Empire period”. However, the example of the content that might be provided is disappointing to say the least: “There is a new story about the Caribbean experience which speaks to the slave period not only being about profit and suffering but how culturally African people transformed themselves into a re-modelled African/Britain.” This would not be a new story at all. British slave traders and owners told a similar story when they sought to resist abolition and emancipation in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: Africans could only ever be culturally transformed and improved, they claimed, if they were extracted from the mire of savagery in which they were sunk in Africa, and exposed to the better example of British owners on Caribbean plantations.[8] If slavery is to be taught in this new resource, all the indications are that the arguments of apologists like Nigel Biggar would be propagated. In a briefing intended for politicians, Biggar claims that Britain absolved itself of the crime of slavery when it abolished the institution in some of its colonies in 1833 (the same year that Macaulay justified the governance of Indians by British shareholders). Thereafter, the British Empire was, according to Biggar, characterised mainly by antislavery activity.[9]

It is unsurprising that slavery dominates the current culture wars over the legacies of the British Empire. Slave trading and ownership has been shown, especially by University College London’s Legacies of British Slave Ownership project, to have significantly benefitted absentee British slave owners within the UK.[10] But the actions of Britons abroad – both colonisers and those people of colour who were made British subjects against their will – are also part of British history. Antislavery is imperial apologists’ trump card because is always taken out of this context.

Here’s some of that missing context: the British antislavery campaign culminated in the 1830s, and it was part of a reorientation of a reforming Britain and its Empire towards free trade and the invasion of Indigenous peoples’ lands in the Southern Hemisphere.[11]  The Abolition of Slavery Act was passed after the Great Reform Act at exactly the same time as the East India Company was restructured along the lines justified by Macaulay, and as the British government subsidised a surge in the colonization of Australia. In both these spheres of empire Britons continued to exploit coerced labour.

Enslaved Indians were exempt from the Abolition Act and their indenture enabled post-abolition labour shortages to be met in the former slave holding colonies.[12] Whilst destroying and sometimes enslaving Aboriginal communities, Britons also kidnapped Pacific Islanders to transfer sugar production from the Caribbean to Australia.[13] Nevertheless, the supposition that Britain was an antislavery nation became its excuse for the aggressive expansion of its empire through the conquest and subjugation of African societies during the second half of the nineteenth century.[14]

Creating Britishness

The Report seems to be for teaching a grand pretence: that the British Empire was a way of encouraging people of colour around the world to feel included in Britishness. “We want all children to reclaim their British heritage”, the authors claim, making it seem as if that British heritage was something voluntarily acquired by Black Britons’ ancestors. In effect it says: let’s pretend that the British Empire peacefully extended the benefits of Britishness to people of colour. Never mind all that unpleasantness.

The rendering of black and brown people as British subjects involved great violence, however. Even the darling of Boris Johnson and the empire apologists, Winston Churchill, in a moment of candour, declared that “our claim to be left in the unmolested enjoyment of our vast possessions, mainly acquired by violence, largely maintained by force, often seems less reasonable to others than to us”. It is a travesty on the scale of holocaust denial to gloss over Britain’s imperial violence.

For Ruling the World we examined three years of British imperial governance in detail: 1838, 1857 and 1879. In those years alone, we estimate that around 1 million people of colour were killed by British forces and nearly 2 million British subjects allowed to starve to death. The Victorian Empire’s “Small wars” may have been small for Britain, but the killing of hundreds or a few thousands of people in any one Indigenous community could be enough to shatter a relatively small society and deter further armed resistance. Furthermore these wars were almost continual. In 1879 alone British forces conquered AmaXhosa, Griqua, Bapedi and AmaZulu in South Africa as well as invading Afghanistan for the second time. British forces demonstrated a blatant disregard for the lives of people of colour. In 1856 for instance Henry Bowring, governor of Hong Kong, had Cantonese civilian districts shelled every 10 minutes until the Qing governor accepted his terms for entry to the walled city and legalisation of British opium imports. The use of scorched earth tactics against colonial foes was routine until it was deployed against white Boers, when it caused outrage in Britain.[15]

Yet systemic violent conquest never appears in imperial apologists’ absurd balance sheet of the British Empire’s “good” and “bad” points and, it seems, will not be featuring in this Report’s proposed teaching resource. Discrete acts of racialized violence such as the massacre at Amritsar in 1919 sometimes appear in the “bad” column, but apologists for empire consistently disavow the reality that even after initial conquest, the Empire’s everyday administration was conditioned by racist assumptions and the threat of violence.[16]

The Report’s refusal to acknowledge that the British Empire was not only founded on, but also governed according to such racial division fuels further division today rather than healing it. As Senator Malarndirri McCarthy said of Australia, “truth telling must be an integral part of unifying our country, not dividing it”.

Decolonising

The Report is decidedly against “calls for decolonising the curriculum”, however, because these are “negative”. They involve merely “the banning of White authors or token expressions of Black achievement”. In fact most of those who call for a project of decolonisation are not advocating any such restrictive or tokenistic agenda. They wish, rather, to extend students’ knowledge beyond white authors (something that the Report itself does when it recommends “writers in the Commonwealth, such as Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, and Andrea Levy”), and to reveal the truth about the ways that people of colour were made British subjects.

Let us hope that the Report’s envisaged “credible, high-quality, online national library … enhancing the content and quality of lessons taught” includes something of the truth of the British Empire, rather than the amnesiac and nostalgic vision propagated by this government. “Understanding different perspectives and contested events is”, the authors acknowledge, “central to the study of history and should help to equip pupils to navigate a world of ‘fake news’ and clashing opinions and truths.” Indeed. For as Sathnam Sanghera has noted, “Our collective amnesia about the fact that we were, as a nation, wilfully white supremacist and occasionally genocidal, and our failure to understand how this informs modern day racism, are catastrophic”.[17]

The undoubted gains that there have been in combatting racism in Britain, “the progress won by the struggles of the past 50 years”, needs to be continued. But the effect of this report might be entirely counter-productive. It seems intended to stall the further momentum that Black Lives Matter protestors urged. Rather than seizing the opportunity to acknowledge the wrongs of the past and provide a more reconciliatory history, it seems intent on reassuring resistant white Britons that they need not take the trouble to understand Black Britons’ experiences of racism. Racial discrimination, just as they long suspected, is all in the minds of Black people, especially those of Caribbean descent. Even worse, it is just a cynical strategy of self-advancement – “playing the race card”. 

The catastrophic effect of this Report may be that its avowed intention – “to build trust between different communities and the institutions that serve them” – is belied by its own disavowal of historically entrenched and persistent racism. To achieve its further aim of “genuine inclusivity to ensure all groups feel a part of UK society” necessitates precisely the reckoning with the past that the Black Lives Matter movement has called for.


[1] On the long campaign to have the statue removed before it was torn down, see https://www.bristolpost.co.uk/news/bristol-news/how-city-failed-remove-edward-4211771 and https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/remove-the-edward-colston-statue-from-bristol-city-centre

[2] The Telegraph, 16 January 2021

[3] https://www.theartnewspaper.com/news/uk-culture-secretary-controversial-monuments

[4] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2020/06/20/academics-fear-mobbed-stand-british-empire-oxford-scholar-says/

[5] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/black-lives-matter-protests-uk-boris-johnson-slavery-statues-george-floyd-a9563541.html

[6] Dan Hicks, The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution, Pluto Press, 2020.

[7] As for Britain’s record on democracy elsewhere in the empire: The franchise was extended to poorer men in Britain in 1832, 1867 and 1884. By then two thirds of men, 18% of population, could vote. Race, rather than class was the dominant form of exclusion in the Empire overseas. Lionel Smith, governor of Jamaica wrote after emancipation of the enslaved that he feared more “Coloured” members being elected unless the property qualification was raised or voting taxed. Free black people and former slaves, he wrote, “are not yet qualified by education and property to command the respect of the country”. Even by the 1930s only 5% of Jamaicans could vote. As British settlers overseas were enfranchised on more generous terms than those in Britain, armed rebellion in the Cape Colony led to a “nonracial franchise” which allowed some Khoisan and Mfengu military allies to influence six constituencies. Such was the need to prevent more Africans voting, that the property bar was set to exclude the poorest whites too. When more Africans qualified in the 1890s, it was lifted again. In the Australian colonies Aboriginal people were not necessarily explicitly barred from voting, but it was widely assumed that they would not. When “Yellow Jimmy”, a so-called “half-caste”, tried to vote in 1859, he was prosecuted for impersonating a white man. In New Zealand, Māori men could vote for four “special” seats in 1867. In proportion to their population share, they should have had fifteen. In Canada, First Nations men had to apply for exemption from their “Indian” status, which meant giving up traditional ways, disassociating from kin and acquiring private property. Far from dispensing democracy, the British Empire withheld it on the grounds of race. Democracy was something for which independence movements had to fight against British rule.

[8] Paula E. Dumas, Proslavery Britain: Fighting for Slavery in an Era of Abolition, Palgrave, 2016; J. R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery: The Mobilisation of Public Opinion Against the Slave Trade, 1787-1807, Routledge, 1995.

[9] https://briefingsforbritain.co.uk/britain-slavery-and-anti-slavery/#_ednref27

[10] https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/

[11] Alan Lester, Kate Boehme and Peter Mitchell, Ruling the World: Freedom, Civilisation and Liberalism in the Nineteenth Century British Empire, Cambridge University Press, 2021: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/ruling-the-world/6264B85460CE672609666F24F86EBEFD

[12] Alan Lester, ‘The Men Who Made the Empire Run’, BBC History Magazine, April 2021

[13] https://australian-legacies-slavery.org/; https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/black-lives-still-dont-matter-here/; Emma Christopher, ‘An Illegitimate Offspring: South Sea Islanders, Queensland Sugar, and the Heirs of the British Atlantic Slave Complex’, History Workshop Journal, 90, 2020, 233–252,

[14] Richard Huzzey, Freedom Burning: Anti-slavery and Empire in Victorian Britain, Cornell University Press, 2012; Padraic X. Scanlan, Slave Empire: How Slavery Built Modern Britain, Robinson, 2020.

[15] Such British violence was, and is, consistently disavowed in the iconography of colonial warfare. Think of the most famous paintings of Rorke’s Drift, Isandhlwana and the sole (white) survivor of the first British invasion of Afghanistan reaching Jalalabad. All show redcoats under siege, defending barricades, forming squares, or escaping with their lives, after being assaulted by savage hordes. Wars of imperial conquest overseas became the thin red line defending itself in the public imagination at home.

[16] Kim Wagner, Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre, Yale University Press, 2019; Sathnam Sanghera, https://www.channel4.com/programmes/the-massacre-that-shook-the-empire; Alan Lester, https://theconversation.com/britain-should-stop-trying-to-pretend-that-its-empire-was-benevolent-59298

[17] Sathnam Sanghera, Empireland: How Imperialism has Shaped Modern Britain, Viking, 2021.

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24 comments on “Comments on the Report of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities
  1. jo says:

    Great article, utterly damning of the meretricious, empty, and ill-evidenced report in question.

    V quick correction – Sathnam’s surname is Sanghera.

  2. Rajwinder Pal says:

    Thanks for this well argued commentary Alan. Excellent work. I had a very busy day yesterday and will now get down to reading the report. Thanks once again for all the hard work.

  3. Mike Heffernan says:

    Thanks Alan – excellent commentary on a scandalously poor report.

  4. William says:

    Excellent analysis.
    The proper study of History involves the assemblage of as many facts as possible rather than of the few facts that are desirable.

  5. Keith Penn says:

    Superb commentary. The report is an embarrassment, an example of what seems to be institutional fragility. Thank you

  6. Thanks very much, Alan. Excellent piece – and thank you for allowing us to re-post it on the Decolonising Geography website!

  7. Dr Azlina A says:

    Great paper thanks. Please send it to the media for publication – it really needs to be read by those outside academia too.

  8. Hiri Nurmi says:

    How does the East African slave trade being 50% larger in total than the West African trade over the time it operated fit into your narrative? And the Barbary coast slave trade was hardly insubstantial either – by some estimates over one million white people were enslaved by Barbary pirates over it’s duration over several hundred years.

    • Alan Lester says:

      These slave trading practices do not fit into my narrative because they are not relevant to the report upon which it focused.

  9. Gevan says:

    Deeper self exam is needed to move Academia out of colonial retrograde amnesia.Recovering nations full collective memory will show before colonialism there were atrocities in each and every culture. BRITISHNESS merely co opted, encapsulated and entrapped nations in their cultural sins & iniquities. Then used them to divide,conquer and control them. Failing to recognize these lapses of memory in each nations narrative subjects them to a catastrophic dis service.
    All in this critical time need to see things from the point of first principles in order to facilitate enduring truths necessary to bring healing to their people,families,land and their cutures.

    • Alan Lester says:

      Every human society, precolonial, colonial and postcolonial, demonstrates inhumanity. This blog is about the denial and disavowal of British inhumanity and racism in a report focused on Britain.

  10. I agree with Alan Lester that the Race Commission was misguided in not recognising that black people in the UK suffer from endemic racism in this country, especially from the police and the courts. However, it is unfair to label Britain as a racist country as other minorities, such as Indians and Chinese have been very successful. These groups have higher earnings and higher entry levels to Oxbridge and professional jobs that white Britons. We have to address why some minorities have been successful and others have not.

    Regarding the Empire, both Mr Lester and Sathnam Sanghera in his book Empireland,are right to say that one cannot judge the Empire by an inventory of positives and negatives. However, you cannot ignore the positive aspects altogether. In Empireland, slavery and oppression are mentioned in detail but there is barely any mention of improvements in governance, public services and infrastructure. I come from Sri Lanka and all our schools, hospitals, parliamentary and legal systems are derived from the British model. Furthermore, the book hardy quotes any authors who experienced the Empire at first hand. A critique of the book based on these sources is given below:

    http://www.forgotten-raj.org/doc/Empireland.htm

    • Alan Lester says:

      Thank you Rohan,
      I would just make a couple of quick points in response: many of the ‘benefits’ you mention were opened to colonial subjects themselves only when nationalist movements’ demands to be included in the institutions of governance, to overturn discriminatory laws etc became too costly to resist in the last few decades of Empire. Most of the time, in most colonies, access to these ‘benefits’ depended on race. There are very many indigenous sources that testify to these exclusions as well as a vast amount of official British correspondence itself, which we trawled through for ‘Ruling the World’.

  11. Jeremy says:

    I’ve read the report throughout. Yes, it is clearly trying to get away from all the nastiness of Britain’s imperial history and it doggedly pushes the idea that, since racist attitudes are to be found everywhere, there is no point in publishing another report which condemns the institutions of the UK as fundamentally racist. So much of your criticism seems valid to me.
    But I don’t see what good can be achieved in following your (implicit) proposals here that educational institutions should provide a much more comprehensive and detailed account of the atrocities, the prejudices, the exploitation, the abuse, the suffering, the callousness, and so on that were promulgated by the British from c. 1500 onwards. Surely, we know that the past was a horrible place. How does it help the present and future simply to re-state and re-state and re-state that litany of man’s inhumanity to man? In other words, will your proposal to teach more of Britain’s slaving history reduce the incidence of BAME people contracting Covid or getting handed down custodial sentences from the judiciary?

    • Alan Lester says:

      Thanks for the comment Jeremy,
      I think it’s important for Britons to be taught how institutional, systemic racism first developed (which was through post-abolition colonialism in my view), so that they can first acknowledge it, then understand it and ultimately challenge it. I disagree that most Britons already know how empire produced systemic racism. Celebration of empire and denial of the racism upon which it rested still condition most popular representations.

  12. John Slee says:

    The report is an excellent report with many recommendations which, if implemented, should improve lives.

    The critics seem only interested in finding reasons to hate and persecute people based on their identity. It is as if the critics need ethnic populations to fail so they can continue to hate their ‘oppressors’ despite that in a number of documented cases the ‘oppressors’ have worse outcomes than the people they are oppressing.

    ‘I think it’s important for Britons to be taught how institutional, systemic racism first developed (which was through post-abolition colonialism in my view), so that they can first acknowledge it, then understand it and ultimately challenge it’. So what would you teach about the mfecane under King Shaka Zulu? Or the pre and post colonial conflict between the Shona and the Ndebele? Or, for that matter, about British effort to stop the Arab slave trade? Surely all history is complex and to teach it in terms of a single variable is to do the student a disservice?

    • Alan Lester says:

      I agree with some of the recommendations. My article was about the report’s engagement (or lack of it) with the historic reasons why structural racism exists in Britain. I have taught the Mfecane as well as other instances of conflict in various courses on South Africa and colonialism. The blog was about the teaching of British history and therefore focused on the extension of British rule and the creation of British subjects.

      • John Slee says:

        thanks for the reply.

        I’d say glibly racism exists in Britain because racism exists everywhere. People forming groups based round a shared identity is the default behaviour of any and every society. The interesting and useful question is how to eliminate it. How do organisations or societies create environments which are genuinely inclusive and create trust in all groups, and develop standards which are universal and not have groups developing informal standards which may be detrimental to overall purpose and performance, or create division and ‘us vs them’.

        • Garry Umphress says:

          facts but all of facts,especially those that have been hidden.
          Using the tribes mentioned by Nuri’ in the inquiry ”  what would you teach about the mfecane under King Shaka Zulu? Or the pre and post colonial conflict between the Shona and the Ndebel” ?
          This is where to start the deconstruction process to not only see but understand  the well hidden foundation of Colonialism. How it altered the course of history across the world and how it has actually contributed to what today is being called and argued about aka
          “systemic racism”.
          Which is trying to force the world to limit their view to not be able to see the malefocient hidden hand through the ” colored” filter of BLM.

          The approach which is being shared is the foundation in which all nations wage war. It was developed by the Mesopotomians, adapted by the Egyptians, improved by the Chinese. It has historically been used as a secret strategic and tactical weapon both by invading force’s as well as those who reinforce to fight later usually in a larger campaign.

          The invading force discovers the tribes in the lands who have religous beliefs involving human sacrifice in their mythological constructs.

          They capture,imprison,torture and sacrifice their chiefs,defile their women and often sacrifice their children.

          Those remaining become subjects or vassals spiritually and militarily who can be allied later if necessary so as to use them in other operations if needed.

          In essence the invaders gain not only the spiritual authority and seniority of the people and their ancient demonics in the land but also than forge a suzerain to control the mythological constructs of the people of the land and use them and their tribes as vassals.

          Enter : addditional military forces ,colonists, manufacturing, trade, an economy with banking stir for three to four generations,exoerience civil unrest until the majority of the wealth and control over the natural resources is taken. Then this four generational cycle is then set to repeat itself taking the earned wealth over each four generations who follow the first four through taxation financial recessions and natural disasters.

          These foundations of these and more are known as Nations who have used untempored mortar to build on.

          Untempored in the sense that the foundation was built upon not just the invading force’s penchant for human sacrifice but also upon those people of and in the land.

          Until these tribes in these nations can reconcile themselves to their own atrocities than those of the invaders,they can only expect the stern historians to continue to be in denial and void of the foundational truth to facilitate a spiritual reconciliation to heal their nation.

          I challenge those who desire healing for themselves as well as their nation to do the research in your own nation then hit me up. I can share the details to show you how to see and identify these patterns and more.

          Patterns that vector spiritually and physically to those empires mentioned and more.

          Respectfully submitted
          Garry Umphress

        • Alan Lester says:

          Thanks. If your initial assumption is that racism in Britain now is not really a problem, then it’s reasonable to fear that teaching about the racism of the past would create divisions. This is exactly why this report is so pernicious. It gives ammunition to those who are predisposed to deny the existence of systemic racism. That ammunition is all the more powerful for having been supplied by a handpicked group of Britons of colour. But the point is that their key finding is at odds not only with the experience of most Britons of colour, but with the evidence which has been studied by more neutral social scientists, medical professionals and others. If we start out by recognising that most Britons of colour do in fact experience racism, as the overwhelming evidence indicates, then a curriculum which acknowledges how that racism came to be and seeks to challenge the assumptions underpinning it starts to heal divides. It’s the denial and disavowal of the problem that causes further division, not the recognition of it. And again, yes racism is prevalent elsewhere too. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t address it here.

          • John Slee says:

            The report doesn’t say that racism isn’t a problem . It says it is one of a number of problems, and that there are steps that can be taken to address racism and make matters better.

            To make a specific point, it isn’t enough to say that most Britons of colour feel they have been discriminated against in order to conclude that racism is a unique problem. You need a control group, and you need to demonstrate that ‘comparable’ white populations’ have been discriminated against less than the group of Britons of colour. Many working class white Britons, particularly those with strong regional accents, also feel they have been discriminated against because of their class and regional origins. Many outcomes for white working class groups are well below those of ethnic groups such as Indians and Chinese. Hence any study needs to look at issues across society as a whole.

            It is dangerous to simply take claims of discrimination on the basis of colour at face value and argue from ‘lived experience’. It isn’t a scientific approach. The clearest case is school exclusions. People who claim that high rates of exclusion amongst children of Caribbean origin is evidence of racism need to explain why children of African origin are excluded at lower rates than the white population. Why would teachers be racist towards Caribbean children but not racist towards children of the same race from Africa? That is a perfectly reasonable question that the report (I believe) poses, and I have yet to see an answer to that by the critics.

  13. Alan Lester says:

    The objections to the report are not based solely on ‘unscientific’ lived experience. They are based on prior scientific investigation which the commission chose to overlook in favour of a narrative already set out by the government which appointed it. A number of experts supposedly consulted have now said that the main purport of their evidence was ignored. Yes there is some merit in some of the points made in the report but too often factors like ‘Geography’ are cited as if they have agency of their own, when the ways that racism shapes geography in the first place are ignored. To admit this is not to elide the fact that some white communities are also marginalised and excluded.

    • Garry says:

      In other words;
      We cannot discuss race literacy without first acknowledging the inequitable and unjust systems that have prevented Black, Indigenous, Latinx, Asian, Queer, Trans, first-gen, low-income, and many other historically minoritized and marginalized communities from attaining education and generational wealth.

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