Some Reflections on Black Lives Matter and Racism

As a student in the 1970s, when I campaigned against racism,  I expected that in my lifetime I would see it reduce significantly.

Now, nearly 50 years later, I am surprised that the progress we have achieved, as a country, is much less than I anticipated. Whilst I believe that we have made some progress, the scale of racism that persists disappoints me.

So, let’s start with what, I perceive, to be the successes. The overt, in your face, racism of the past I think has reduced. In those days, many immigrant families feared for physical attacks in the streets, many white parents forbad their children from playing with non-white friends from school. A survey in the 60s, had 50% of white respondents saying they would move to a new house if a black person moved next door and the language of the day was often intemperate, uneducated and coarse. Bernard Manning infamously went on Mrs Merton and talked about ‘there being no Pakis at Dunkirk’ (Pakistan hadn’t been invented in 1940 and Manning clearly knew nothing about the thousands of Indians fighting for the British Army in WWII).

I believe that Britain is now a more tolerant and pluralist country. We take a more positive view of immigration. In 2011, 64% of Britons viewed immigration negatively; in 2019 only 26% thought that.

Disapproval of interracial marriage has dropped away. In the 1950s, only 5% of people approved of interracial marriage; now that figure is over 80%. Over recent decades, the UK has hospitably welcomed peoples of all nationalities and creeds to our shores. London is one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the world.  Citizens of other countries admire British values of tolerance, diversity and inclusion. So, I believe, there are things to be proud of in the way we are evolving a pluralist, multicultural society.

However, the scars of racism and prejudice, whether conscious or unconscious, persist, as the powerful testimonies of many successful black people have shown over the last year, as an example listen to Michael Holding talking about ’Black Lives Matter’ and his experiences – https://youtu.be/MaJfif0Dq8Q

The statistics are also sobering.

A 2020 You Gov Poll reported that:

• 2/3rds of BAME Britons have had a racial slur directly used against them.
• ¾ have been asked ‘where they really come from?’
• 50% have experienced racism in the street and nearly as big a percentage have experienced it at work
• 84% of BAME Britons believe that racism exists in the country today (virtually the same as 30 years ago when the number was 86%)
• 29% have been stopped and questioned on the street by various authorities.

People from a BAME background also:

• Are significantly underrepresented at senior levels of companies, professions and even the NHS. For instance, only 7% of directors of top Companies are from BAME backgrounds against a percentage of over 14% BAME people in the UK population.
• Since 2010 there has been a 49% increase in the number of ethnic minority 16-24 year olds. who were long term unemployed – while in the same period there had been a fall of 2% in long term unemployment among white people in the same age category
• Black graduates are paid an average of 23.1% less than similarly qualified white graduates.
• Health inequalities affecting BAME Britons has long been recognised, but the COVID epidemic has given it sharper focus with people of Bangladeshi ethnicity having around twice the risk of death than people of White British ethnicity during the first wave. People of Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, Other Asian, Caribbean and Other Black ethnicity had between 10% and 50% higher risk of death when compared to White British.
• We still have far too many young black men being killed by other young black men.

So, what needs to happen now.

I’ve pondered this question hard, particularly since I perceive that over the last 50 years, we’ve had in power governments which have had generally good intentions in this area. But little progress seems to have been made.

As a practical start the Government and other authorities could implement the majority of the recommendations of the following reviews:

• The Lammy Review on the Criminal Justice System
• The Timpson review on School Exclusions
• The McGregor-Smith review on Employment and the Workplace

But to tackle what I think may be an underlying cause of racism in our country perhaps we need to radically overhaul what we teach our children at school, particularly with respect to our history?

When I was growing up, I was taught mainly about the Romans, the Tudors, the Stuarts and the two World Wars. I learnt about how we as a country had stood out ‘alone’ against the tyranny of Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese.  I learnt that the British Empire had been the largest empire the world had ever know and in my geography atlases much of the world was still coloured pink. I was taught about William Wilberforce and how Parliament abolished slavery.

Consequently, the sense of British exceptionalism, which has been a continuing theme of public and political discourse for my whole life, seemed perfectly natural.

With respect to those ‘pink’ countries I also learnt that most of them were poor third world countries and we, through the Commonwealth, were ‘looking after them and helping them develop’.

That was my educational inheritance.  And alas, it seems, based on the experiences of my children and of my friends’ grandchildren, that their educational inheritance isn’t much different.

Over the last decade I have been fortunate enough to travel the world and to have had the time to read more extensively. It seems embarrassing to admit, but in this process, I have ‘discovered’ the following:

• India in 1700 was the richest country in the world; accounting for 27% of the world’s economy.
  • The palaces and temples of India built during this period were far grander, more opulent and luxurious than anything similar in Europe at the time.
  • India was a far greater industrial and manufacturing nation than any other European or Asian country at the time.
  • India’s textile goods were famous throughout the world.
  •  India’s plentiful supply of jewelry and precious stones generated huge wealth for the country.
• When the British left India in the mid-20^th century, we left an impoverished third world country having systematically repatriated, over two centuries, vast sums of wealth and natural resources, in the process destroying native Indian commerce, industry and agriculture.
• With this extraordinary wealth, the British Empire helped establish the City of London as one of the world’s main financial centres and explains how some of our richest families, institutions and cities became so prosperous.
• Another source of British wealth was of course the slave trade with the accompanying sugar and cotton industries in the West Indies and America.
  • Over 10 million enslaved Africans were transported in brutal unsanitary, overcrowded conditions, across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas from the 16th to the 19th century. 3.4 million of these were transported by British companies. It was the second of three stages of the so-called triangular trade, in which arms, textiles, and wine were shipped from Europe to Africa, slaves from Africa to the Americas, and sugar and coffee from the Americas to Europe. It was a profitable business.
  • The British economy was transformed by the Atlantic slave trade. In 1700, 80 per cent of British trade went to Europe from ports on the east and south coasts. By 1800, 60 per cent of British trade went to Africa and America, sailing from the three main west coast ports – Glasgow, Liverpool and Bristol.

I do not think it right to say that our imperial history was an unremitting saga of brutality, conquest and racism. Many ethnic minorities have settled in Britain because they embraced the best of British values and saw Britain as a home, they wanted to make their own.

However understanding history, I believe, plays an important component role in any national psyche. So its content is important.

It is interesting to contrast how the Germans have used the teaching of history since the end of the Second World War. Neil McGregor, former Director of the British Museum wrote: ‘What is remarkable about German history as a whole is that Germans use their history to think about the future; whereas the British tend to use their history to comfort themselves’.

I believe that, if we are to combat today’s racism, we need to acknowledge that much of the wealth of our country was derived from past actions. We also need to acknowledge that a wilful white supremacy of past centuries informs our society today.

Just as the Germans recognised the horrors of the Nazis, to forge a better tomorrow, so I think we could change, much more fundamentally, conscious and unconscious racist attitudes today, if we understood our history better.