The Report That Shook Britain’s Race Lobby

A government commission finds the U.K. is no longer ‘deliberately rigged’ against minorities. Cue the outrage and racial attacks on its chairman, Tony Sewell

By Tunku Varadarajan of The WSJ. Excerpts: 

"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.” In its March 31 report, the commission concluded that while Britain isn’t yet “a post-racial society,” neither is it any longer a place where “the system” is “deliberately rigged against ethnic minorities.”"

"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.

Black Caribbean children perform worse in British schools than those of any other group. “For years,” Mr. Sewell says, “it has been said that this is explained in terms of teachers’ racism.” Yet black African students—“same age, same demographic, same classroom”—had academic achievement rates higher than those of whites. In fact, he says, all ethnic groups other than Caribbean blacks perform better than white British students, with the exception of Pakistanis, who are on par with whites."

"While 14.7% of all British families are single-parent units, the share is 63% in the black Caribbean community. Britons of Indian origin have the lowest single-parent incidence—only 6%."

"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.”"

"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.”"