The Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities (CRED) report is the latest attempt by government sponsored opinion-makers to persuade key stakeholders that the growing concern academics, and activists have about institutional racism in the UK is merely a matter of opinion and identity politics, not verifiable fact.

The CRED report was written to complicate previous findings of institutional racism in the U.K. by providing alternative explanations for racial disparities based on class, culture, and individual behaviour (p.233).

The CRED report is written to confirm the view that white racism is decreasing, and that racial integration is a success in the U.K. This assertion contradicts the most recent survey data reporting that the majority of Black and Asian populations in the U.K. (roughly 75%) experience racist discrimination and believe they are less likely than whites to have their human rights protected. Black People, Racism, and Human Rights, a Joint Report by the House of Commons and the House of Lords, found that racial discrimination is not only reported by the majority of Black and South Asian populations in the U.K., but that racial disparities in maternal mortality, criminal justice, Covid-19 deaths, and social equality could accurately be tied to racism.

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The CRED report claims that what is observed as racism is actually due to socio-economic disadvantage, but fails to engage studies showing that white working-class boys who show the greatest trends toward downward mobility still outperform working-class ethnic minority groups in terms of income.

The CRED report does not demonstrate that income and wealth are equally predicted by degree attainment across racial groups or that there are not racial disparities within disadvantaged classes.

To prevent discrimination against majority groups (whites), the report urges an “outlook that seeks to optimize outcomes across all groups and dimensions in society” (p.54). Accepting that groups who have unjustly benefited from the racist arrangements of the past retain their political and financial advantages over the groups they have exploited.

The report maintains that societal hierarchies and racial inequities are not born of racist social practices but the inferior cultural practices of some racial and ethnic groups. Even with equal opportunity, the authors believe racial disparities would exist because some cultures (and families) tend to be more successful than others.

The Herald: Professor Tommy CurryProfessor Tommy Curry

The CRED report merely rehearses a narrative of racial progress popular in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s which celebrated the triumph of integration, proclaimed the end of racism because of desegregation, and ushered in the belief that racism had been eliminated from American society—residing only in the hearts and minds of fewer and fewer whites.

The lawyers of the desegregation efforts recognized then as we should recognize now that the presence of (anti-Black) racism cannot be remedied by the degree of inclusion or exclusion racial minorities are allowed in majority-white societies. Rather, the issue of racism must be addressed through a dismantling of white supremacy, or what Frances Lee Ansely refers to as: “a political, economic, and cultural system in which whites overwhelmingly control power and material resources… [where] relations of white dominance and non-white subordination are daily reenacted across a broad array of institutions and social settings.”

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In a country already struggling to earnestly acknowledge its histories of colonialism, violence, and anti-Black racism, the CRED report offers whites a panacea to the pestilence of race consciousness and the increasing demands by non-whites for political and economic power, or actual racial equality. The CRED report will be weaponized against Black and other non-white scholars researching systemic (anti-Black) racism to deny that racism is a worthwhile social problem.

In short, the CRED report allows whites to legitimize their managerial role of non-white populations in the U.K. as benevolence towards those less racially fortunate.

Tommy J. Curry is a Professor of Philosophy and holds a Personal Chair in Africana Philosophy and Black Male Studies at the University of Edinburgh.