The facts about race and education

Judging from the reaction to last week’s Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities report, you’d think it had been written by a group of white supremacists who deliberately falsified the evidence about the prevalence of racism in contemporary Britain. Labour MP Clive Lewis tweeted a picture of the Ku Klux Klan alongside the hashtag #RaceReport, while Dr Priyamvada Gopal, a Cambridge University professor, compared the chairman of the Commission to Goebbels. In fact, only one of the report’s ten authors is white and the chairman, Dr Tony Sewell, says in the foreword: ‘We take the reality of racism seriously and we do not deny that it is a real force in the UK.’

So why this grotesque misrepresentation of what is clearly a good faith effort to understand the causes of racial inequalities and come up with some sensible solutions? The reason is that it challenges the dogma, imported from the United States, that every British institution, from Kew Gardens to the National Trust, is beset by ‘systemic racism’.