When ‘white privilege’ doesn’t count

First off the blocks criticising Dr Tony Sewell’s report of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities was Professor Kalwant Bhopal from the University of Birmingham. Writing in the Guardian and focusing on her specialism of education (she is director of the Centre for Research in Race and Education), she took exception to the statistics that showed the majority of ethnic minority groups ‘perform better than White British pupils’. If this were true, of course, it would put to bed the whole idea of institutional racism in education and ‘white privilege’, for it wouldn’t be a racism worth its salt if whites systematically came bottom or near-bottom.

In her tweets about the report she guides us back to her latest book, White Privilege: The myth of a post-racial society, for evidence of the reality of how white privilege works. Amongst other evils, it leads to ‘low educational attainment’.

The extraordinary thing is, however, that the data she presents in her book lead precisely to the same conclusion as that of Dr Sewell’s report.