Race

To read the press releases, you would think we’ve found the panacea to racism in the form of unconscious bias training. Numerous organisations, including the Labour party, have announced they would be putting their staff through such programmes. This follows in the footsteps of the civil service, which has required all civil servants to undertake unconscious bias training since 2018, magistrates, for whom the training is compulsory, and the Met police, where it forms part of ongoing officer training. Google, Facebook, the FTSE 100, government departments — including the Ministry of Defence and Ministry of Justice — and non-profits proudly advertise the programmes they put their staff through. But the

When I was about ten, on return home from church I ate a peach, the juice of which dribbled down my new pink frock. I scuttled to my room to change, bunching the dress under the bed. I emerged the picture of innocence, but I felt guilty. For weeks, the garment pulsed with accusation. Going to sleep, I always knew it was there. Sure enough, my mother discovered the wad while vacuuming, and she was furious. She could have scrubbed out the juice had I told her about it right away. To this day, I’m mindful that you can only expunge stains while they’re still fresh — and somewhere in

Every day I thank God for the British Empire. Without it I wouldn’t exist. My Gold Coast-born mother would never have met my English father. She herself is the descendant of a Scottish merchant called Bruce. Now she lives happily in rural Perthshire. She’s the only black in the village. Growing up in the 1990s, I faintly remember debate over whether non-whites could be British. Certainly the question had receded by the time Monty Panesar made his England cricket debut midway through the following decade. Meanwhile, however, Britain quickly became one of the best places for cultural entrepreneurs to promote the pernicious fallacy that we are best understood through the

You can’t discuss racial inequality without using the N-word. And you can’t debate social justice without adding the C-word and the F-word as well. In this case the N-word is Nepotism, the C-word is Credentialism and the F-word is Favouritism. What is often overlooked in the debate about social justice is that inequality of opportunity need not arise from the exercise of negative preferences but from a mildly positive, unintended bias operating in reverse. Inequality of opportunity need not arise from the exercise of negative preferences Q. What is, at birth, the best predictor that you will become a doctor? A. Having a parent who is a doctor. Hence there

Gaslight has been a useful word meaning ‘to manipulate a person by psychological means into questioning his or her own sanity’, as the OED defines it. Last week saw it change meaning. In parliament, Florence Eshalomi asked Priti Patel whether she understood the ‘anger and frustration felt by so many people’ involved in Black Lives Matter protests. In reply Miss Patel gave some of her experiences of racism, such as being called a ‘Paki’. (Some news reports blanked out Paki.) Next day 32 black and ethnic-minority (BAME) Labour MPs declared in an open letter that the Home Secretary had ‘used your heritage and experiences of racism to gaslight the very

When I first saw the footage of George Floyd being asphyxiated by a policeman’s knee on his throat, my reaction was pretty standard. My eyes bugged. I stood up. I exclaimed something like: ‘Bloody hell!’ We’ve all seen the video dozens of times now, but it’s worth clinging to that initial shock, the better to appreciate that America’s spontaneous collective revulsion in response to such grotesque abuse of power was genuinely commendable. Yet the nationwide marches a fortnight ago had a clear goal: the culprit’s arrest. If late in the day — had a civilian choked a policeman to death, he’d have been handcuffed faster than it takes to say