Adieu, Commission for Racial Equality

A fond farewell to the Commission for Racial Equality

19 September 2007

It never grasped that ethnic disparities reflect cultural forces

The CRE’s problem is that it was set up to counter white discrimination against ethnic minorities and it cannot drag itself away from that now long redundant and counterproductive state of mind. It persists in seeing our various minority ethnic communities as a sort of weird, undifferentiated morass of oppressed people — defined, politically, by their deeply regrettable lack of whiteness. It is, to my mind, a racist assumption — but also patently false. A Chinese girl growing up in Manchester has far less in common with a Bangladeshi girl growing up in Tower Hamlets than she does with a white girl growing up pretty much anywhere. The Bangladeshi girl is about as likely to go to university as a Jewish girl is likely to end up in a pie factory in Melton Mowbray, because of the cultural imperatives of the community from which she originates. And the CRE still assumes — as is clear from that bone-headed conclusion to its report — that our ethnic minorities are equally persecuted and discriminated against and that the guilty party is the white majority. One supposes that it takes this demonstrably erroneous view because otherwise it would have no reason to exist — but then, having said that, it is about not to exist, so one might have hoped for a moment of clarity and perspective to have emerged from its death throes. But no such luck.