9
ISSUES: Racial & Ethnic Discrimination
Chapter 1: Racism & discrimination
White people may deny it, but racism is
back in Britain
Discrimination, prejudice, violence and common bigotry raise no concern these days.
By Yasmin Ailbhai-Brown
I
n 1960, American novelist Harper
Lee wrote her masterpiece,
To Kill a
Mocking Bird
.
It won the Pulitzer Prize, and was
made into a film starring Gregory
Peck. Among the central characters is
Atticus Finch, a virtuous white lawyer,
who defends Tom Robinson, a black
man charged with rape.
The novelist wrote at a time when
black masculinity was criminalised
and innocent men were frequently
lynched, framed and executed. Lee
exposed the squalid, racist culture
of her homeland and found hope in
liberal values. Then she fell silent.
Decades passed. In the long-awaited
sequel published this week,
Go Set a
Watchman
, Finch has become a hard
racist and segregationist.
African Americans greeted the new
novel with relief.
A good friend, an academic in San
Francisco, emailed: “Harper is finally
telling the truth. Those guys like Finch,
who pretended to be with us, were
lying to themselves. They liked to be
anti-racist heroes, but only when it
suited them. Inside their liberal hearts
and heads they are supremacists. My
son married the daughter of a lawyer
who loved Martin Luther King and all
that. He refused to walk her down the
aisle. So I did.”
He is a businessman, who wants to
remain anonymous because he is
worried about the consequences of
speaking out.
A new American film,
Dear White
People
, has just been released in the
UK. Witty and caustic, it examines
white privilege and black identity. It
will pull audiences. We find strange
comfort in tut-tutting about racism
in America. It makes us feel morally
superior.
No black Briton would dare to do
something similar. It’s fine to make
movies about long-ago slaves and the
Raj. But to put stories of racially unjust
Britain, here and now, on screen?
Absolutely not. (Go on, prove me
wrong.)
There is much national outrage when
well-known people use words that are
deemed offensive. But discrimination,
prejudice, violence and common
bigotry raise no concern these days.
People of colour die in custody or
during arrest; black graduates are kept
out of jobs; apprenticeships are harder
to get if you are not white; minorities
are more likely to be stopped and
searched and new migrants are seen
as “cockroaches”.
The National Audit Office recently
looked at the top civil service and
found it to be almost wholly white
and male. Researchers have found
that ethnic-minority offenders are
more likely than white offenders to be
sent to prison and get long sentences.
Black men and women cannot get into
trendy clubs. Colour matters more
than talent in almost every profession.
Race-discrimination cases are much
harder to pursue and most victims
have given up trying.
Here she goes again, many readers will
think, say, and tweet. Special pleading,
guilt-tripping tolerant, white Brits. GET
OVER IT. And anyway, the real bigots
are black and Asian people, Muslims
most of all – they who hate white
folk, western culture, our freedoms.
Terrorism is the real problem, they say.
White working classes suffer more.
Racism is so yesterday. Black is the new
white.
I wish.
Frankie Boyle is rare among white
men. He speaks up again and again
against this perfidious, contemporary
racism. And, many would say, crosses
a line.
Raising this subject causes a bad smell,
revulsion and odium. The messengers
are denounced and cursed. Denial and
complacency fight back.
The nation should be proud of how it
has allowed talent to flower. Look at
black actors Idris Elba and Chiwetel
Ejifor, presenters Mishal Hussein and
