In one of the more openly culture war-based elements of the report, it accuses “well-organised single-issue identity lobby groups” of reinforcing “pessimistic narratives about race” through over-emotive, non-data-based approaches to their work. While it stresses that this is “not about allocating blame” or stigmatising single parents, such a focus risks accusations of a return to earlier attitudes when this did happen. The report notes differing levels of single-parent families between varying communities, suggesting this as a factor to be examined. On a similar theme of moving away from structural issues, the report calls for more focus on “the extent individuals and their communities could help themselves through their own agency, rather than wait for invisible external forces to assemble to do the job”. “The cultural deafness of this report is only going to become clearer in the coming days and weeks.” Individual/community responsibility Halima Begum, at the equality thinktank the Runnymede Trust, said: “I’m absolutely flabbergasted to see the slave trade apparently redefined as ‘the Caribbean Experience’, as though it’s something Thomas Cook should be selling – a one-way shackled cruise to purgatory. Labour said the government “must urgently explain how they came to publish content that glorifies the slave trade”. One section of the report – on teaching about Britain’s colonial past – says this should include material about the Caribbean experience “which speaks to the slave period not only being about profit and suffering, but how culturally African people transformed themselves into a remodelled African/Britain”. The report calls for a broader use of terminology, including phrases such as systematic or structural racism. Where such claims are made, the report suggests, they should be proved – which campaigners will argue is not necessarily an easy thing to do. The reality is more nuanced: it argues that overuse of the term, sometimes when there is no evidence of an inbuilt institutional bias in that context, has “diluted its credibility”.
Pre-publicity for the report suggested it would dismiss the idea of institutional racism altogether. That could be a key divide: just because there is less racism than 40 years ago, should it be viewed as no longer a pressing problem? Institutional racism The conclusion offers one clue to this, noting that in contrast to most Black Lives Matters protesters, the bulk of the commission are from “an older generation whose views were formed by growing up in the 1970s and 1980s”. The approach has brought criticism from some campaigners about a complacent attitude.
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