Successful social science academics enter power relationships with their students that are as unequal as any they describe in wider society. They have been placed in positions of privilege by hegemonies quite as real and powerful as any others in our society: those of academia. These hegemonies are powered by the same forces as any others: money, tradition, inherited status, nepotism. In fact, academia is complicit in all the injustices of our societies, as universities have long been the beneficiaries of those vested interests. As have all their students, irrespective of racial heritage: the universities they attend have been established, supported and grown through the wealth of slave-owning, imperial, hierarchical and oppressive nations.  

From these (tainted) positions, Social Science academic can teach their theory-as-fact virtually unopposed, then set and mark the assessments on them that could decide their students’ futures. They can mutually reinforce each other’s statuses by referring to each other in their respective publications. This allows them to amplify their messages and their influence far beyond those of the normal pub philosopher, without even going near the internet. 

Young people, who make up the student population, are always the activist generation. They have the most time and energy and tend to be unencumbered by financial responsibilities, mortgages and children. They are still learning about their world and relish meta-narratives that seem to explain it in understandable structures. They have newly emerged into their majority after a life-time of being controlled by their parents and teachers, and they still feel resentful, having spent the last few years in conflict with them as they tried to break free. They’ve had enough of being pushed around and they want to exercise power.

They are also still developing their senses of self, so it is incredibly important to establish their identities and their tribes, and they have not yet been bludgeoned by fate and their own weaknesses into admitting how fatally morally compromised we all are. They are desperate to defend the righteousness of any position they adopt. 

These are probably the people who are most influenced by the social theorists. They take their courses, listen avidly to their lectures, write essays demonstrating how right they are. Especially if the theorist appears to be part of a counter-culture. 

They often lack perspective because they have no way of knowing how different the academic zeitgeist was even just a few years before. They are only beginning to learn how to sceptically analyse what they are told. They can be induced to accept theories as indisputable truths, because their lecturers suggest they are the pre-conditions or foundations of intellectual debate^[1]. 

Young people are also the most adept at navigating the internet and social media, so it is no surprise that the debates and language of the campus end up first on social media and then on the streets. Or that, on K-pop platforms, teenage and pre-teen fans bandy terms such as “transphobic” and “racial bias” like children in a war zone playing with live ammunition. 

Add in how confrontational social media is, and its global reach, and we find ourselves prey to super-charged monsters that rampage across the planet like Godzilla or Covid-19, before subsiding,  conceding to the next angry fashion. 

It’s the cultural revolution all over again!

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^[1] Probably because the lecturers themselves have forgotten that their pet theories can be challenged. Our brains reinforce the neural pathways we use most often. We are designed to get set in our ways.

The rise of terms such as “White Privilege” demonstrates the peculiar literacy and articulacy fostered by the internet, and the resultant rise of Social Science theory. I wonder if this is allied to the increasing numbers of young people attending university and other 3^rd level institutions^[1]. Mine is a doubtful construction, which is entirely appropriate, and it goes like this:

Long before the internet, universities were sources and forums (fora?) of debate and discussion. They were societies’ great word generators. Now they must share that title with the internet itself. It was natural, practically inevitable, that academic debate should move online and, as more people attend university, the population becomes increasingly aware of the vocabulary and concerns that are current among academics. 

Those interested in the state of society and the injustices of life are often drawn to the Social Science departments. Socialscience, however, is not like other disciplines. The traditional sciences try to base their theories on data generated by rigorous experimentation, where they try to control all the variables so they can isolate one factor and scrutinise its behaviour. Social Science is hoping to identify and analyse trends and patterns in human societies, so it cannot create such controlled laboratory environments without committing some terrible human rights abuses!

Social scientists must content themselves with plucking one or two pieces of data from the whirling mess of human interactions and then creating a plausible narrative that fits them. Consequently, they have become very comfortable with highly speculative theories based on reductive mono-causal explanations of highly complex phenomena. 

They support and firm up their arguments by reference to other equally speculative theories which chime with their own ideas, but they cannot go on to test their ideas experimentally. So, what would traditionally amount to the literature review that precedes an investigation is presented to us as the investigation itself. Its hypothesis stands in for its lack of conclusion 

Academics and scientists are supposed to test their ideas by publishing peer-reviewed papers and through open debate. However, as no reliable dataset is available, this usually amounts to matching one set of unverifiable assumptions against another. Social Scientists can just pick their preferred theory and run with it, and to hell with the balance of probability. With reputations, tenure and careers at stake^[2], academics have a good reason to stubbornly resist changing their minds. They treat their hypotheses as fact, dismissing all contradictions, all alternative explanations as anomalies. 

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^[1] According to The Independent online (27/09/19) 50.2% of people between the age of 17 and 30 had attended a 3^rd level education provider, by the academic year 2017/18, thus finally reaching Tony Blair’s target of 50%, set in 1997. 

^[2] Thus salaries and the ability to put food on the table.

A good example of self-policing is, I think, the theory of “White Privilege”. This operates like the tailors’ scam in The Emperor’s New Clothes: we are told that only the enlightened can recognise endemic racism. If you don’t see your own racism (or oppression, if you are of colour), or if you question the logic and the definitions of the theory, that proves you ARE racist. You’ve been trained by a racist society to be blind to it.

Liberal, capitalist individualism has finally accepted that racists are the worst sort of scum^[1]. Previous equality and diversity campaigns have made the accusation extremely insulting. (Rightly so. It is one of the many achievements of such campaigns^[2].) “Racist” encapsulates all that is bad about Britain (Please adapt for your own country/culture): a monstrous hybrid of blood-soaked imperial werewolf, snarling, emasculated English-Nationalist skinhead-rat, and, complacent, narrow-minded little-Englander.

So, there is enormous pressure (among Lefty-Liberals like me) to accept White Privilege as true, even though, by definition, you cannot experience it. By doing so you can distance yourself from your inherited white racial guilt. 

But our acceptance is laced with secret doubt and suspicion that we dare not admit to in public. Because everyone only has a theoretical understanding of others’ experiences, everybody is locked into their own minds, every misfortune you don’t personally and directly experience is a privilege. Non-amputees have Non-Amputee Privilege; non-battered partners have Non-Battered Partner privilege; People with good eyesight have Eyesight Privilege; Non-anorexics have Healthy-Relationship-with-Food Privilege (You lucky, lucky bastards!) Coming from Ireland, I was astonished to discover that, in England, red-haired children sometimes get bullied for being “Gingers”! Non-Ginger Privilege! Who Knew?!^[3]

We are encouraged to support a theory that claims the absence of suffering and disadvantage is privilege. Everyone can be dismissed and silenced for simply having the normal experience. It becomes, ironically, a disadvantage in any debate on the issue. In light-filled, liberal forums, having a minority or oppressed status gives you authority and passion; it gives identity.

And so we get to play under-privilege Top Trumps again. Also known as The Intersectionality Game.

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^[1] Capitalism prefers all people equal, thus equally exploitable.

^[2] By identifying the ways that our societies still manifest bias, without recognising the progress that’s been made, activists are being unfair on their fore-parents. But I guess all generations are ego-centric. Everyone thinks they are the first people to have thought their revolutionary thoughts. 

^[3] Mind you, like internet trolls, playground bullies pick the person they want to bully first, and then target their victim’s vulnerabilities.

According to modern Western values, meaning and purpose in life are located within the individual. Social-media promotes the idea that self-actualisation is the goal of life, which leads people to respond to terrible crimes by recounting their own experience of everyday racism and sexism. A vague knowledge of various speculative and generalising social theories, has convinced them that such minor incidents are gateway or enabling behaviours and are thus relevant, so it is not inappropriate to connect somebody touching your hair with the killing of George Floyd, or, in response to the killing of Sarah Everard, to point out that you have encountered some unwanted sexual attention at work. It is starting a conversation about racism and sexism. In fact, to suggest it is inappropriate is probably just a way of protecting the racist patriarchy. 

Meanwhile, a belief in the virtue of democracy, just because it’s democracy, drives activists to recruit as many people as possible to their cause because the sheer size of the movement will justify their positions.

Slogans such as, “if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem” encourage everybody to get involved in the campaign, and suggest that if you can’t be bothered, or are too intimidated, to challenge every single example of bias, you are betraying your comrades and, crucially, yourselves. Not to stand up against racism, or to doubt the truth of any of the central tenets of the movement, is heresy. You are denying your own identity as an oppressed people of colour or an LGBTQ person, or whatever. 

This is an internet age of atomised, international connectivity, made worse by Covid lockdown. In the past, community was an accident of geography. Your people were whatever bunch of bastards you had the misfortune to be living next to. the fact that half of them were embarrassing blood- relatives only made it worse. But you had to learn to put up with their shit. 

Nowadays, community is an active decision – a declaration of loyalty. You can view your neighbours with naked hostility and still feel you belong, as long as you keep the faith. 

This keeps everybody in line, because, as The Secret Barrister has pointed out, “We are yet to find a society that does not have rules surrounding the behaviour of its members and sanctions for their transgression. Agreeing social imperatives and taboos, and enforcing them through shunning, appears to be instinctual behaviour in primates.”^[1] Being a member of a subversive organisation demands a particularly strict form of conformism.

Social-media, the field upon which these battles take place, fosters extreme and confrontational behaviours, because it protects its participants from harm, while it’s algorithms feed their biases and deny them access to alternative views. 

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^[1] The Secret Barrister, P7, 2019, London: Picador

Modern anti-racism campaigns encourage people to identify and call out examples of endemic racism. Our society has long declared itself racially egalitarian. Most Brits are proud of this, so persistent racism is unlikely to be glaringly obvious. It will probably need to be uncovered, often through the undeniable discrepancies in statistics. Hence to “call out” racism or sexism or trans-phobia, means to expose and name it for what it is.

The zeitgeist is one of internet-enhanced protest, conflict and schism. Modern people pride themselves in having the courage and self-belief to personally challenge injustice. As well as calling it out, they “stand up to” it, and, of course, “speak truth to power”. What is important to modern activists is not collaborating to create a better community, it is self-expression, the firming up of their own atomised identity, their personal integrity. 

This egotism is supercharged by the consumer-capitalism of the internet, which assumes that personal self-realisation is the ultimate goal and good of human life. The post-modern scepticism^[1] of any truth beyond personal, emotional experience or statistics^[2], also encourages people to see community and collective action as simply an acknowledgement of superior numbers. This must come from the assumption, drummed into us since infanthood, that democracy is the perfect, virtuous form of state structure, so that by voting on an issue, and reaching a majority verdict, a position becomes justified and moral: it is shriven. 

The goal, then, becomes to create a mass movement and to force governments (and industry leaders) to acknowledge the size of it. This will automatically lead to beneficial change. Hence #MeToo and (years ago) the anti-war “Not in My Name” campaign, and so on. 

We are increasingly used to having things served to us on a plate. Apps and algorithms that we don’t understand are able, inexplicably, able to provide us with whatever we demand. Or so it appears. 

We carry that attitude into our protest movements. As citizens of a democracy, we demand that something is done and then sit back with self-congratulatory satisfaction, expecting that somebody will do it. It’s writing to The Times for the internet generation; we are demanding, en masse, to see the manager: “Siri, dim the lights and dismantle systemic racism”; “Alexa, challenge everyday sexism.” 

All this seems to lead to a very strange phenomenon: mass demonstrations of unfocused self-expression. The response to the murder of Sarah Everard seems to exemplify this. A lone male policeman appears to have opportunistically abducted and murdered this poor woman. There has been a nation-wide outpouring of dismay and anger, and of empathy for the victim and her family. 

But this poignant moment of national unity has somehow led many people to demonstrate and protest – a confrontational act intended to challenge…what? Whom? It is unclear. People don’t seem to be sure what they are marching for, because the (alleged) perpetrator of this terrible act is transgressing against some of the most sacred patriarchal principles. Patriarchs can’t have rival men randomly abducting and murdering their women. The taboos this guy has broken are vociferously defended by our sexist society, so a culture of sexism can’t be said to have enabled him. 

This doesn’t seem to matter much to the protestors, though. The belief that self-expression in support of a cause is the purpose of campaigning, has allowed them to believe that shouting at somebody is “starting the conversation”, and that will automatically lead to some sort of “progress”.

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^[1] probably Descartes-derived

^[2] the poor man’s scientific investigation

The human animal appears to be attuned to threat, so it’s much easier to make somebody feel alienated than included. We’ve touched on this before. I guess if you’ve experienced racism in the past, you’re likely to be highly sensitive, even over-sensitive, to it ever after. And the more often you encounter it, the more you’ll come to expect it. We also have a biological tendency to generalise and assume – to simplify highly complex issues to one single causal factor, so we can understand it, and then tell ourselves that it is “the key issue”.

In addition, the internet, through its protection and fostering of like-minded ideological bubbles, has made stubborn confrontation the standard discourse of the age. If people feel they are fighting a pitched battle against dreadful foes, you cannot blame them for using whatever weapons come to hand.  Including accusations of racism, which our supposedly liberal societies have made highly potent.

The media further stokes this atmosphere of confrontation and conflict because it helps to sell their products. In the service of balance, they will seek out commentators and journalists who specialise in denouncing racism, to respond to any controversial, possibly racist incident, like that of Meghan Markle vs. The Crown. In fact, Afua Hirsch tells us that she’s been fielding hundreds of requests to comment on this very issue, and, last Sunday, in The Observer, the historian David Olusoga was enticed into writing on it, which, I think gives it far more gravitas than it deserves. 

Thus, also, Candice Braithwaite in the Guardian, reporting how she “lost out on hosting a documentary to a lighter-skinned black woman”, even though the subject was one she is at the forefront of bringing to public attention: the much higher rate of mortality in childbirth among black women in the UK. The woman who is now to host it is a “light-skinned, mixed race popstar.” 

Meanwhile, In the Waitrose food magazine (for Christ Sake!) Zoe Adjonyoh was complaining about Cultural Appropriation in the British food and Catering industry, because white chefs want to use exotic ethnic minority cuisines in their own successful ventures, passing it “through a white filter, for white consumption with white profit”. For example, she has repeatedly been offered unpaid internships by white chefs so they could use her expertise to expand their West African food repertoire. 

I suspect, that, in each case the writer was approached by an editor and asked to comment on these topical issues. (Certainly, Zoe Adjonyoh’s contribution was part of a whole spread on Cultural Appropriation.) They are expected to do their thing and get the red-faced, colonial, tory-voting pensioners nicely riled up, ready to say something stupid and racist.  Everyone would be thoroughly disappointed if the writers of colour said, “well, these are complicated issues…”

Yet they are. The Meghan Markle commentators are ignoring the extent that her treatment is typical of the cruelty meted out by tabloids to all celebrities, of all colour, which seems to feed a toxic envy in their readers. Candice Braithwaite’s comments ignore, as she admits, any other factors that led to the producer’s decision, such as the potential pulling power of a pop star host. (Although, admittedly, that star’s success may be laced with colourism.)  Zoe Adjonyoh’s point ignores the awful, predatory exploitation of absolutely everybody in the restaurant and food industry.   

By denying their complexity, these writers are reducing the scope and depth of the injustices they are identifying, including their true relationship with racist bias. They find it difficult to explain how so many people of colour can achieve success, despite such racism, or why so many white people also seem to be disadvantaged. They make it more difficult to identify and explain the all-too-common situation where racially inequality occurs, even though nobody involved is racist.

By making claims that are easily challenged, they are enabling Right-Wing commentators to dismiss all our claims as foolish, intemperate first-world liberalism, what they call “Wokery”. 

More importantly, by simplifying these issues to one accusation of endemic racism, and by implying this is driven by racist bias in the individual members of our immediate communities, they are driving wedges between groups who should be uniting to combat injustice.  “White” people, who also feel badly used by society, feel rejected and insulted by the idea they are wallowing in “white privilege”, especially as it is usually the most successful people of colour who are lecturing them on their advantages. People of colour are encouraged into a paranoid belief that they are surrounded by hostility and hatred. We give people the false choice between two extremes; if they question any of the fundamentalist beliefs of their own racial or political group they are classified as race or political traitors. They become outcasts from their own people, denied their identities. This is almost impossible to withstand, so groups draw further apart, begin to view each other with resentment and suspicion. 

Unequal treatment is unjust precisely because we are all, in essence, equally valuable. By emphasising our differences and different experiences without also drawing attention to our essential similarities and common experiences, we drive people apart, and into the arms of intransigent extremist groups. we create the situation we condemn.   

Writing in The Guardian, recently^[1], Afua Hirsch added to claims that the treatment of Meghan Markle was driven by racism. Disappointingly, she then didn’t come up with any scandalous, white supremacist obscenities.  Her argument appeared to rest on the fact that some right-wing radio commentator called Andrew Pierce had said, “do you look at [Meghan] and see a black woman? ‘Cause I don’t…I see a very attractive woman. It never occurred to me.” Ms Hirsh suggested that Mr Pierce saw black women and attractiveness as mutually exclusive, so, because he did find her attractive, he had to reclassify her as not-black. 

I admit, the optics don’t look great for the pasty, middle-aged white guy. They never do. He may have been letting slip a subconscious opposition between blackness and attractiveness, but Ms. Hirsch’s argument seems a little too neat and logical to match the messy, illogic of the human brain. We’re a box of random associations, emotion and self-contradiction. 

Anyway, whether Andrew Pierce was being racist or not, he isn’t a spokes-person for Britain, or even white Britain or even white male Britain. In fact, I suspect he was intentionally admitting to a degree of lecherous sexism to show how honest he was and to thus give weight to his denial of racism.   

I, too, had no idea Ms Markle had a mixed-race background until her spat with the British press erupted, maybe a couple of years ago. I have no interest in the royal family and think celebrity culture and is horrifyingly toxic, so I was only vaguely aware of another slim, dark-haired young woman hanging around with one of the princes. She seemed very similar to the other one, Kate Hamilton(!), or whatever her name is (The Duchess of Cambridge one.)

As I have been saying ad nauseam, racism is the stereotyping of a group of people. It is making (usually dismissive) assumptions based on their visually perceived tribal characteristics. It is the useful ability to generalise gone rogue, an atavistic and emotional thing. 

So, Racism is likely to be triggered, not arrived at by logic. Meghan Markle doesn’t fit any of the racist stereotypes. She is a member of our most prominent social elite. Surely hostility towards her can’t be caused by racism if we all had to be told that she’s black.

That doesn’t mean she can’t be attacked on racist grounds, though. The tabloids, especially, are vile. They are just trolls who get paid for it, and told to use the odd tired euphemism. But trolls use whatever weaponry comes to hand. They target your vulnerabilities – if you’re gay you get homo-phobic trolling; if you’re trans you get transphobia; if you’re black you get racism. Your vulnerabilities attest to injustices in our society and the hostility of some, but not to a naked bigotry among the general population. Most people don’t feel this way. It’s unfair to call us all racist on these grounds^[2]. The press always go for women associated with the royals. It’s their strange, hostile form of love. I suspect it’s misogyny^[3]and resentful classism^[4] before it’s racism.  

Interestingly, Afua Hirsch seems to be aware of this, because, in the same article, she says, “We saw a similar strategy of obsession and vilification play out with his mother.” As far as I know, Princess Diana was entirely, 100%, inbred, white aristocrat. So, racism was clearly not one of the strategies Diana could use to counter-accuse her detractors.

It is, however, one that can be used by Meghan Markle. 

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^[1] For Meghan Markle, leaving Britain must seem more and more like the right choice, 05/03/21

^[2] Unfortunately, there are much better grounds, like those statistics we were discussing earlier.

^[3] Meghan Markle is clearly female.

^[4] “Ordinary people should know their place, not be putting on airs and graces, getting above themselves; it’s not fair of the rest of us, left behind in the gutter, unless they’re having a hard time, too.” Etc. Etc. 

I’m doing an online course with a university, so I’m technically one of their students. I recently filled out a questionnaire for their Students’ Union. One question was “Do you identify as the gender you were assigned at birth?” This has a flavour of adolescent “I-didn’t-ask-to-be-born” ingratitude to it. It suggests that your mother, (possibly) harassed and terrified father, midwives and doctors are conspiring together to impose some awful injustice on their new-born, at the point of birth.

This seems deeply unfair. The activity of birthing is not “assigning”. A birth is usually a collaborative activity (although the burdens are not equally spread!) that sees a new life, a new consciousness introduced to the world. The child’s gender is recognised, as part of that miraculous (and hopefully joyful) arrival. It is a registering of a small part of your biological, genetic identity, as made apparent in your physiology. This is who you are, to start with, for better or worse: do with it what you wish. 

As attested to by all the other people helping with your birth, we are part of a community, and our identity is negotiated between the members of that community. You do not come into being spontaneously, at your own request. Nobody ever asked to be born. We are all press-ganged into existence. Who you are is not purely up to you. And, unfortunately, you are committed by this to having certain experiences or expectations imposed on you by the world, and being excluded by others. If you are born male, you will never experience menstruation or pregnancy or child-birth. You will experience the prejudice and expectations levelled at men but not those levelled at women. If you are born a woman you will never experience the biologically determined aspects of masculinity. Gender is an affliction as well as an opportunity, but it is inflicted on every one of us equally. 

Of course, you have a greater interest in, and knowledge of, your identity than anyone else, and should have the most sovereignty over it. You should be allowed to think of yourself, and live, in a manner other than the one expected of your phenotype, by society, if that is what you want. But you should acknowledge where you come from and that this urgent desire in you is your psycho-biological state, not a social restriction that, if lifted, would lead to a flowering of latent woman- or manhood and a resumption of a lost psychological wholeness. 

If other people are good and kind, they will treat you as you require, but it is difficult to insist upon it. People like to think and say what they want, and to curb this is an infringement of their civil liberties (“rights” aren’t a genuine property of existence.) In fact, to insist that you must be thought of, and talked about, as a woman, when you were born with a Y chromosome and, consequently, male sexual characteristics, is not only tyrannous, it is to promote the most rigid, restrictive and reductive version of the difference between men and women. The sexes are reduced to superficial and highly artificial, in fact grotesque, stereotypes of entirely socially constructed differences, of make-up and fashion and gossip and girls’ nights in and social media and “oh-I-know-darling” versus football and beer and gaming and boys’ nights out and “fucking-twat-him-one-the-cunt”.

Surely the answer to the problem of gender prejudice in society isn’t a campaign of even more aggressive reverse-coercion, the identification and destruction of the normies and cys-gendered, it’s to work towards a society where everybody respects and accepts everyone else as equals, where everybody reaches out, with kindness and understanding, to everyone else, no matter that all 7 billion of them are a bunch of fucking wierdos.

The national Census’s version of the same question was (something like) “do you identify as the gender registered at your birth?” Much better. It seems a small thing, but I think it makes a big difference. 

I think, in the past, social justice campaigners were challenged with singular, tokenistic exceptions. “Racial inequality!?” the old jingoistic buggers would bellow, “but there was a fighter pilot from Trinidad in the 2^nd World War!”

To respond to this, we would point out that we were looking at a whole society. “There are always exceptions,” we’d retort, “the fact that there are so few of them proves our point – one, solitary pilot of colour!” 

Once discriminatory legislation has been dismantled, some members of formerly marginalised groups will start to do better. However, these are outliers. We still need to tackle prejudice in social norms and narratives. Britain, with a history of democratic liberalism, condemns prejudice and discrimination, so everyone is very reluctant to admit to themselves that they entertain these biases.  

So, evidence for such discrimination comes from looking at statistics. We were interested in the differences between subgroups in whole populations: it’s not that white kids aren’t stopped and searched, it’s that far more black kids are. There are thousands of black doctors in the UK, but far more white and Asian. 

These discrepancies are highly significant. They attest to inequalities of opportunity and limiting of life choices. They suggest that many people will have been treated very badly due to assumptions made about them. However, the numbers come from enormous data sets, 60 million people, in the case of the UK alone, with multiple contributory factors, and thousands and thousands of exceptions.

Any monocausal explanation, any overarching grand-narrative, is going to be far too simplistic to fully explain the phenomena you’ve identified. But sophisticated analysis is laborious and tedious, and the equivocal conclusions it tends to throw up are complicated and unsatisfying. It’s far more fun to plough on with our preferred theory, ignoring and dismissing all anomalies, and using confirmation bias to seek out evidence that supports our claims. 

Having come up with some totalising and easily graspable theory of everything, the temptation is to clutch it like a talisman, to brandish it like a weapon. Especially, for professional social commentators, if you gain a reputation for voicing these opinions articulately, if they become your USP in crowded market (although this can lead to annoying pigeon-holing^[1].)

But then, ironically, you find yourself massively over-applying your theory, even making far-reaching and unfair assumptions about other people on little evidence, without considering other explanations or complicating factors. Without empathy or understanding. Like a racist. 

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^[1] Afua Hirsch said recently that she’d had “literally hundreds of calls”, asking her to comment on Meghan Markle’s fight with The Palace (whoever they are!) (The Guardian, 05/03/21); Otegha Uwegba complains, understandably, about how “Black Writers [are] assigned the position of race educators whether they like it or not” (Whites: On Race and Other Falsehoods, 2020, London: 4^th Estate, p25)

The actor David Harewood recently presented a documentary on BBC One, simply called Why is Covid Killing People of Colour? It is fascinating viewing, although the revelations it produces are things we tend to know already^[1]. It is illuminating, all the same, to see the facts and figures collected together. The picture that emerges is undeniably one of profound inequity between racial groups.

It is more difficult to explain why this should be the case, in a society that claims to believe in equality and to protect the rights of the individual, and where many members of marginalised groups transcend the barriers placed in their way, although many more do not. Facts and figures are meaningless without a hypothesis that explains them. 

A good example of the problem is the statistic, mentioned in the documentary, that 95% of Doctors who have died of Covid-19 have been from racial minority backgrounds! This is appalling and difficult to explain (impossible to explain away.) A virus is unable to make choices, but what racist decisions could government or NHS leaders have made, in what circumstances, that would lead to such an enormous difference?

The epidemiologist on the programme suggested a couple of factors. The first is that “front-facing” doctors, those actually dealing with the infected patients, are more junior and more likely to be from racial minority groups; those in managerial roles who don’t come into contact with Covid patients, are more likely to be white. I guess this may be more pronounced among the older doctors, who are more vulnerable to severe reactions: it takes time to be promoted up to managerial level, so if manager-doctors are more likely to be white, a higher proportion of older junior doctors will be from minority groups, right?

Racial minority healthcare workers also seem more reluctant to demand adequate protective equipment, presumably because they believe the request would tell against them, in some way. 

There are many more factors that need to be considered in addition to these, though – how big is the data set? Urban hot spots, where Covid 19 spread particularly rapidly, are densely populated. They also tend to be the areas with higher proportion of racial minority inhabitants. Do they also have higher proportions of racial minority doctors? Were they doubly exposed because the communities they lived in were particularly vulnerable (due to population density, etc.) Is there any truth to the suggestion that darker skin blocks the production of vitamin D from sunlight, which builds resistance to Covid? Men appear more vulnerable than women. Are racial minority doctors more likely to be male?

In discussing all the contributory factors, we realise how impossibly varied individual experiences must be, and how permeable the categories of the underprivileged, so that no one person can guarantee that they will experience privilege or under-privilege.

This must demonstrate the fallacy of attributing guilt and complicity to individuals, instead of to structures. We need urgently to address inequality in our society, especially when it is literally a life and death issue, but not by singling people out and destroying them. We all make assumptions and generalise all the time, and when these are pernicious, they need to be challenged, but your peers are not evil criminal geniuses sitting in their mountain lairs, laughing MWAHAHA! 

Attacking and trying to crush them will only alienate people. Creating division is segregation is racism. You are becoming a servant of the demon.

We need to transcend our justified resentments. We need to reach out to each other. (Well, maybe not the English Nationalist Skinheads…)

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^[1] I’m sure he does too, but the producers need him to pretend to be surprised. He does this brilliantly: he’s an actor!