Yes, let us get cynical about such endemic social ills like racism, like poor housing and childhood poverty, like educational inequalities and academic achievements, like involvement in crime, real or manufactured, like greater unemployment rate based on ones ethnic background,like differential arrest, prosecution, conviction incarceration rates based on ones ethnic origins, and about the social status of ones ethnic group being determined by which ethnic group it is.
Yes, let us become cynical that things ever get better, and that even when they do get better, it is either significant or durable.
And what is the cause of this excess of cynicism, you might want to know; what has given rise to it, when there are so much to be positive about?
Well, this is my initial response to a recent report by Britain's Equality and Human Rights Commission, citing the need for the British government to have a comprehensive strategy to tackle the detrimental impact of inequalities in the UK which seem to be based on the ethnic backgrounds of the sections of the population experiencing them.
The report is entitles, Race Report - Healing a Divided Britain: The need for a comprehensive Race Equality Strategy.
Now, for anybody of a certain age, who have some knowledge and/or experience of how people's ethnic and, yes, gender and class placements have historically been key factors in determining their roles, aspirations and achievements in British society, this report is, yes, rather startling. At least, when it is considered outside of its historical context, and 'the principle of inertia.' I make reference to inertia in the context that, whatever progress has been made in positively addressing any kind of inequality, over time, unless a system is put into place to counteract or remove - which is probably unlikely, since new forces of inequality will always arise - the forces of inequality, they will inevitably burst through again, like weeds and other vegetation reclaiming abandoned farm or residential land.
Britain has had many decades of attempting to address the effects of ethnically determined inequalities on her black and other minority ethnic communities. It has pass several pieces of what has been called 'race relations legislation', including the Race Relations Act, 1976, the Race Relations (Amendment) Act 2000, and the Race Relations Act 2000, and, prior to setting up her Equality and Human Rights Commission, it had a Commission for Racial Equality. All of which were intended to help her black and minority ethnic citizens to have more of a level playing field to negotiate some of the obstacles which have been impacting on different aspects of their lives.
How, then, you and I and others, might want to know, that, in the year 2016, the UK's Equality and Human Rights Commission, can find it necessary to have to tell the government that the Kingdom needs a comprehensive race equality strategy?
Which is why I am arguing that we ought probably become cynical about the struggle for racial equality.
Does this mean that I am suggesting that, as it is with the poor, the adverse effects of racial inequality will always be with us, and that there is no point in trying to remedy it, with or without a comprehensive strategy? Well, no. Probably just that the British might need to first carry out a comprehensive review and consultation about what kind of society they desire to have, and what they mean by, and how they want issues such as racial, gender, and class factors to figure in it.
Of course, the challenge which confronts the British, is not or is not entirely dissimilar from that which confronts other countries in the west, such as Europe, including the Russian Federation, and America, or in the East, including China. The real difference is likely to be that some countries prefer to deal with racial inequalities in their society by ignoring or denying its existence, doing nothing about, or accepting it as a fact which has to be lived with.
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