1981-1991: How racist is Britain
01 January 1991
1981-1991: How racist is Britain
artdoc August=1992
The Scarman Inquiry, set up in the wake of the rebellion of
black youth against police and state racism in Brixton in
April 1981, has been the cornerstone of government social
policy on race for the past 10 years. The conclusion of that
inquiry, published in the autumn of 1981, was that
`Institutional racism does not exist'. In the police, Scarman
found `racial prejudice... manifest[ing] itself occasionally
in the behaviour of a few officers in the streets'. In society
at large, he found `prejudice', `discrimination' and be dealt
racial disadvantage'. Of these, the first was a matter for
white individuals; the second was to with by equal
opportunities policies; and the last, which sounded like a
disability inherent in black communities, was to be cured by
treating `special ethnic needs and problems'.
When the Scarman Report was published, CARF wrote: `Far from
being the balanced and fair Inquiry portrayed in the media,
the Scarman Report is one of the most conservative reports
[of] recent years ... his wilful failure to acknowledge two
decades of state and police racism in the teeth of the
evidence stands at the centre of the report, informing all its
conclusions and recommendations ... But then, Scarman was
never meant to do anything but deflect the anger and
frustration of blacks against police harassment and state
racism from developing into a full-blown challenge to the
status quo. And in that he has succeeded - temporarily.'
As a result of the report, there has been a burgeoning of
`equal opportunities policies', race `advisers' in every
field, ethnic monitoring and ethnic programmes. Ten years on,
CARF looks back at Scarman, and asks: Was our scepticism
justified? Or have the myriad of race equality and ethnic
programmes helped to reduce or do away with racism in Britain?
Do black people now have more equal access to jobs, to
housing, to health care, to education, as a result of the
policies of the past 10 years? Are they treated more fairly by
the criminal justice system?
Below, we summarise a large number of recent surveys in the
fields of housing, education, social security, employment and
the criminal justice system. These bear out what black people
and anti-racists working on the ground already know from their
dally experience: black people are systematically denied equal
and fair treatment and are discriminated against in all areas
of life. Equal opportunities policies haven't worked.
The findings serve to remind us that the fight against racism
is a fight for Justice. It is a simple demand. It does not
require bureaucracies, special departments and `compensatory'
policies, but a dismantling of policies which assign black
people to the worst housing - or none; which treat black
claimants as in some way `undeserving' of welfare; which
denigrate black children in schools and deny black people
work; which criminalise black people on the streets and in the
courts. As a prerequisite to all of this, the fight for
justice for black people involves fighting against racist
immigration policies which define black people as undesirable,
and set the framework for institutional racism.
Without the recognition that racism is institutionalised,
engrained in legislation and in administrative policies at
central and local level, and without a determination to root
it out of these structures, all the equal opportunities
policies in the world are doomed to failure.
HOUSING
Racist policies still abound in local authority housing
departments. In London's East End, Tower Hamlets local
authority is still evicting Bangladeshi families from homeless
families accommodation on the grounds that they should have
stayed in Bangladesh, and has sons and daughters existing
council tenants get priority on the waiting list. The CRE has
taken them to court.
In London generally, black families are twice as likely to<