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Flying the flag. Credit: Barry Lewis/In Pictures via Getty
Political life is full of tensions between equally desirable goals and motivations. The tension between the principle of solidarity and that of diversity in Western democracies is one that I and others have investigated, and remains a persistent “progressive dilemma”.
The recent publication of the Sewell report into the UK’s racial and ethnic disparities got me thinking about another large, awkward tension that the modern world presents us with.
The tension is this. On the one hand, multicultural democracies encourage people to celebrate and affirm their group identity — the traditions, practices and priorities that make their group different. On the other, we regard with suspicion and alarm any significant differences in average outcomes — for example in educational or economic success — that might arise from those same group practices and preferences.
I am not suggesting that we should not care about differences in outcomes between groups, and indeed individuals. Rather, the relevant question here is which differences in group outcomes arise from some unfair form of discrimination, such as racism, and which arise from the behaviour patterns and preferences associated with a particular group. The Sewell report created such a stink in part because it said that some group differences arise from the latter and not from racism.
It’s not always the case that “society is to blame”. And it’s not mere chance that causes most people from, say, British Chinese and British Indian backgrounds to do better in the education system, and the earnings league table, than other big groups including the white majority. Obviously not all cultural traditions and preferences impact on bigger picture outcomes. Some groups prefer hip-hop others country music, no big deal. But other traditions, such as norms relating to education, work, the family and child-rearing, can have a big impact on average group outcomes.
When such group differences contribute to positive outcomes, such as the fact that around 30% of NHS consultants are British Indians, it is attributed to the group’s drive, energy, focus on education and so on. But when minority groups have negative outcomes — when they are over-represented in the prison population, the unemployed or the poor — race justice campaigners tend to default to white racism as the explanation.
Sometimes they might be right to do so. The history of ethnic minorities being denied opportunities in the past, as with women too, might contribute to differences that are wrongly seen today as inherent to the group — when in fact they arose from those eras of exclusion. But what if group differences persist even in fairer and more open societies? What if some groups that were excluded in the past are now roaring ahead while others lag behind?
The problem is that if you want to close all gaps in outcomes you will have to iron out many of the group differences and ways of life that really matter to some people. Of course, not everyone feels strong attachment to a group and they are never homogeneous things anyway. Nevertheless, respect for group difference is partly what multiculturalism was supposed to be about.
Consider, for example, how the much greater religiosity and gender traditionalism of many of the UK’s minorities, especially south Asian Muslims, contributes to a host of different outcomes: more multi-generational living thanks to a greater readiness to care for elderly relatives at home, or lower household income thanks in part to fewer women working outside the home. It might be helpful to think of the causes of group difference on a spectrum with external factors, like discrimination, at one end, and internal factors, like Chinese parenting traditions, at the other, with a grey area in the middle that is a mix of the two.
Some of this same logic applies to individuals too. Modern democracies declare our legal, political, moral equality as citizens and yet we know that the talents that make for success in our societies are unequally distributed and also unequally nurtured. This creates one of the least examined tensions of liberal modernity: being unsuccessful in a relatively open, achievement-oriented society leaves a person with less psychological protection than in previous eras.
A hundred years ago, everyone knew that life was a lottery. If you were at the bottom of the pile it was just bad luck; it was down to your class origins or skin colour. But as societies have become more individualistic and somewhat more equal and meritocratic, so the threat of being exposed to constant low-level humiliation has increased for those who don’t climb the ladders.
This may help explain one of the paradoxes of the modern world: the more we worry as a society about the differences between groups and individuals, and the more we challenge unjust hierarchies, the more visible becomes the reality of inequality, both justified and unjustified. This is a version of the Tocqueville paradox, named after the French 19th-century political writer who observed that social frustration often increases as social conditions improve.
There is a good reason for this — the rising expectations of new generations for equal treatment and opportunity whether relating to class or race — but there is also a less good reason in the growth of a grievance culture that sees all difference as discrimination.
Resentment is a powerful emotion. And a resentment-driven politics that tries too enthusiastically to suppress all outcome differences must eventually end up restricting liberty too. With class politics, this led eventually to the Gulag; with race politics it leads merely to quotas, affirmative action and race consciousness trumping colour blindness.
Yet the demand for equal outcomes in the context of group differences can be a divisive force in modern society. Glenn Loury, the black American economics professor, recently argued that “it leads either to the tyrannical imposition of standards that suppress the authentic expression of groupness or to a finger-pointing suspicion every time we see someone pop their head up above the level zone… If the Jews are over-represented here and the blacks are under-represented there, there must be some intrinsic unfairness built into the system.”
Of course, there is sometimes unfairness built into the system. But the mere existence of difference is not evidence of unfairness. Moreover, even differences that do arise from cultural norms are not set in stone. One of the Sewell report themes was that less successful minority groups, and indeed the white majority, can learn from more successful ones without abandoning their distinctiveness.
Just as racism can weaken, so group cultural norms can change. This is often easier said than done and shifting cultural norms and preferences can be a long, hard road. (Though things can also change very fast: Ireland went from outlawing homosexuality to having an openly gay Taoiseach in around 25 years.)
Another way to mitigate the problem, as I argue in my latest book, is to expand our definition of merit and success and thus achieve a better general distribution of status and reward. When the corporate lawyer and the dementia nurse come closer in status, and maybe even in pay, some of those awkward group differences might start to loom less large.
The word equal retains something of its simple mathematical meaning — one side of the equation is the same as, or equivalent to, the other — even when used in a messy, human context. Yet moderate socialists realised a long time ago that equality of outcome was an unachievable goal and that equality of opportunity, difficult enough in itself, was a more appropriate one.
The Sewell report was widely condemned and accused of victim-blaming for pointing to the complex causes of different group outcomes, I suspect though that in years to come it will be seen as starting a more honest conversation about the challenge of group difference in an egalitarian age.
It is possible to imagine a society with a sufficiently wide spread of opportunity that individual and group differences are not seen as threatening or unfair. A society of legitimate inequalities does not have the utopian ring of the equal society but it is a much more attractive goal.
David Goodhart is a commissioner of the Equality and Human Rights Commission but writes here in a personal capacity. The piece is adapted from a BBC Radio 4 Point of View.
David Goodhart is the author of Head, Hand, Heart: The Struggle for Dignity and Status in the 21st Century. He is head of the Demography unit at the think tank Policy Exchange.
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SubscribeLeaving aside whether this is a good or a bad article, or whether Goodhart is or is not talking sense, what a terrible thing has happened where race is obsessively discussed day in and day out in the press, on the TV, in workplaces and in the schools and universities. There is no escape from it other than leaving the UK (and avoiding lots of other countries too.)
What an utter catastrophe.
I speak as a deserter – I left the UK about 20 years ago for a country with only a few per cent of foreigners.
I am particularly glad my children are not being brought up with this stuff being rammed down their throats all the time. I would view UK media as similar to hard-core pornography and any child of mine found reading the Guardian would be told it is a form of self-abuse leading to blindness and madness.
I am not sure exactly what your complaint is. You prefer a society where race is obsessively discussed?
Yes he does as he can be so smug about his own tolerance while enjoying criticizing others he disagrees with . My theory about this country is that when we went bankrupt about thirty years ago , the government etc sold us on to other countries , who as part of the deal are allowed to give us all their unwanted people.
No; his complaint is about a lack of balance in attitudes and discussion, and about hypocrisy in current discussion.
Sorry, still in the dark about what is meant. Can you be clearer?
Race has become the great American pastime, replacing baseball and whining. So somebody must like it. I suppose you all over in the UK are starting to adopt it.
As a society we’re expected to tolerate some immigrant groups who’ve proved themselves to be quite intolerant themselves. A Guardian poll not too many years ago showed 52% of UK Muslims admitted to wanting to make homosexuality illegal. ILLEGAL.
I don’t see why we should tolerate such intolerance. Do you?
Islam is intolerant of anything that isn’t in line with Sharia. The House of Saud with its vast oil wealth has initiated and is funding global jihad whose aim is a global Umma. Mind your daughters, don’t play music or drink alcohol.
Capitalism will do to Islam what it did to Christianity. A bird in the hand (stuff and more stuff now) is worth two in the bush (pie in the sky when you die).
If only. There are plenty of wealthy, educated Islamist radicals – Osama bin Laden was hardly poor! Wealth and modernity do not inoculate against fanaticism.
“Wealth and modernity do not inoculate against fanaticism.”
A fundamental mistake made by Marx inter alios.
Thanks, I looked that up. The Survey from 2015 did report that. It also reported Muslims felt slightly more British than the average for the population. Will be interesting to see how that changes over time. The survey only interviewed 1000 British Muslims and 1000 people as a control group.
I don’t agree that homosexuality should be illegal but I don’t think it should be illegal to think it should be. The law on incitement to hatred covering sexuality is evidence that, as a society, we actually don’t tolerate it.
When people are religious, test of tolerance ” Are you happy for oldest son to marry a woman from another religion and convert to it? For a muslim family this would mean marrying someone Jewish or Hindu “.
They may feel British in a superficial, generic way because they don’t feel English, Scottish, or Welsh. Don’t be fooled by silly surveys.
Mark, the muslim immigrants may want to make homosexuality illegal, yet the point is that they will fail. This is a strawman argument – no mass of immigrants is sufficiently powerful to change the laws of their host country if there is any cohesion there in the first place.
Now regarding the incessant & tiring anti-racism rallying cries, it is indeed unfortunate. But perhaps we should consider just how much racism is ingrained in certain cultures (the USA for starters) and how long its abhorrent defenders have been dismissed as “patriots” or some other absurd label in order to excuse the inexcusable.
Just like you, I am tired of the incessant anti-racism push – but let us not delude ourselves about the existence of a reasons for it. Society took too long to acknowledge racism and act upon it, and now we’re left to deal with the pendulum swing.
They won’t fail if it is they running the country.
I personally think the pendulum analogy is flawed. It implies there is a sweet spot between favouring one group over another, based on race/class/religion
The issue is far more binary: you either believe all are equal before the law (conservatives/classical liberal/social Democrat) or you advocate for favoured status based on group identity (Apartheid, BLM, Jim Crow, woke, Islamism).
Class is also a group identity.
The progressive left support intolerance as a tool to destroy the western culture, the most tolerant culture ever.
The reason is the progressive faith: All change is always to the better.
That’s a pretty silly remark, because you are using the word “intolerance” as though all forms of intolerance were the same, and setting the “majority, in the middle” against intolerance, as though the majority were entirely free from intolerance.
It simply doesn’t add up.
Do you think the English people should survive or be blended out of existence for the greater good of certain power elites?
You sure your question is for me? I am guessing you meant someone else.
The English people are already a wonderful blend and it hasn’t put them out of existence so far so I don’t think it’s likely in the future.
Only a foreign hater attempts to describe a colonised native group as a “blend”. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.
We are all blends of a number of races – why is that offensive ?
No- we are a blend of ethnicities we are all of the same race.
When everyone thinks you’re an idiot because of your comment, it indicates a need for self reflection. But typically it results in a doubling down, excuses like “Well, there are only right-wing trolls on this comment thread”, etc. Just so you know I’m a Green Party supporting, bicycle-advocate, vegetarian, earring-wearing dude, and I think you’re an a.. as well. Take this as you will. You are not “in the middle”, although you think you are. You are on the lunatic left fringe.
It is being discussed ad nauseam now because for decades all talk of it has been actively suppressed by the authorities. We have been made afraid to even raise the topic for so long that there is a great deal to get through before some semblance of normality can resume.
Better it is discussed now than suppressed yet again, and left to fester beneath the surface. We need to find a way through problems that are real, not imagined, and which will not go away by virtue of being studiously ignored.
The Sewell report was ‘widely condemned’ in certain sections of progressive media because it didn’t align with their view, not through challenge to any components of it. The interview between Andrew Neil and Mercy Muroki gives some hope for a future based on facts and nuance. The inevitable outcome of simply screaming against findings is that effort goes into all the wrong places. Can’t fix a real problem when you’re so upset about fantasy ones.
I watched that interview. What a breath of fresh air Mercy Muroki is compared to the self-styled intelligent and attractive black women, usually only lightweights in the intellectual sense, that are much more usually haranguing whitey on the meedja.
Yes, Mercy Muroki is wonderful. I saw her interviewed on Triggernometry. That aside, we have all known this for some time.
Yes, Mercy is wonderful. I have seen her interviewed a couple of times.
If some minority groups fail to flourish it’s their own fault.
Let’s stop pretending all cultures are equal – those cultures that hate gay people, practise FGM, treat women as second class citizens etc – I actively hate them and think they have no place in my country of birth.
“Another way to mitigate the problem, as I argue in my latest book, is to expand our definition of merit and success and thus achieve a better general distribution of status and reward.”
Madness. Make words mean what is Correct, you mean. Like someone of a group where a large amount end up with criminal records – But has never has actually done time should have the same status of an individual of a group that mostly are professionals, if that individual one is a top consultant – because they are both above average, both excelled within their group? Both worthy of equal status?
You are being obtuse. He meant, as i understand it, that equally necessary groups of professions, workers etc, are equally valued, economically. A skilled trauma nurse who may not have had the innate talent to become a doctor but is still a necessary part of the team should be compensated more equally. In Finland, teaching is a highly respected profession. So not only are teachers, including elementary teachers, highly paid and respected, they are also chosen out of the top percentile of graduates. Not the lowest as in most western countries . This means there is a knock-on effect. Parents highly respect them, too; thus, so do their children. I bet there’s little disruption in their classrooms. When parents consider elementary through high school teachers as a form of lower level but convenient childminder, disrespect etc. follows.
The idea is that we don’t all have the talents to be in highly-skilled and highly paid professions. But if there is a more equitable payment for society’s equally needed workers, there would be less resentment in society in general. The article is claiming that it is this resentment that is causing so many of our current problems.
I didn’t read anywhere in it that society should economically value the criminal class. Perhaps, i have misunderstood your point.
Belatedly read these comments, yes Susannah thanks you do read me correctly
Conveniently ignoring the fact that whenever one group does bad we’re not allowed to talk about it because racism. Which given what’s happened in Yorkshire is a sign, that no we are not an equal society.
We are living in an age where some groups are protected and any genuine criticism of them is met by claims that such criticism is driven by bigotry of one form or another.
Which fits in with my point of view that we have to take the people , criminals, drug addicts general trouble makers that other countries don’t want and so can’t criticize them. The original group of people who arrived post WW11 have mostly done alright for themselves.It is also noticable that there are a lot of groups trying to prevent deportation of, in many cases really awful ,people by boarding planes protesting etc-like yesterday’s protests in Scotland. These anarchist groups must really dislike their own country & will do anything to destroy it as can’t they find a better cause?. However they needn’t bother with their protests as the Home Office has no intention of deporting anyone.
And as the latter are obviously not fleeing from danger (if they were why make yourself so conspicious in new country by committing so many crimes ?)why have millions of people who are from the dominant group in their own family country been allowed to come to a country which lives by completely different rules?
Tarring a whole nationality or group with the same brush and saying IQ is a feature of ethnicity. You do know that’s racism?
Why is the known average g measurement of Africa and India an emotional problem for you?
I prefer to think people should be thought of as individuals rather than categorised or judged by where they are from.
Have you ever heard of things such as statistical averages, patterns, outliers, atypicals, typicals & suchlike? Say, think of a sum of a number of individuals. And so forth.
In the case of the Pakistani community, the outliers will be even more extreme given the alarming rates of endogamy/close family marriages.
By definition it might be ‘racism’ but is it wrong to say it? Should saying that be illegal?
It’s not illegal to think it or say it unless the intention is to incite hatred. Which isn’t demonstrably the case here. If I was a Pakistani reading this, though, I’d probably feel insulted and wonder why the writer hates me, my friends and family.
What a puerile approach. Is “hate” the only negative sentiment you can think of?
That aside, if a Pakistani person reading it happens to feel insulted, so what. I hear / read / see many things any given day which i find insulting, yet i don’t demand others to cater to my sensitivities. It’s part of being a grown-up.
Frankly I don’t care what you think.
You care enough to respond, for which I thank you.
Yes we do. And? So what?
Do you expect us to take offence in being called a raycisst, or something?
I am called a racist by Islamists. Since when did exposing the contents of the Islamic works become a race!!!,,?????
The consequences will be dire because it’s a short jump from “What cannot be uttered” to “What goes without saying”. People are being trained to read the news and fill in the blanks. This will increase racial animosity, no doubt.
multicultural democracies encourage people to celebrate and affirm their group identity
Well, that’s not really true, is it, David? The minority incomers are encouraged to do this, but the majority are called racists for doing so. You’d think the minorities would have to be racist too, but they’re not, because their race excuses them. So we can say that in a multicultural society, whether something is racism or not depends on the race of the racist.
with race politics it leads merely to quotas, affirmative action
Which is inevitable given the fundamentally dishonest position of the grievance industry and its fellow travellers. On the one hand race doesn’t even exist, and there’s no such thing as white culture. On the other it exists well enough that we can use it to establish quotas by race so as to diminish the white culture of, say, the C of E. This body has decided that as the UK is 13% ethnic minority, 15% of its priests must be black. Given that a good half of the 13% aren’t even Christians, this means the Church intends to implement racist quotas against white people by over-representing blacks to whites by about 2.5 to 1. This sort of farce is inevitable given the self-contradictions of the “thinking”.
less successful minority groups…can learn from more successful ones without abandoning their distinctiveness
How do you get British black men of Caribbean heritage to behave like British black men of west African heritage (this is a male problem, by the way; black women get paid more than white)? Tumbleweed.
How many therapists does it take to change a lightbulb? One, but the lightbulb has to want to change.
John Redman—Thank you for drawing attention to Goodhart’s ‘multicultural democracies encourage people to celebrate and affirm their group identity’. He managed to slip that one past me.
Yes, he got that one past me, too. On the whole, I think it’s a good article, but little things like that need to be challenged. And the difference between Black Britons of Caribbean heritage, and those of more immediately African descent is striking; interestingly, the same has been observed in the USA, as I read a few months back that Nigerian Americans and Ghanaian Americans have better outcomes than white Americans, and are less likely to come to the attention of the criminal justice system, which clearly operates a very selective form of racism, one which only picks on you (purely for the colour of your skin) if your family was born in the country for several generations.
Having lived most of my life is in the quintessential multi-culti society, there are times when I think the only benefit is the food choices. And I don’t say that lightly. My family hails originally from Greece; by the current metric, I’m a person of color, easily confused for a Hispanic, a Middle Eastern, a Jew, and a dozen other things.
Where multi-culti has gone off the rails is the nonsensical charge of “appropriation,” which is a feature of such societies, not a bug. I get no more uptight about white women making burritos than about a Mexican grilling burgers, and the women’s example is cited on purpose. Two ladies in Portland started a burrito truck and were hounded by white woke leftists into shutting it down. We get nonsense over some Anglo with braids but silence over a black person with hair dyed blonde. Just stop. It’s embarrassing.
Agree 100%, this “appropriation” business is complete lunacy!
Me too. I don’t get it. I love music and without cultural appropriation most of what I love wouldn’t exist.
Absolutely! Where would the 2 Tone/Ska revival be without “cultural appropriation?!”
Love it. So simple, straight forward, down to earth. And true. Let the “thinkers” tangle themselves in theories and pontifications. Let the politicians spar with laws and policies. Leave the woke to their virtue signalling, the business man to his profits from cheap labour. The reality for the vast majority of the population really is “the only benefit is the food choices”. That is our “lived experience” (apologies for appropriation of woke culture speak).
The irony of having the argument about the cultural appropriation of a burrito in English is totally lost on these morons.
it’s not mere chance that causes most people from, say, British Chinese and British Indian backgrounds to do better in the education system than other big groups including the white majority
One reason for white underperformance David Goodhart doesn’t touch on:
One’s heart goes out to this lone white pupil in a London school.
That’s a distortion, I’m afraid. The under performance of what we might call ‘deprived’ one parent family white kids, boys in particular, goes back many decades. It was certainly very evident in the mid 1970s, long before I’d ever heard the term ‘multi-cultural’. Tough white kids, especially boys, in inner city comprehensives, were difficult to engage and inspire, as I well remember. The commonest characteristic which struck me at the time was what we used to then call, ‘broken homes’. Lacking positive male role models, left boys aspiring to be like louts who ran loose on the streets of their locality, even when their mothers were making good efforts to instil better morals.
Here is the brave educationalist Philip Beadle telling it like it is to a roomful of NUT members in 2008 (from a teachers.tv video on the white working-class):
“Difficulties about taking the subject on involve being explicit about race, which can be uncomfortable. You cannot have a properly functioning multicultural educational system when the needs of one social and ethnic group are completely ignored. I’ve sat through whole rafts of assemblies about Nelson Mandela, Rosa Parks, and Jessie Owens, where the only white person mentioned all term is Adolf H itI er. And I’ve watched the white kids squirm with guilt and embarrassment and shame as they are force-fed a daily diet of the doctrine of their own obsolescence.
“How is it possible to reverse generations of ambivalence particularly towards education if they only rarely see images of themselves in school, and most of these are negative?
“Black History Month is controversial among the white working-class – not in that they don’t recognise the right of black people’s celebration of their own culture and history, but the fact that there is no single event through which they may investigate their own culture, and how they come to be here.”
The article seems to be implicitly assuming that equality is an objective concept that is itself not subject to the power of definition. Do our laws treat Muslims equally? A Muslim man may have up to four wives according to Muslim law. Oh, but you will say “He may marry one woman just like everyone else. That’s equal. We don’t need to change the concept of marriage just to satisfy his desire for more than one woman.” But then a homosexual man says “Marriage is not equal! Sure, I have the right to marry a woman but I don’t want to. You must change the definition to make it equal.”. And we quickly nod our heads and agree.
The nature of equality does not hang above this argument untouched and unsullied. It’s a weapon that may be shaped and modified for purpose. People use it to achieve the outcomes they desire.
Mohammed had a good trick to get what he wanted. He said he had had a visit and Allah had told him it was ok to do all the stuff HE wanted to do.
A well known woman serving as the Representative of an American state uses a surname that was given to her family by another to pretend she belonged to them when she left her country. Of her four marriages , one apparently was to her brother , which gave him legal status-he now resides in the UK. Even if you put in a formal complaint noone will investigate her. It was quite comical years ago when we realized our landlord had numerous alias-one was the typical arranged marriage , one was with his British girlfriend & best of all one was one with the Samaritans who we once saw him singing with.
In that respect it’s a bit like “fairness”, a word that means different things to different (types of) people. After graduating, and prior to finding a “proper job”, I was, for a while, a waiter. On my first day I was informed that all tips were pooled and shared out equally, because “that’s fairer”. I tried to point out that if Waiter A is especially attentive to the diners, tries to smile more and offer a welcoming experience, whereas Waiter B is sullen, off-hand, and serves people generally when he gets round to it, it is fairer that each keeps his own tips, and Waiter A will probably receive a good deal more than Waiter B.
Both the right winger and the left believe in fairness, but to the former it is a matter of getting out according to what you put in, whereas to the latter it is a matter of everyone having the same outcome, regardless of input. Another difference is that the right winger acknowledges that his own version of fairness is a dream for which we should strive, without ever having a chance achieving it in an imperfect world, but the left winger often sees his version as something that must be achieved immediately, and by force if necessary.
I have been working in India on three occasions. I have just watched a re-run of Rick Stein in India. People who believe that there are race problems in this country should go to India or Pakistan. There they will see how rich Indian people treat poor Indian people. Ditto in Pakistan.
This does not mean that there are NO race problems in the UK but it does mean that they are of relatively minor importance.
we suffer from people with no concept of how other parts of the world live. People in the US talk about poverty with no clue of what the real thing looks like. The same applies to race. You make a good point.
Do you want the English people to die out because you are afraid of “race problems”, ie the rejection of the Establishment’s race project by the natives of this land?
I understand your point, but to those with an exaggerated moral impulse that seek establish unwarranted moral concerns via any critical theory offshoot, such observation rings hollow I think, for they would see it as a red herring or a two wrongs argument that seek to establish precisely your conclusion – that they are of relatively minor importance. Such a relativistic argument does not assuage the totalising and exaggerated nature of their morality.
Disagree. I think they would see that I was white and, therefore, to be ignored.
Perhaps. My limited experience when discussing with critical theorists (of the decolonial type) is precisely what I have outlined.
So I suppose the point is that critical theorist types do not express themselves in a uniform manner – some discuss using argumentation and others don’t (due to power discourses being irrelevant etc).
My problem with ‘critical theory’ is that has been designed and is led by ‘critical theorists’. Basically, it is a highly developed, precisely argued set of opinions. That is all, I’m afraid.
This is NOT a multicultural society. This is an ancestral homeland colonised by foreign peoples who were invited by the political class and coerced upon the unwilling natives.
Except that our rulers still see themselves as French nobility who have lost their homeland , but might as well boss the peasants about while they are here. Everytime one of the elite is asked what is your favourite?-it is never anything British , can you imagine an Italian or French politician choosing Elgar, Constable & roast beef & yorkshire pudding , mais oui I always holiday at Filey-I think not.
Camden Council in its sensitive administration allowed a Ramadan event in Tavistock Square where the Gandhi statue is located. Also located there in a corner and a bit overgrown with leaves and foliage is the memorial for those killed and injured in the 2005 7/7 bus bombing.
I lived very near there and used those gardens and often went there with my young daughter.
When I wrote to the council saying I thought it a bit insensitive to the dead, survivors and their families to allow it there and not hold it elsewhere. Maybe Russell Square I was told I was a racist and a trouble maker by my then local Labour Councillor, Adam Harrison and he told me he was glad I had moved and felt sorry for the council I had moved to another borough!! I am the villain for pointing out the crime!!! My daughter and I could have been blown up. We were lucky. Camden has a big Bangladeshi Muslim and Nigerian Muslim community. I wonder if Labour led Camden had taken a leaf out of Labour MP Naz Shah’s book when she told the child victims of the Rotherham and Oldham Muslim Pakistani pedophiles, to ‘shut up in the interests of the community cohesion.’
Given that we cannot ultimately survive the presence of these peoples, for them to be in our home without our express consent and by state coercion constitutes a crime under article 2c of the Geneva Convention on the prevention and punishment of genocide.
The council accidently sent their mag from another district. I was surprised to learn that an area i understood was the corner-stone of both enlightenment & industrial revolution-with blue plaques everywhere, actually only began its history about 50 years ago , all thanks to the generous newcomers. The rest -, the Victorian buildings ,the industrial heritage the stately homes are all a mirage apparently
Loving this part:
Wokeness is first and foremost about oneself and projecting one’s own micro frustration into macro-socio-economic expectations. The plasticity of this ideology is its greatest strength. Contrary to classic Marxism theory with its rigid class-based framework of analysis, the new progressists can juggle with any perceived (or even real) anecdotal injustice and make it into a macro issue without bothering with significant socio-economic evidence.
“My” reality = reality, because if something wrong exists for me it’s already too much wrong for the universe.
Got you – right and wrong are relative, depending directly on the number of people impacted. Ahem…
David Goodheart: “On the one hand, multicultural democracies encourage people to celebrate and affirm their group identity — the traditions, practices and priorities that make their group different. On the other, we regard with suspicion and alarm any significant differences in average outcomes — for example in educational or economic success — that might arise from those same group practices and preferences.”
This is not true. That “other hand” is a new development and an ideological, not a normal, one. For example, I grew up in a multicultural community, NYC in the 1950s. There was zero concern for equal group outcomes. Everyone was given pretty much an equal chance and then things shook out as per individual and group predilections. No one ever thought about group outcomes. That there weren’t enough Polish doctors or Jewish sanitation men wasn’t a fit subject to worry about. But ethnic festivals were plentiful and sincere, to everyone else’s pleasure. Remember the Feast of San Gennaro? St Patrick’s Day? The Puerto Rican Day Parade?
Once again, the concern about equal outcomes arises from one thing only: black failure. No one is concerned about irregular ethnic results in basketball. Trying to account for something we’ve been taught since 1965 is unacceptable and which can’t be the fault of blacks themselves is the reason we’ve twisted ourselves into pretzels to try to “solve” it, even going so far as to embrace irrationality and illiberalism.
Yes, whites now feel guilty about unequal outcomes. But black failure is the “root cause,” not some imaginary, ever-changing social construct called racism.
Yeah apart from the many many many times in history and in modern times when it leads to genocide.
and that sounds potentially good but you just know “positive” discrimination won’t appear nor will I doubt any acknowledgement of minority’s discriminating.
“Just as racism can weaken”
I like that as a realistic way to view progress in social relationships. It’s like a falling exponential curve which never actually reaches zero. I’m sure racism can never be totally eradicated because some people can’t or won’t change. But then like child poverty which can never be eradicated because of its definition, when we progress in weakening racism the definition is changed by those who only want to destabilise our social improvements for nefarious reasons.
I really do wish the phrase “child poverty” could be removed not only from the English language but also from the universe. Children all exist (well at least in the legal systems I know) in a state of extreme poverty since they can’t own anything – its owned by their parents or some form of trustee. Remember the wicked trustee who wants to marry the heiress to get his hands on the fortune that used to be so popular in books.
Forget child poverty think poverty or if you must qualify it adult poverty.
An excellent article. Only one sentence seemed jarring to me: “When the corporate lawyer and the dementia nurse come closer in status, and maybe even in pay, some of those awkward group differences might start to loom less large.“
Do you seriously consider nurses lower status than lawyers? With all due respect to lawyers, most people I know respect nurses well above them.
Part of status is reward though, I think that is what David is saying.
I don’t think he does; I believe his new book argues for society to recognise achievement outwith the purely intellectual. (Haven’t got my hands on a copy yet, though.)
It was obvious to most people from the start, decades ago, that there was a massive contradiction between “celebrating diversity” and condemnation of anyone who points out differences. Nice to see the intelligentsia catching up.
There isn’t an equal outcome with members of the same family. How can it possibly be achieved anywhere else?
The left needs victims -why otherwise is the left needed ?
Thats why they attacked the Sewell report so outrageously. They never debated the issues- they denigrated the authors – nearly all of whom were BAME (imagine if they had been all white !) .
The harsh fact is that not having a father in a household , a single parent mum, on a rough estate – is not a good start in life, It doesnt matter what colour your skin is. But pointing to absent fathers is racist say the left.
“With class politics, this led eventually to the Gulag; with race politics it leads merely to quotas, affirmative action and race consciousness trumping colour blindness.”
You really think so? Do you think it will end there? When poor minorities try to use their victimhood status to clamber over and push down whites and other more-successful-on-average groups to get tot he top, how long do you think that society will remain stable without decaying into some sort of violence, chaos, or retribution?
There is no reason to say that race politics will somehow be less gentle in the long run than was communism.
Are you coming here to join us, or are you coming here to make us join you?
Multiculturalism is a really sh)t concept. It leads to division, mistrust, hatred and, in extremis, civil war (see France).
It is also extraordinarily unfair on the host societies whose populations are quite literally forced to like it or lump it by their own governments.
Excellent article. Another way of viewing this is through culture. Throughout history the most successful culture would predominate. Greek culture was replaced by Roman, then Muslim (Ottoman), then the Renaissance and enlightenment evolved Western Culture. Western Culture has benefitted more of humanity than any other.
The Left has labeled Western Culture as White Supremacy to fuel the grievance industry by blaming unequal outcomes on what are, in some cases, cultural differences in inputs.
it is interesting how the people who are most vocal about everything being an example of “white supremacy” are white. They never volunteer to give up their own privilege, of course.
“White Privilege” is a feature, not a bug, although it is more apparent in some societies than others; I lived and worked in the greater Los Angeles area for over 10yrs and was ticketed for speeding far too many times.
Once I was pulled over doing nearly twice the speed limit in a residential area – you’ll have to accept my word that while I was driving very fast I was driving as safely as the road conditions allowed – and at no time during the stop did it ever cross my mind that the cop would start screaming at me, mace me, or pull his gun on me.
I was a nice white, middle class guy in a nice white-ish middle class car, and was ticketed for the mph over the limit and sent on my way. The cop could have easily charged me with reckless endangerment or something, which would have resulted in a court appearance and possible loss of license if convicted.
Contrast that with a black colleague who drove out of the office carpark at 2am, after pulling a double shift on Black Friday, in a new-ish Cadillac Escalade SUV, only to be immediately pulled over by the local cops and asked where he stole the vehicle from.
They kept him sitting in the gutter in his suit and tie with his hands zip-tied behind his back for over 3 hours while they tried to find an excuse to bust him. In the end there were 4 cruisers attending, one of which was a K9 unit looking for drugs and/or firearms.
As for my “White Privilege,” I can no more give it up than my black colleague could turn himself Caucasian.
Thanks for trying, Hal. But racist people will never acknowledge the reality you just described. They will invent arguments about your black colleague acting strange, the car looking like a known stolen car or anything else other than disgusting racism institutionalized in the police force.
For the racist crowd the problem is the nuisance of the protests, not their own inexcusable behaviour which creates the problem in the first place.
how odd that these “racist people” of your imagination have done none of the things you cite.
I see jazz, trip hop, reggae, rock n roll, the works of James Baldwin, Seamus Heaney, Picasso, Robert Burns etc as part of Western Culture but not white supremacy. There are lots of great things about Western Culture the left celebrates.
Jordan Peterson’s being channelled it seems. He has been banging on about the topics raised in this column for at least, prominently, four years now. Such frames as multivariate analysis, equality of opportunity vs equality of outcome, Paredo Distribution/Prices Law, resentment and the Gulags, benign and malign hierarchical structures.
The final sentiment is a recent proposition of Peterson’s. He maintains the failure of current liberal democracy – to establish a romantic narrative of the striving for “… a society of legitimate inequalities…”, is of concern, compared to the romantic narrative of aiming for a utopia of ‘totalitarian’ equality.
I think we live in a culturally pluralistic society not a multicultural society. Hence the tension and confusion where one cultural/ethnic group seeks to assert a component of its cultural practice as if it were of equal standing to the instantiated mores and ethics and values established in law by a dominant group.
On my first mornint at St Albans School, our form master introduced himself. He then said something I have never forgotten.
Life, he said is not fair. You are not here at this school because you are better that everyone else. We can fill every place at this school many times over. No you are here at this school because someone else is not. That is not fair. Life is not fair. Remember it.
It seems various so called progerssive thinkers have confused the reality of life not being fair with an idea that has absolutely no bsae in evidence. We now reap the corn they have sown.
David ,are you sure about the statistic that 30% of UK medical consultants are specifically from the Indian subgroup?I thought the total figure for consultants from the minorities was around 40%, which only leaves 10 % for all the rest, of which there are plenty- lots of Pakistani origin, fewer of African extraction but they are catching up fast. However, you may be right- what’s your source ?
People probably don’t realise how extreme NZ is becoming under the Ardern government. Maori make up 15% of the population but you only need one ancestor.
https://www.facebook.com/NZLabourParty/videos/215459550032665
” I do not agree that it is necessary to re-introduce ‘essentialism’ into the discussion. In fact, I think it is dangerous, because it adds fuel to the fire of those who love engaging in ‘authenticity talk’ to establish that there are no ‘real’ or ‘full-blooded’ Maori left in New Zealand anyway, and that
consequently nobody can be entitled to anything simply on the grounds of ‘being Maori’. The authors should have made clear that it is a strategic essentialism that underlies a commitment to bi-nationalism. Qualifying the essentialism as ‘strategic’ makes explicit that the Maori nation is constructed as an imagined community with the aim of wrenching power from the ‘mainstream’, while at the same time avoiding the ‘authenticity trap’. ”
The above is a review of this Distinguished Professors book Recalling Aotearoa
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKY9IMhnyOY
Ahhh I see now why the Left has reframed equality as equity.
On the one hand this is a sensible perspective since for example, equal comfort on a bus would require seats being positioned to create differing amounts of leg room and so to achieve equity, seats would be allocated according to height and leg length.
(It would be an interesting experiment in implicit and explicit cooperation to see if people chose an equitable seat or a nonequitable seat with one group not informed of the equity policy and the other informed).
However, the equity the woke Left are referring to is to ignore the cultural differences, rather than explicitly take differences into account, and achieve equal outcomes through positive discrimination. Whilst this would create material equity, it incentives a race to the bottom in terms of victimhood, freeloading, productivity and trust and would eventually implode as a result of increasingly competitive antagonisms.
In contrast, building a soft hierarchical society based on layered equal value and worth whilst still retaining the underlying motivational ethic of ‘survival is work’ would put more emphasis on personal and group adaptation.
Thus, as long as vertical and horizontal inequalities are narrowed by facilitating equity through equality of opportunity, then this will make society more grounded in ecological adaptation with a less competitive group diversity adding to ecological resilience.
Why are ‘solidarity’ or ‘diversity’ desirable? I’ve never found either so. Both are emotionally-loaded in origin, and I prefer ‘membership of a group’ to be purely regulated by the impartial Law, and not a compuslory Govt. policy, against people’s private will. Compulsory ‘solidarity’ or ‘diversity’ offend against ‘free association’ which is the only real ‘liberal’ value. It does not imply any emotional commitment to one’s ‘fellow man’ at all nor require that ‘diversity’ should be approved of. It merely posits an equality of obligation of everyone NOT to do things which everyone is assumed to find unacceptable.
Though I disagree with the piece about the Sewell Report (largely because I don’t think it was particularly well done, was disowned by several of those who contributed to it and contained a mismatch between its evidence and its conclusions) I do think the article makes good points about how we define merit, success, status and reward. Though I’d extend the metaphor from comparing the Dementia Nurse with the Corporate Lawyer to comparing the part-time DJ/part-time bus driver with the Corporate Lawyer.
“Was disowned by several of those who contributed to it” Is this true? If true why did they put their names to it? How many? ? “Contained a mismatch between its evidence and conclusions ” please identify this mismatch, or alternatively clearly state this is your assertion, based upon your opinion and biases if you wouldn’t mind.
Not having a go at you, but isn’t this the type of thing that passes for debate these days, which actually isn’t honest debate?
Several people who were listed as having contributed asked for their names to be removed and some Commissioners disagreed with the final version. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/apr/11/downing-street-rewrote-independent-report-on-race-experts-claim?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
An example of the mismatch between evidence and conclusions would be the way the report acknowledged BAME was a reductive term and way of looking at race but then used the term ethnic minorities in much of its summary.
It’s good to be challenged when making assertions.
Good Lord, yes. It’s all very well managing a complex and lucrative merger, but if you can’t line up the lights on a pair of Technics decks to seamlessly sequence two dire records (that you neither wrote, performed or even recorded) you’re not worth your bus fare home. I’m not one of the people who downvoted you, but I think your DJ comment is risible (n contrast to much of what you post).