ACTSA Statement on the Report of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities in the UK

ACTSA is the successor organisation to the Anti-Apartheid Movement. Because of our long history of standing up to institutional, institutionalised, and systemic racism, we understand very well the impacts of oppression, brutality and hatred based on race. We continue to exist because while apartheid may have ended in South Africa, its legacy continues to be felt in many areas of life and affects the entire Southern African region.

We have worked with Southern African communities, trade unions and other groups to campaign on injustice that exists today as a direct result of colonialism and institutionalised racism. For example, we campaigned successfully for justice for Southern African gold mineworkers who developed chronic diseases when they were denied adequate safety equipment during the apartheid era. We have raised the issue of period poverty in Zimbabwe, and have campaigned for women’s rights in Eswatini.

Similarly, we recognise that Britain’s history of slavery and colonialism has left many of its systems and institutions deeply entrenched in the devastating legacies of that era, which continue to disadvantage people from the African diaspora to this day. We are horrified that the race report would trivialise this by concluding that there is no evidence of institutional racism in the UK. It is disappointing that while our role in the abolition of the transatlantic Slave Trade has been glorified in the report, our role in establishing that trade has been trivialised if not ignored.

The attempt in the report to acknowledge ‘historical wrongs’ done to black and other ethnic minority communities is dangerously downplayed by the shocking attempt to denigrate communities’ well-founded distrust of institutions, such as the police, because of these historical wrongs. Without providing evidence of fundamental systemic changes that have been made to correct historical wrongs and prevent them from happening again, the authors of this report have no right to demand that the ‘BME’ community should move on from them. This is especially tactless since there is substantial evidence of continued racial injustice today. We are concerned that the Windrush Scandal of 2018 has been trivialised in this report. It continues to impact on people today, the majority have not received compensation, nor have the “Windrush Lessons Learned” recommendations been implemented.

We are disappointed that just as we saw during the period where there was apartheid in South Africa, the British government is only concerned with presenting itself and the country in the best possible light. This is dangerous and unhelpful in that it dismisses people’s lived experiences of racism and risks perpetuating the deeply unhelpful attitude that black communities are unreasonable. It also provides a disincentive for future efforts to address racial injustices, which obviously is unacceptable.

Systemic and institutional racism cannot be disregarded. It impacts on human rights, life chances and access to equality, freedom, and justice. No modern-day society can claim to be just if any segment of its population is held back by the same systems that it purports to rely on to deliver freedoms to the majority. What is needed now is a government and society that does not deny this reality but confronts it and is genuinely committed to change the experience of black people and people from other ethnic minority communities in the UK.

All the above considered, we cannot understand how the report reached its conclusions, and we reject its findings.