Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race(18)

Because he exists in this book only to make a point, we can imagine that the young black man makes it out of education in one piece, with a good degree from a good university, and his eyes fixed upon getting a good job, like all determined graduates. Although he won’t know it, outside of education, the drastic racial disparities continue. He might look at the white kids he went to university with and watch them effortlessly transition from student booze-culture-loving lager louts to slick-young-professional status. Full of hope, our black boy will still continue to send out CVs, because he believes in meritocracy. There’s no difference between him and his white peers, he thinks. They sat in the same lectures and read the same books. But his potential employers might not see it that way. In 2009, researchers working on behalf of the Department of Work and Pensions sent job applications with similar education, skills and work history to a number of prospective employers. The only distinctive difference in the applications were names – they either sounded white British, or they didn’t. The researchers found that the applicants with white-sounding names were called to interview far more often than those with African-or Asian-sounding names.11 ‘High levels of name-based net discrimination were found in favour of white applicants,’ the report commented.

So, our young black man could find himself unemployed and scraping by for a very long time. Research in 2012 found that austerity was hitting young black men particularly hard, with their demographic facing a sharp rise in unemployment, predating even the 2008 recession. A staggering 45 per cent of black sixteen-to twenty-four-year-olds were out of work in 2012 compared with just 27 per cent in 2002.12 More broadly, ethnic minority people in England and Wales have historically dealt with lower rates of employment and higher rates of unemployment than white people.13 Looking at twenty years of census data between 1991 and 2011, you’ll see that black men have had consistently high rates of unemployment – more than double those of their white counterparts. The same disadvantage is echoed in black Caribbean women and black African women compared to white women.

There is more to life than getting a good education and a decent job, though. Productivity alone does not make a worthwhile human being. What about our young black man’s social and personal life? On his way to meet friends, or to school or work, he might find himself stopped and searched by the police. In fact, he will almost certainly have some contact with the police. A 2013 British report revealed that black people are twice as likely to be charged with drugs possession, despite lower rates of drug use. Black people are also more likely to receive a harsher police response (being five times more likely to be charged rather than cautioned or warned) for possession of drugs.14 That probably won’t come as a surprise to him, though, and he will be used to the feeling of an overbearing police presence in his life. He will have almost certainly seen his brothers, uncles and older male friends routinely patted down by the police. In fact, relentless policing of the black community in Britain means that black people are over-represented on the National Criminal Intelligence DNA Database. Although there’s no recent official figures, a 2009 report from the Equalities and Human Rights Commission estimated that roughly 30 per cent of all black men living in Britain are on the National DNA Database, compared with about 10 per cent of white men and 10 per cent of Asian men. They also estimated that black men are about four times more likely than white men to have their DNA profiles stored on the police database. This led the commission to comment ‘. . . we are concerned that the high proportion of black men recorded on the database (estimated to be at least one in three black men) is creating an impression that a single race group represents an “alien wedge” of criminality.’15

We must hope that, later on in his life, our black man is not adversely affected by health problems, either physical or mental. A 2003 NHS England report confirmed that ‘there is a uniformity of findings that people of African and African Caribbean backgrounds are more at risk than any other ethnic group in England to be admitted to psychiatric hospitals under the compulsory powers of the Mental Health Act’ – that’s being sectioned against your will.16 In the same year, an inquiry into the death of David Bennett, a black man who died in a psychiatric unit, added ‘[black people] tend to receive higher doses of anti-psychotic medication than white people with similar health problems. They are generally regarded by mental health staff as more aggressive, more alarming, more dangerous and more difficult to treat. Instead of being discharged back into the community they are more likely to remain as long-term in-patients.’17 As our imaginary black man gets older, he is less likely to receive a diagnosis of dementia than his white counterparts. If he does, he will receive it at a later stage than a white British person.18

Our black man’s life chances are hindered and warped at every stage. There isn’t anything notably, individually racist about the people who work in all of the institutions he interacts with. Some of these people will be black themselves. But it doesn’t really matter what race they are. They are both in and of a society that is structurally racist, and so it isn’t surprising when these unconscious biases seep out into the work they do when they interact with the general public. With a bias this entrenched, in too many levels of society, our black man can try his hardest, but he is essentially playing a rigged game. He may be told by his parents and peers that if he works hard enough, he can overcome anything. But the evidence shows that that is not true, and that those who do are exceptional to be succeeding in an environment that is set up for them to fail. Some will even tell them that if they are successful enough to get on the radar of an affirmative action scheme, then it’s because of tokenism rather than talent.