Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race(19)

The statistics are devastating. But they are not the result of a lack of black excellence, talent, education, hard work or creativity. There are other, more sinister forces at play here.

There are swathes of evidence to suggest that your life chances are obstructed and slowed down if you are born black in Britain. Despite this, many insist that any attempt to level the playing ground is special treatment, and that we must focus on equality of opportunity, without realising that levelling the playing ground is enabling equality of opportunity. This is far from new. Over a decade ago, Neil Davenport wrote in Spiked Online that ‘affirmative action enforces rather than overcomes notions of equal racial abilities’.19 Instead of being seen as a solution to a systemic problem, positive discrimination is frequently pinpointed as one of the key accelerators in rampant ‘political correctness’, and quotas are some of the most hotly contested methods of eliminating homogeneous workplaces in recent years. The method works a little bit like this: senior people in an organisation realise their workplace doesn’t reflect the reality of the world they live in (either because of internal or external pressure), so they implement recruitment tactics to redress the balance. Quotas have been suggested as a strategy in many sectors – from politics, to sport, to theatre – and they always receive a backlash.

In 2002, America’s National Football League introduced measures to address the lack of black managers in the sport. Named after the NFL’s diversity committee chair Dan Rooney, the Rooney rule worked through a rather mild method of opening up opportunities for people of colour. When a senior coaching or operations position became available, teams were required to interview at least one black or minority ethnic person for the job. This was a shortlist requirement only. Teams were under no obligation to hire said person. The rule wasn’t a quota. Neither was it an all-black shortlist, or a rigid percentage target. Instead, it was an incredibly tame ‘softly softly’ attempt to rebalance the scales. The Rooney rule was implemented a year after it was introduced. A decade after the rule’s implementation, the evidence was showing that it was working. In those ten years, twelve new black coaches had been hired across the States, and seventeen teams had been led by either a black or Latino coach, some even in quick succession. The general consensus was that the sport’s bosses had begun to see candidates that they wouldn’t have previously considered.

Around the time of the rule’s tenth birthday, its success in the US led to the idea being floated in British football. For some football bosses, it was considered a good way to quell the sport’s ugly history of overt racism, a way to heal the jagged wounds of monkey noises and bananas thrown at black players on the pitch in years past. Then Football Association chairman Greg Dyke gave the idea a nod, confirming to the BBC in 2014 that the FA’s inclusion advisory board were considering some version of the rule. In British football, as of 2015, the numbers on race were pitiful. Despite overall black and ethnic minority representation of 25 per cent in both leagues, there was only one black manager in the Premier League, and just six black managers in the Football League. There were no black managers in Scotland’s top four divisions, and just one black manager in Wales’ Elite League.20

Despite its utterly inoffensive nature, the idea of implementing the Rooney rule in British football sent the nation into a spin. Chairman of Blackpool FC Karl Oyston called it ‘tokenism’ and ‘an absolute insult’ to people in the sport.21 Carlisle United manager Keith Curle essentially called it a box-ticking exercise.22 Richard Scudamore, chief executive of the Premier League, introduced plans to develop a pool of black coaches instead, and called the Rooney rule unnecessary.23 The way it was spoken about, you’d think that the FA’s plans weren’t suggesting having one person of colour on an interview shortlist, but instead were asking team heads to walk into their local supermarket and offer their most high-level jobs to the first random black person they saw in the vegetable aisle. In 2016, the English Football League opted to put forward proposals to implement the Rooney rule on a mandatory basis. The Premier League chose not to entertain the idea even on a voluntary basis.24

Around the same time as Britain’s Rooney rule conversation, a similar debate was taking place in the business sector. Then Business Secretary Vince Cable tabled plans to diversify business boards, announcing an aim of 20 per cent black and ethnic minority FTSE100 directors in just five years. Research in the same year found that over half of FTSE100 companies didn’t have a single person of colour at board level.25 With the conversation about boardrooms previously focusing solely on a very white version of gender, Cable’s intervention was refreshing. But, again, there was pushback against the idea, with the director general of the Institute of Directors, Simon Walker, telling the Telegraph: ‘Businesses seek to appoint board members on the basis of competence. They may not always make good decisions but there is little sign of systematic racial prejudice at the top of British business.’26

In 2015, a debate pondering the possibility of quotas to secure an increased number of women and people of colour judges prompted senior judge Lord Justice Leveson to announce to a lecture hall that the idea was entirely demeaning. ‘Creating a principle of appointment not because of merit but in order to achieve gender or ethnic balance’, he told his audience, ‘will inevitably lead to the inference that those appointments are most decidedly not based on merit alone.’27 Although it was established in 1875, the High Court only welcomed its first black judge, Dame Linda Dobbs, in 2004. She was born in Sierra Leone, received her legal education in Britain, and was called to the bar in 1981. In an interview with video archive First 100 Years, she detailed some of the discrimination she faced, saying, ‘It was difficult to complain about things in those days. There were no procedures. None of that was recorded, so to try and prove that, you know, you were discriminated against was very difficult indeed.’28 Dame Linda Dobbs retired from the High Court in 2013. In 2015, just 7 per cent of judges across courts and tribunals were black or from an ethnic minority background.