Nadine White, Race Correspondent for The Independent has written this reflection on another Black History Month and concluded: “Racial equality in Britain is as distant a dream as ever”.
Despite the high profile political appointments of people of colour, the heightened awareness of racial injustice since the murder of George Floyd in 2020 has not been harnessed. Instead “From the widening ethnicity pay gap between Black and white workers to the “violent” deaths of Black people in prisons, the struggle is real. From the absence of Black history on school curriculums to the majority of Black Britons reporting experiences of racial discrimination by doctors and nurses, there’s yet more work to be done.”
She quotes just released statistics that reveal that Black British people are still disproportionately affected in terms of detention and treatment compared to white people. The optimism of 2020 has largely gone as the government presses ahead with plans “to send thousands of Black, Asian and Middle Eastern refugees to Rwanda, describing them as ‘illegal’ migrants because they arrive by boat. Meanwhile, ministers have rightly opened our doors to tens of thousands of mostly white Ukrainians fleeing Russia’s bloody war.”
The government’s Hate Crime Action Plan launched in 2016 appears to have ground to a halt and there hasn’t been a word from ministers about the worrying surge in these incidents in the last year.
Read the full article here.
