It’s 2019 and you’d expect that institutional racism would’ve been rooted out by now. Well what can we expect when Britain’s elite is 97% white. Time and time again the British media amplifies racism, with newspapers like The Sun and Daily Mail showing anti-immigration stances as well as islamophobic ones.
How can we expect to get rid of racism when everyday we are surrounded by media outlets and other institutions promoting it? Another damaging thing is the use of degrading racist terms that some political figures use, such as Amber Rudd who on a BBC radio interview referred to Diane Abbott as a ‘coloured woman’. Vince Cable also used similar degrading language as he said ‘I welcome people with dark faces, I was married to one‘. How is it acceptable that these prominent political figures are using such racist terms and that they hardly face no consequences for it? The ‘I have a black friend so i can’t be racist’ card is not a justifiable excuse.
You might be asking yourself ‘is all of this really so damaging?’ Well, yes it is. POC face abuse and discrimination every single day and it’s not helpful when our very own politicians can’t differentiate between what terms are acceptable to use and which ones aren’t. Ethnic minorities are three times as likely to have been thrown out of or denied entrance to a restaurant, bar or club, while 38% of BAME people said they had been wrongly suspected of shoplifting in the past five years, compared with 14% of white people. It’s gotten that bad that the NSPCC found that children are now wanting to whiten their skin to avoid racial hate crime as the police had more than 10,000 incidents reported last year. ‘Police data showed that babies and toddlers were among the victims of more than 10,500 crimes recorded in 2017-18 – an average of 29 every day.’ This is a horrendous amount of cases and it’s important to take into consideration that there will be plenty more of cases that haven’t been reported as some children are afraid to speak out.
It’s heartbreaking that children are also on the receiving end of racial abuse and being told ‘to go back home’ is such a vile racist thing to be told and can be really damaging. Comments like this are now being normalised by the likes of Trump, which some individuals are arguing isn’t racist. It’s utterly astonishing that this is even being debated about, of course its racist. But alas some white individuals can’t look past their bubble of privilege as they think that they have the right to dictate over what POC can find racist.
It gets worse as institutional racism has turned to more violent means as the Met’s use-of-force data and found the Met used Tasers on black people more than four times as often as on white people, and used restraint four times as often. Black people are 40x more likely to be stopped and searched in the UK which is clear bias and racial discrimination that the criminal justice system is using. It’s institutionally racist to assume that it’s just mainly young black men committing knife crime as in the North there’s a significant number of white working class knife crime too. But no, the media and the criminal justice system disproportionately targets young black men instead, creating the stereotype that they are the criminals, when in reality they are not. So many young black men’s lives have been ruined and it’s important that we understand the real reasons behind knife crime and not just label it to a certain race.
When the media demonises POC, politicians use degrading terms and the criminal justice system disproportionately targets Black and Asian men, who are we meant to turn to? The rise in islamophobia accompanied by the Conservatives ignoring it within their party is affecting many ethnic minorities everyday. Muslims get beaten up and verbally abused as well as some Sikhs getting targeted as they are mistaken to be Muslim. This is wrong on so many levels as no one should be attacked or targeted for their ethnic/religious identity.
It is so crucial that racism is rooted out and it should start with the institutions who clearly have racism within. Racists shouldn’t be given a platform and it’s essential that we fight back and stand in solidarity with one another to help drive it out. POC are affected by institutional racism every single day, when will we finally be free from this targeted bias?
Bhavs politics 