Racism RIP, reckons Nigel Farage. Bring out the bunting. Antidiscriminatory legislation in the workplace “would probably have been valid” 40 years ago, but “I don’t think it is today”, he says in a documentary to be screened on Channel 4 on Thursday. “If I talked to my children ... about the question of race, they wouldn’t know what I was talking about,” he says. Everything is for the best in this the best of all possible worlds.
Try not to laugh. I suspect he means well. Though his party may have a bit of a downer on immigrants, there are some he likes, according to the programme’s publicity: Huguenots, Jews and Ugandan Asians. There was the past allegation from Ukip’s founder Alan Sked – fiercely denied by Farage – that that the man of the hour once spoke derisively of the “Nig Nog vote”. But even if true, it would have been a while ago. Let’s accept he believes things are ticking along nicely. That is not to say that he is right.
I wonder if he has heard of Stokely Carmichael. Carmichael was a bit of a race warrior and when we speak of him these days it is because he was apparently the first to craft the phrase “institutional racism”. There have been many definitions, but for these purposes all Farage need know is that it suggests that discriminatory outcomes can still come from an institution brimming with well-meaning, non-discriminatory people. Tradition may be the explanation; or corporate culture. Or just the unwillingness of good people to risk their own fortunes by challenging bad practice. Sir William Macpherson upset a lot of people at the Stephen Lawrence inquiry just by accepting the concept’s validity.
What does it mean in practice? Well, it means, by way of example, that as Farage trumpeted the end of workplace racism, new figures indicated a 50% rise in unemployment for young black people since 2010. It means things can be sunny up top and not so good under the surface.
I feel a killjoy sometimes. Whenever the likes of Farage assert that racism is past tense, I have to tell them that it hasn’t gone away; it has just mutated. That it is harder to spot, more insidious. It might not crack open your head or spit in your face, but it can blight your life in its own way.
