TRIGGERnometry - "Our Report Found No Evidence of Widespread Institutional Racism" - Mercy Muroki

Episode Date: April 11, 2021

Mercy Muroki is a social policy researcher, commentator, columnist and one of the commissioners for the recent Race and Ethnic Disparities report. Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/  OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Paypal: https://bit.ly/2Tnz8yq https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissen. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. I'm delighted to say we have a fascinating guest for you today. She is one of the commissioners of the recent race and disparity report. Mercy Maroki. Welcome to Trigonometry. Thank you for having me. It's so good to have you. Listen, before we get into the subject itself, just tell everybody a little bit about who are you, how are you where you are, what has been your journey through life that brings you here. Well, as you said, I was one of the one of ten commissioners on the recent race and ethnic disparities report.

The government established the commission about a year ago following the George Floyd and Black Lives Matter movement to basically look into race and ethnic disparities and to produce a report kind of summarizing what's going on, why disparities are taking place. and I was chosen as one of the independent commissioners because of sort of my background in terms of I've done a lot of social policy work and I have looked at race. I've done throughout my academic and professional career. I've done quite a lot of stuff on race and ethnic disparities. I've also kind of done lots of commentary on issues of social, class, race, things like that. So yeah, that's why I was chosen to be one of 10 commissioners.

And, yeah, the report's just being published. And I'm sure we'll get into a lot of it today. And so you said that it was George Freud. Was that the main reason? Because it felt things were going so well, you know, so, as says the white bloke, but things were going much better than they ever have been regarding race. And all of a sudden, last summer, it seemed to exploit.

Was that the real reason behind it? other reasons as well? Well, I mean, it was a catalyst, the George Floyd thing. And obviously, it was happened in America, didn't it? And I think we have a tendency to Americanize the debate on race, don't we? And so obviously the protests were here as well. And everybody saw the news and all the protests that were happening, particularly in London. And so I suppose, you know, as the government, they had to respond to that in a course. quite substantial way. And so that's why I guess they set up the commission. And it's good to have you here. We've had at least one, I think, of the other commissioners. In fact, Dr. Tony

Sol himself on the show quite a while ago. And others involved in it also as well. So let's get into talking about some of the findings of the rapport. It's obviously been commented on quite a lot and we'll get to the reaction a little bit later. But let's talk about the report. Give us some of the headline items on it because it broke it down into crime and policing, education, health and other areas, family breakdown, all that sort of things.

So if you were to give us a summary that you wanted people to take away from this interview of the main findings of the report, what were they? The main finding was really that, firstly, Britain has come a really long way, particularly in the last 50 years in terms of just outcomes for different ethnic minority groups. I mean, that is the big finding that a lot of people don't like to admit, especially people in the kind of race relations industry.

But we have definitely come a really long way. I know from surveys over the last year, there are people who think racism has actually gotten worse in the country. So even though it feels intuitive to say, of course, things have got better, there is a, you know, large group of people who don't think that way. So, you know, our findings across the board, we looked at four areas, education, employment, crime and policing and health. It showed that things have gotten better.

The other big thing really was that this BAME, we've all heard of BAME, Black and Minority, ethnic category, is just not a useful term to describe what's actually going on in terms of ethnicity and disadvantage, ethnicity and ethnicity in our country. across lots of social policy areas because actually ethnic groups, particularly when you break them down into subgroups, so black African, black Caribbean, Indian, Pakistani, etc., you see actually they have wildly different outcomes. So this idea that there is one experience of race and ethnicity and disadvantage split between the white group and the BAME group, you know, all the evidence we looked at completely kind of busted that myth. So what we found was that there is

lots of different experiences. Ethnic minority groups are, some are doing really well, even better than the white British population, particularly Indian and Chinese across the board. And then other groups remain kind of at the bottom of the league table. And actually those two groups tend to be black Caribbean individuals, particularly children. white working class children as well. And other groups that aren't spoken about, like Roma gypsy population, you know, all those kinds of groups. And actually our report was the first one that gave the white category equal weight

because we weren't coming at this to say, let's look at ethnic minorities. We were saying, okay, we've been presented with all these ethnic groups. They're equally valuable. And so let's look at the data equally. And so whereas other reports hadn't perhaps looked at outcomes for white British groups and white ethnic groups, we did that. And, you know, finally, I'm sure everybody would have seen the headlines, particularly if you're from the UK, about we said racism doesn't exist. Institutional racism is a myth. That's not what we said whatsoever at all.

What we said was we looked at all the evidence and we didn't find evidence of, you know, widespread systemic racism across any of the kind of full policy areas we looked at. We didn't say institutional racism is a myth in and of itself. We didn't say the concept is illegitimate. Actually, you know, I keep pointing people who are making the claim that we've said institution racism is bogus to, you know, page that. of the report, which actually defines what we consider institutional racism to be and actually sets out a framework for kind of understanding different manifestations of racism. So this idea that we would go out to define this concept whilst simultaneously saying it's a myth is, you know, it's not very intellectually coherent.

So what we said is given the evidence we looked at and we looked at a lot of evidence, we didn't find evidence of widespread, you know, systemic racism, institution racism. And you were talking about these groups. One of the things that I found very interesting about the report was saying that geography is almost more important than race as to outcomes. You're far more likely to do well, for example, if you live in London, than if you live in Middlesbrough. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, on top of kind of socioeconomic indicators driving ethnic disparities, geography was a massive one. And, you know, for instance, if you just look at the 10 most

deprived neighbourhoods, one in three, nearly one in three Pakistani people live in those neighbourhoods compared to one under one in ten white British people. So you can really kind of map out geography onto the disadvantages that are taking place for different ethnic groups. And once you start doing that, you get a more clearer picture. of why it is that, you know, certain groups fare particularly badly. So, yeah, geography was a massive one. And I think that's often alongside class as well. That's often not a factor that's appreciated. And that's where, again, our report was looking at all these different factors that weren't necessarily, ethnicity weren't necessarily race. And we found evidence that these factors

we're actually driving a lot of the disparities. Mercy, you mentioned the word class, and I think people living in Britain all have a sense of what that is. But how do you define that in the context of trying to do an evidence-based report? What does class mean? Yeah, so class, there are kind of acknowledged, accepted indicators are used to kind of establish what class is. I mean, obviously, class in and of itself is a complicated concept

to define because it means different things, different people. If you're measuring kind of income only, that might not be necessarily a good indicator. But, you know, with the data sets that we used, and, you know, for example, we commissioned a new research from the University of Oxford. A lot of the data we used was actually national data, so really robust data sets that have these indicators in them. So we weren't just kind of making it up. We were using kind of pre-established definitions of these things. and using a, you know, really large nationally representative data sets, you know, that statisticians have very much taken care to make sure the data sets are really robust. So, you know,

I'll leave statisticians to kind of figure out how to calculate all these things. And the thing that I find particularly interesting because I have a background in it like you do is education. And seeing the outside. of the children. And particularly when, you know, when people say education, the education system is system is systemically racist, I mean, there are certain points where you think to yourself, well, you might have a point, for instance, if we look at exclusions. But if you look at the difference between Black African and Black Caribbean, especially the boys, the outcomes,

they're huge. Yeah, absolutely. And this is another kind of point I like to raise when people talk about education system is institutionally racist. And these aren't just, you know, people online, randoms that I think one of the kind of heads of these big teaching unions, I can't remember, which one recently did come out and say the education systems, institutionally racist. So these are kind of people at the top of education making these claims, often not very much backed up by robust evidence, but to take that point of we hear black exclusions as an example for when you say, well, why is the education system institutionally racist?

And you're right, if you look at the outcomes between black Caribbean and black African, wildly different, not only in terms of their performance, particularly in secondary school, where you see black African kids outperforming white British kids, outperforming the national average. And then you see Caribbean kids kind of all the way at the bottom of the league table. but in exclusions as well because actually African kids are no more likely to be excluded from school than their white British counterparts. It's Caribbean kids where that disparity really is there. So this kind of speaks the point of kind of, you know, you can't conflate. Even just saying black, I see so many headlines, black exclusions, black kids this, black kids that.

And it just doesn't make, it's not very clever to do that. Not only because it's, it's, It's just completely neglecting the fact that it's not black kids. There's Caribbean kids on one hand, African kids on the other, and even that is quite simplistic as well. But it feeds into this idea that if you're black, just if you're black, then the education system's out to get you. It has nothing else to do with anything else going on in your life, like culture or family or anything like that.

But it's just if you're black, then you'll be screwed in the education system and in life. And so those kinds of really simplistic narratives or analyses just don't help the debate whatsoever. And we've been dancing around the topic of looking at why white British and Black Caribbean kids, particularly the boys, are doing less well than every other subgroup. Why is that, mercy? Is it because of the fatherlessness issue in those communities? Is it because they don't value education? Or is there something else going on? So we don't really know. It's probably the easiest answer. And, you know, in the report, one of our recommendations is to actually do the first proper deep dive look into why there's certain ethnic groups are doing really well and how we can replicate those factors. We've heard stuff about kind of immigrant optimism. And that's, you know, a theory for white African kids, particularly immigrant kids. And just generally immigrants tend to do. better. Caribbean kids and Caribbean families don't tend to be immigrants. So we don't know.

And yes, those kinds of factors such as family are important, surely, because, you know, in the report we found that 63% of Caribbean children are growing up in a lone parent household. and that's absolutely staggering to me because, you know, that's six and ten kids growing up, and it is most likely going to be without a father because they'll be largely single mums. So to pretend that firstly, those kinds of factors couldn't possibly be driving any of the disparities is, you know, doing those kids a disservice, I think, and it's very disingenuous. And also, I think the reason people haven't told. that subject is because then you get accused of demonising single parents or nobody really wants

to go down that route and, you know, families in general, the concept of strong and stable families are seen as some kind of backward right wing thing these days, isn't it? So there's a lot of reasons why I think we're not talking about why it is that certain groups are not doing so well because it touches on difficult, uncomfortable topics. But I, you know, I don't know. But One of the other main recommendations is actually for the government to set up a review into families, to look at the underlying factors driving that relate to family, that are driving outcomes and how families can be better supported given that family structures do drive so many outcomes, basically. It just occurred to me that people watching this were the more critical I might be like,

Okay, so your conclusions in the report were the systemic racism doesn't seem to be an issue, right? Is that broadly accurate? It's that given the evidence we looked at, that's not a conclusion we could make because we can't, you know, we could make conclusions that weren't rooted in the evidence we looked at. So it's not to say it's not an issue. It's just in the evidence and in these four areas that we looked at, we didn't find evidence that there was systemic racism driving them. So in the things that you looked at,

which is policing and crime, employment, health and education, you did not find systemic racism based on the evidence. Yes, absolutely. Okay, so we're clear on that. Yeah. But you're not denying the racism exists and people experience racism.

Absolutely not. And that is why our very fast recommendation is to tackle racist actions. Again, a lot of this rhetoric, I think, about, oh, they've denied racism. You know, you just have to look at recommendation one and then you'll figure out, no, we're not, because our top recommendation is to actually empower

the Equality's Watchdog, the Quality and Human Rights Commission, to do more, to have more powers to kind of tackle racism, particularly in relation to online racism. And we did find evidence of overt racism, particularly online. And in fact, you found that people from my name, minority backgrounds, experience more abuse and discrimination, etc., online versus the white

population. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So these aren't things we're denying. And I think you'd have to be an idiot or a racist to deny that. There is racism online. And there is a vet racism in society because there's all sorts of awful things in society. So, yes, we didn't find evidence. that institutional racism was driving the disparities,

but could there be institutional racism under particular context in certain times? If you can show the evidence for that, then that was something we went in being open to finding. You know, we didn't go in with preconceived conclusions. Well, we'll maybe get to that later on in terms of the reaction to the report on what people have said. But on the disparities in outcome,

I think the one thing that a lot of people feel very passionately about, including friends of us. You know, we have black friends of ours, guys, obviously, usually, who say, well, look, I'm not into this whole victimhood mentality. But when I was a kid, by the time I was 18, I'd been, like, stopped and searched 20 times by the police. So in terms of policing and the disparities that do exist there, what are the driving factors that you identified for why? some of these things happened that way. Yeah, and that is true. We did find a massive disparity, particularly in relation to stop and search. And there was a lot of factors that were kind of driving those. You can never obviously really determine why is, you know, a particular office. You know, we have biases, don't we, all of us? So...

Not me. Yeah, so, you know, we... With that face and that voice, no one's going to believe that. We can't say, you know, that perhaps biases are or aren't driving those things. They probably are, they drive everything, you know. But having said that, we can go off the evidence we have and try and kind of look at what's going on there. And something we found, because ethnic minorities are massively disproportionately, more likely to live in deprived neighborhoods.

And those deprived neighborhoods are more likely to be heavily policed, right? And so... Because there's more crime. Yeah, exactly. And so when you start looking at factors like those, you know, the conditions, the context, then some of it starts making sense and it becomes evident that actually, you know, you can actually explain why it is they're more likely to be stopped and such. and also, for example, ethnic minority population is younger,

so we found that kind of drives, again, why is that there's more a disproportionate number of younger black people, for instance, would be more likely to stop and search. So, yes, you know, we can't pin down exactly why that is, but what I would say, I mean, one of our findings was that for every one young white kid killed, 24 black kids are killed. And that's between 16 to 25. When you have a disparity that stuck in terms of likelihood of being murdered, I don't think demonising the police or saying we should have less policing is the answer whatsoever. You should have more effective policing, sure.

But this knee-jerk reaction of, oh, it's a problem with policing. You can't blame policing on the fact that, you know, for everyone white victim of homicide, a young, young victim, there's 24 black victims. So, you know, can you really blame institutional racism on that either? So again, we have to have these conversations about why it is that that's taking place. And yes, it involves, you know, sometimes making perhaps awkward and uncomfortable hypotheses relating to family and culture and all that kind of thing and nobody wants to go there. Mercy, let me just jump in there because I just want to get to the end of this. So let me make the best possible case I can for the existence of institutional racism in the way that you framed

it. So you say that the reason that this is happening is that people from ethnic minority backgrounds live in deprived areas, much more than white people. And as a result, there's more crime. As a result there's more policing, as a result, there's more interaction, et cetera, right? But isn't that what people mean when they say institutional racism that essentially minority populations are growing up in areas where they have bad schools, bad, you know, social organization, bad access to activities for children, that they can't go out and play or whatever? And as a result of that, there's more crime. And therefore, it's the poverty that they end up growing up in that's causing all this other stuff later in life?

I think that's why we have to be clear what we mean by institutional racism because, you know, I would suspect maybe many people would describe what you're describing that phenomenon as institutional racism. But we have to remember the racism part of that argument. That, what you're describing, yes, that is institutional. It's institutional something.

But we have to remember that racism is a very serious, serious thing, you know. It has to be happening because of somebody's race, if you're going to use that race as a word. And what we see in the data is that race is not a good, you know, explanatory factor for why things happen the way they do. What do you mean? But when you say the evidence isn't showing that? For example, if you look at Indians versus Pakistan, and Bangladeshi, if you look at Black African versus Black Caribbean, race is not a good determinant for how, what outcomes your life will have. That's what the data shows.

It's all these other factors. And so, you know, outcomes are so fragmented and so all over the place. Some groups are, you know, subgroups are doing so well. Some are doing really poorly, even if they're the same race. That's why this racism argument begins to kind of break down quite quickly. do pockets of, you know, racism exist in particular neighbourhoods and things like that, I'm sure they do. But I think once we start kind of unpicking that, so, you know, for example, you said about living in deprivation, poor access to particular institutions and services, okay, well, let's tackle that. Let's find out why it is that they have that poor access.

Let's, you know, come up with policies to help them out of poverty, you know? that kind of, that's where the conversation should be. And once you say, well, it's institutional racism, so the system itself, you know, is out to get ethnic minorities or black people, then, you know, you can't go much further than that. The conversation should be, okay, well, if they're disproportionately more likely to live in poor neighborhoods, what can we do about? But how can we empower them to make sure their prospects are better? And that's why it is important. that things, you know, for example, take employment and wage gaps. Wage gaps at its lowest for a decade at 2.3% between ethnic minorities and the white British population.

For under 30s, there's no statistically significant wage gap, which I'm sure, you know, everybody would welcome. Again, ethnic minorities, we commissioned research, as I said earlier, and into education and social mobility and ethnicity and things like that. And ethnic minority kids, you know, control for every factor and they're still more likely to outperform their white British counterparts. These are things we should be celebrating. And actually, these are the things that are going to then impact wealth in the future of ethnic minorities. So let's kind of, you know, carry those things on.

And I think that's the way the conversation should go. what can we identify that can kind of have a tangible impact on people's lives? Because ultimately it is, as much as we like to talk about kind of philosophical, sociological concepts when we're talking about race, like systemic racism, white privilege, all those things. You know, everybody's living their life in a very tangible way. And the poorest people and the most deprived people care about putting food on the table. You know, they care about their job and, you know, they care about their health and things like that. So we should be having conversations in that space about actual tangible issues, really not like, you know, white privilege, systemic racism, etc.

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go to expressvp.com slash trigger and get three extra mumps for free. That's expressvPN.com slash trigger. Go to EXPR-E-S-SvP-N.com slash trigger to learn more. It's a very good point. Now, we were talking about tangible issues. You mentioned that horrifying statistic. If you could repeat it again about black boys more likely to be murdered than white boys?

Yeah, so for every one young white victim of homicide, there's 24 black. victims. Why, I mean, I still... You should just take a moment to think about that. That is crazy, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. I think that was one of the most shocking thing. That is shocking. For me. Why is that? Exactly, is what I would say.

Is it institutional racism? I mean, I would like somebody to make a compelling case for why that would be institutional racism. And I'm sure somebody very much could, I'm sure, Somebody might write an essay in the YouTube comments about why that is institutional racism. But we need to understand why how, you know, culture, family, people's environment, mental health, all those things, how they feed into something like that and to produce such a stark disparity. I mean, we didn't kind of do a deep dive into why that particular statistic is the way it is. But judging from kind of all our other evidence is being driven by, again, probably deprivation, family stability, all these kinds of things. We just, we don't know because we don't ask these questions. We're too busy arguing about white privilege half the time.

So we don't know what really why that's the case. It's shocking and it should be a national scandal. But all the kind of publicity that things relating to race and disadvantaged get are just so confined to all these sociological concepts and not, you know, why the heck cast so many, you know, black kids dying on the street. and also why they're disproportionately more likely to do the killing as well. So why is that? We don't have those conversations and those are really conversations we need to be having. The thing that I found very, very upsetting in the report when I was reading it was

when they were talking about gangs and they were saying that they became a surrogate family. These people, these boys predominantly, girls as well, but boys predominantly are looking for family in all the wrong places. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, there's a whole other conversation to be had on kind of father figures and a sense of brotherhood that young men in particular, I think, are lacking generally in society. So it's not surprising when somebody's, you know, a kid has grown up without a father in their life. They live in a poor neighbourhood. they are more likely to be stopped and searched. They don't really trust the police. They hear a narrative that society is racist. Of course they're going to find, you know, a sense of family somewhere else, right?

Because we're only human. That's the most basic kind of human instinct. And often, unfortunately, there are people who exploit that. And that is why we have a kind of county lines, crisis and that's why so many young kids have been recruited into these gangs because, you know, people see that opportunity for young kids don't really have, you know, they're not really optimistic about their prospects in life. They look around, there's not much to aspire to. So of course, they're going to kind of look for, to make money quickly,

first of all, and that's where a lot of it does come from. And they're going to, you know, get into the wrong crowds essentially. So again, this issue of fatherlessness and there's lots of data, particularly in America, in American studies, to show the massive effects that fatherlessness has, whether it's in outcomes in relation to education, just criminality, all that kind of thing. So I think it's very disingenuous when people say, oh, you're just trying to blame single mothers and then they don't want to have the conversation. Why don't we want to have this conversation, Marcy? Because it seems to me it's a very important and necessary conversation to have. When I worked in Newham, you know, you could see particularly the boys that struggled with, you know, with their education, but also with the structure of the school day, getting into school, doing the homework. And a lot of the time, it's because they didn't have a stable family background. Yeah, absolutely. We're not, I don't know why we're not talking about. I can, I can guess it's because,

anything that seems to demonise firstly poor people, black people, black women, it's almost like all the taboo things that you shouldn't be talking about or people you shouldn't be demonising in society, poor black mothers, you know. So I think part of it comes from that. Part of it comes from, you know, I hate to say it because this is another can of worms, But, you know, some strands of kind of feminism and this is demonisation of, you know, masculinity. Masculinity and the demonisation of two-parent families.

We're kind of looking down upon people who think that growing up in a stable two-parent household is the best set up for a child. You know, that's, you know, a lot of the, I hate to say, the woke liberals. You know, they think once you start talking about stable two-parent families, they roll their eyes, all conservatives, you know, they just think it's some right-wing garbage. Do you think that in our desire to progress socially, we've just maybe sort of, the train is now running downhill without any brakes on? Like, we are so keen to be progressive that we sort of forgot some of the things that got humanity

through the last 30,000 years to where we are now. Yeah, I think which one of the reasons I'm a conservative is for that very reason because I think, you know, change is done best when it's done slowly. Because society is so delicate. It's such a delicate thing. It's like a delicate organism that, you know, then it requires so many tiny parts working correctly at the same time, many of which are just really complicated social relations. they require stability.

And I think we're trying to undo that really quickly. We're kind of almost experimenting. We've kind of using society as a lab rat or something. And we're just trying to change structures and criticising structures that have been in place for as long as humans have been alive. And we're just trying to break those down really quickly in the name of being progressive. Yes, I think that breakdown is, you know, we're doing that at our peril, I think.

It's a very, very interesting point. And we're talking about the breakdown of society. But also, one of the things that I found quite shocking was the lack of faith, particularly from the Black Caribbean community, in the institutions, particularly the police. And if that's the case, if there is this suspicion, then how are we going to move forward as a society? how are we going to progress? Because unless you have faith in institutions and the people who are meant to support you, then we're never going to find any form of cohesion, are we?

Yeah, so trust was something we very much identified in the report as something that's a massive barrier. Again, we found different levels of trust, particularly in policing. We found not all ethnic minority groups massively mistrust the police and institutions in general. But, you know, lack of trust amongst black Caribbean population, for instance, is pretty high. And that's why one of our recommendations, actually, we had a few recommendations that were trying to touch on that issue is to have more

collaborative kind of working between police and local communities. One was introducing a local residency requirement for police forces, which some police forces are doing, just to get a sense that the people policing you are working with you and are kind of drawn from the community. And more scrutiny of, you know, stop and search sort of policy and video footage, body cam footage, setting up these community groups to provide kind of a sort of, a scrutiny for local police forces made up of kind of panels, panel members from the local community, all those. So there are ways you can start kind of building trust between local communities and police in particular. It's not, it's a massive mountain to climb because there

are these issues of, there is the legacy of racism. It's something I would say, particularly amongst the black Caribbean population who feel it very strongly, you know, because of their experiences, particularly kind of from the 50s onwards, of living in Britain, in a way that me as an immigrant wouldn't. So I think it's a massive hill to climb

and I think it's a really important one. But again, we should be talking about how we do that rather than just kind of saying, oh, wow, institution, race, and it can't be solved. It's the system. That's the problem. Yeah. Well, I was going to ask you how much of this is about history,

because as you rightly say, particularly the Black Caribbean community, did experience a lot of racism and not just racism, but actually overt discrimination as well. And those two things aren't necessarily the same, both very bad, right? So how much of this is just maybe people quite rightly being like, well, we've had to suppress all of our. feelings about this for a long time. You know, I have a friend who's from that background,

and he talks about the stuff his parents experienced. And then when he experienced that, they'll be like, yeah, just ignore it. Whereas really, people shouldn't have to ignore that. And so all of this spilling out that we've seen recently is maybe just a delayed, but just reaction to some of the things that went on before any of our time. Yeah. And I think I would buy that more if it was the older generation. driving this kind of movement.

And actually what you see in polls, when you ask people, has racism gotten worse? Is Britain a racist country? Those kinds of questions. There's a massive generational divide and it's always the younger people who are saying racism has gotten worse.

You know, it's the younger people who've never had it so good and that is the truth, we have to be honest. You know, young ethnic minority people growing up in Britain today, there's never been a single point in history where ethnic minority people have had it so good. And not only that, because I know people like to say,

oh, well, there's no point comparing, it's still bad, even if it's not as bad as before, that doesn't matter if it's still bad. But it's not, you know, the data shows that ethnic minority young people do really well, you know, broadly speaking, just objectively, not even comparatively, just objectively. And yet they're more likely to have this mistrust and think Britain's racist. So why is that, mercy? Why is that happening?

I think they're being fed a lot of misinformation. And, you know, young people have this kind of revolutionary spirit, don't they? They think they're going to change the world and they want to fight the system. I think part of it. Then you get old like us and you realize there's nothing you can do. Yeah, exactly. Just become the system. Can't meet them, join them.

Yeah, so I think part of it is just, you know, fight the system kind of stuff. And obviously a lot of young people are massively more likely to be on the left and have that kind of Marxist analysis of everything. So I think part of it is that. But also, I just think we haven't been frank enough about or voices. who have sought to talk about how well ethnic minorities are doing have been crowded out, I think, by people who want to talk about how racist Britain is. And that's why, you know, this is the first report really that has focused on those successes where they exist. It said, okay, yeah,

things are, there's a lot of work still to do. But look, things are actually really good in a lot of areas and I think we need more of that because, you know, if you're growing up thinking you're living in a racist country and your prospects are kind of going to be bad at every point in life, education, employment, then of course that has a kind of psychological effect and we need to kind of combat that because it isn't doing a disservice to young people, I think. I mean, it's a very, very good point. But then there were instances where you the government shoot themselves in the foot. The classic example is wind rush. You know, in the entire Fiasco at the home office. And you think, why couldn't this be sorted out? Why am I

picking up the paper and seeing, you know, I can't remember the exact details of certain cases, but you hear people who've been in this country for 50, 60 years and, you know, they're at risk of deportation. Yeah, I mean, honestly, I'm glad I'm not a member of the government. They don't help themselves. I mean, the commission was independent, right? So, you know, we weren't going off what the government wanted. Obviously, the government commissioned the commission. But I think the government, particularly the conservatives,

and I say this as a conservative, we have got it wrong. You know, we've got it wrong sometimes. and I think it's great to see that they were compensated, but can you really compensate somebody, you know, for being treated that way? There's no kind of justification for it whatsoever. And, yeah, I think successive governments have really let themselves down on the race question in different ways.

But again, I think it's a good opportunity that I think almost, this commission report for the conservatives to make amends almost and say, actually, we're taking this issue really seriously. We care about, you know, ethnic disparities and we want to, you know, solve the issues that are still at play. Let's talk a little bit about the reaction, because some of the things you've talked about and a lot of other things that I never heard in the media that I thought were very important. For example, maybe we should mention it briefly the health side of things. One of the big narratives that came out in the last 12 months is, well, ethnic minorities are more vulnerable to COVID-19 because of institutional racism. And the healthcare system is

institutionally racist, et cetera. The report actually showed that the disparity in mortality was largely down to the sort of jobs that people did, where they lived, the number of people per household, which tends to be high, all that sort of thing. And actually, ethnic minorities in this country tend to live longer and survive major diseases better. But none of that, or the ratio of black kids killed versus white kids, none of that was in any of the media coverage that we saw. I don't think most people in this country even are aware that there's any disparity between the homicide rate for different groups. Why is that? Well, because it doesn't make for sexy headlines, I guess. You don't think so. You don't think black kids are 20,

five times more likely to die? Well, I mean, what doesn't, when we've said things in this report? Ethnic wage gap eliminated? You don't think that makes a great headline? I mean, it does make you wonder, you know, suspicious of the media. I think we all have our theories about why it is the media too much reporting. I have a theory, I can tell you. Yeah, exactly.

So, yeah, again, with the COVID thing, it is all these other factors. I don't care about, you know, feelings. I care about facts. I mean, that's a true way of... She wants to be the Black Ben Shapiro. Oh, God. No, but, no, honestly, I mean, obviously, I care. I'm a compassionate person, right? Let's get that out of the way. But when it comes to looking at why things are taking place, I care about what we could show in the data. I'm, you know, I have a social policy background and I care about... analyzing things properly.

So yes, there are all those other factors at play. And that's not to excuse them. I mean, it's not just because, yes, you can explain away disparities by, for example, controlling for income. And then you say, oh, well, it's because they earn less. That's not to say that's okay. We don't want these disparities to exist. So, yes, all those things are a problem.

some of them are choice and some of them are cultural like intergenerational households. But this is why jumping straight to kind of institutional racism doesn't really help. And I would hope that even though the kind of response to the report has been a massive letdown. Have you been surprised at the response? So did you expect this? I expected it because I've been on social media and kind of active in this kind of space for, you know, a couple of years. And I've seen how people respond to these kinds of things when you challenge their assertions, assumptions. There was a lot of personal stuff.

I think, you know, a lot of the other commissioners, I was the youngest commissioner. others aren't probably as active on social media and they just haven't experienced the level of vitriol that goes on on social media. So it was hard for them. And, you know, when you have an elected member of parliament, you know, comparing the chair of the commission, Tony Sewell, to the KKK, I mean, effectively.

Who did that? Clive Lewis. Oh, wow. He tweeted a picture of a KKK member in response to the repatribe. I'm not an expert on the KKK. I don't think they did reports such. Particularly not an ethnically small black membership as well.

Yeah. He compared the... So it was actually, it was an academic at Cambridge compared Tony Saw to Goebbels. Goebbels, is that how you pronounce his name? Goebbels, Gables, that's the one. It's a Nazi. She compared him to a Nazi, and Clive Lewis, I think, said the commissioner.

was the KKK. So that's the kind of intellectual... This is so mature a debate you want about this issue. Yeah, so that kind of thing, some of it you can laugh off, but others have been really personal and just vitriolic. And I'm still yet to hear anybody actually explain what it is about the report they, you know, the data, what data they disagree with or what recommendations they don't like,

the people making all these comments. So yeah, that's the kind of where we're at. Unfortunately, people aren't really trying to talk about the substance of these issues. But that's a real problem, isn't it? In that we're not having a discussion, it's all well and good. Be critical of the report, but at least do the reading and go, I disagree with this point, this point, this point, and these are my reasons why. And what I worry about, Mercy, is that if we can't have the discussions,

we're never going to move forward, are we? No, we're not, unfortunately, because a lot of these issues, are really difficult, complicated social issues that require, you know, in areas like health when you identify a particular disparities that perhaps can be relatively easily resolved by lifestyle changes, for example, like obesity disparity, then it's clear what the kind of solution for that would be. But that's not the nature of a lot of these issues we're talking about. They're really complex cultural social issues. And it requires people to actually sit down and have difficult conversations. And the climate isn't right for that because, you know,

everybody knows now that as soon as somebody disagrees with you, they call you a racist or, you know, a homophobic. They'll just throw around kind of isms. So people are actually scared to have these conversations, you know, and actually we need white people to, on board almost, to, and in this conversation. We're with you, Mercy. You've got two white people with you. I mean, let's not forget that, I mean, the last census was obviously 10 years ago and we don't have the latest census data.

We won't have that for a while. But, you know, roughly 86% of the country is white. And I feel that's a really big group of people to be kind of excluding from the conversation, right, when it actually requires a kind of warmest national effort, national conversation. And so many white people I speak to and I see on social media, they say, well, I don't know what to say. I'm scared I'll say something wrong, then I'll be called racist. And then, you know, I'll be counseled to essentially lose my job.

You know, that is a reality for a lot of people these days. They'll say something against BLM and then they'll lose their job. So part of the problem is the climate of discourse at the moment, which is really just not conducive to people having open and frank conversations about difficult social issues. Why is it that it seems that people who are on the right and are far more amenable to have these conversations, but people on the left,

I mean, they don't have them. And if they start to have them, this is what happens. We descend into epithet hurling. Yeah. I cannot speak for those sorts of people because I'm still trying to understand them myself. I think we've seen... There's a lot of people on the left

that just are so wedded to this structural racism idea. that they almost can't see beyond that in a way because as soon as you, you know, challenge some of their long-held assertions with evidence, all they see is you're denying, you know, their reality, their truth, almost. And that's, so it almost feels so personal to a lot of these people. And I think we were able to take quite a dispassionate approach, I guess, to when we were doing this report.

Because unlike a lot of other commissions, none of the commissioners have some kind of vested interest in kind of race per se. We're not from the, we weren't from the race lobby. Is that what it is, Mercy? You mentioned the word the race relations industry. Do you think there's just, and I'm just going to put it as crudely as it needs to be, there's just a small number of people who've realized this is a way for them to make a career. To go on TV and to bang on about this issue and to ignore everyone else to shout. I've had this experience of being on TV myself where you should get shouted over by someone

who's just spewing emotion and there's no facts, no data, no rationality at all. But they've got a great career. And so they don't care if they drive society off a cliff as long as they benefit. Do you think that there's an element of that? Yeah. I mean, personally, I find it difficult to trust the opinion of somebody whose entire career depends on, you know, maintaining a belief that Britain is racist. You just have to look at Robin DiAngelo, the author of White Fragility, who makes a fortune.

Biggest racket in the history of mankind makes a fortune. makes a fortune, you know, doing these, like, diversity training and all that kind of thing. $500 quid an hour, mate. We should get on that. What? Yeah. Yeah, honestly, it's, you know, when that's your reality, are you really going to start saying, actually, there's this piece of data that is really contradicting that what I've been saying.

So I tend not to trust people who, you know, have such a vested interest in. that that one belief that they hold kind of never being challenged. But it always seems to me as well that they never seem to put up any real data or any real stats. And if that's the case, and how do you have a legitimate voice in the conversation? I mean, you can't when somebody, so I feel like I have heard people use data,

which is often outdated and often doesn't really account for the full, you know, the full picture. So, you know, anybody can use any piece of data that is, you know, an accurate piece of data to maintain, you know, maintain any position they hold. Which is why when you have something like what we've done in the commission that says, you know, I don't know if you guys have looked through the thing, but it's very heavy on a lot of data. Yeah, we have. When you have something like that that can lay out all the data. And, you know, we spoke to the authors of the other big race reviews that have been done, Baroness McGreg Smith, Race and the Workplace Review, David Lamm. I mean, you know, we engaged with, we try to engage, well, given limitations,

particularly time limitations, with all the data there is out there. We received over 2,300 responses from the public. individuals' organisations, obviously those were, you know, painstakingly gone through by the people working behind the scenes. And, you know, we were really just trying to take a dispassionate evidence-led approach to this. And that is why there are things in there that we welcomed, and particularly on like the successes of ethnic minorities. And things in there that, yes, do echo what a lot of these people say. stop and search statistics, deaths of black mothers during childbirth,

those are things people are often using as statistics for proving that institution racist. And we put those in there because that's the data. And yes, we acknowledge those exist, but that's not the full picture, I think, was our point. So I don't think we can be accused of not having taken an evidence-led approach. And this one thing that I've noticed, is part of the problem as well that with social media, you get members of the public,

and they've got, you know, access to a public platform, and they have these discussions, and they don't really know what these terms mean. They don't really know the concept. So, you know, in the same week that the report was released, I don't know if you saw this clip, David Lammy was presenting LBC,

and this woman rang up, and she was saying to him, you're not English because you've, you know, Caribbean heritage, right? Okay, and people then saw, then equated the two. Well, how can structural racism not be happening if this, you know, if David Lammy had an unpleasant idiot calling them up. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And what happens is, yes, nobody's denying there's racism, that racism happens, you know. It would be as intelligent as denying murder happens, you know, because terrible things happen and humans are

humans, right? We're not all perfect and, you know, some of us are absolute, you know, bleeps. So you could have just said it. You could have and not looked at me. They all look at you when they want to make a negative comparison. So, of course, racism happens. And, you know, that late, I did see that clip. And, you know, if somebody tries to tell me I wasn't English, I'd definitely be using full swell. That's for sure. Because, you know, because, I know you've been on TV and you were saying you weren't English. Was it Adiore? And, you know, he had an issue with that.

It's just like, can we just accept people can identify how they want to? And, you know, I would. I could be a woman, but I can't be not English. I'm not allowed to do that. Yeah, that's how that works. Yeah, people should be, you know, I think people have, perhaps people confuse this idea of national identity with kind of ethnic identity almost.

And I suppose some terms like British and English, they can be both ethnicities and national identities. So people have an issue there. I mean, obviously I would never claim to be ethnically English, whatever that is, because even that's contested, right? English being an ethnicity per se, it's made up of, you know. But nobody can tell me I'm not my identity. is in English, so to speak.

So there is a lot of kind of misunderstanding and of concepts. And I think that characterises a lot of this debate. There's a lack of clarity as well around what people mean when they say these things. Systemic racism, structural racism, institutional racism used kind of interchangeably often. Do they mean the same thing? I mean, did the people who use them know whether they're referring to the same phenomenon? on when they're using them. I mean, so all those things, I feel like people are kind of left to define what they mean by racism. And that's part of the problem. We've just, we don't really

know what racism is anymore. So we can apply it as a blanket explanation for, it's being very much diluted, I think, the term racism. Yeah, the language has evolved to say the least. Let me put one final point to you in the sort of spiro playing devil's advocate before we go to our last question. One of the accusations that was made about the people who were involved like yourself in preparing the report was that while ethnically you're all very diverse, actually a lot of the people who were involved already thought there's no such thing as institutional racism. Well, they're all sort of, quote, unquote, conservatives you are. I don't know about Tony, but I don't know if he's conservative, but he's certainly, you know, he's not a woke leftist,

let's put it that way, right? And so the argument was, Well, all these people who thought institutional racism didn't exist found it didn't exist. Surprise. Yeah, I mean, I can see that. But I think the people on the commission, I mean, I felt like I was out of my depth almost because these are people with, you know, decades and decades of experience, you know, on the ground doing actual stuff we've got, you know, he did leave in December where he served the full original. term, one of the commissioners, Dr. Agaikaka, Lord Ajayaka. So he's got pretty much every kind of medical accolade you can think of as professor of surgery or something like that at the UCL. We have a space scientist for God's sake. We had several people with PhDs. I think probably the majority did. A global economist. You know, these are people. who care about data, you know, they have not gotten to where they were because they were putting

ideology before data. These are people who not only have on the ground experience of doing actual, you know, practical work in lots of areas. And Tony, for example, has been helping young ethnic minority people for decades in education. So, what I would say to those people is just look at the CVs of everybody who was on there and then try and ask yourself whether they got there by kind of put in ideology on race ahead of everything else or they got there actually because they're just very good at what they do and they care about statistics and they care about data and they care about facts and truth. I don't think they're going to do that. I'm going to be honest with you.

So I don't know why. Call me a sinning mercy. So something that actually happened was, so the British Medical Journal, they published a response saying, oh, there was nobody with any health background on the commission when we have a literal professor of surgery or something,

and we have a literal space scientist. There's been a lot of stuff trying to undermine the kind of expert of people on her. You know, Dr. Dambe Samoyo, for example, she's worked for just about every, worked for and with just about every major bank. And she's, you know, she's a global economist,

like a world renown global economist author. And there seems to be kind of, there's been a lot of hateful, the vitriolic stuff trying to put down the personal backgrounds, professional backgrounds of people involved. And I think it's just, if anything, it's just showing the colours of the people doing that more than anything. I think it says more about them than the commissioners, to be honest. Yeah, and I would completely agree with you.

Mercy has been a wonderful interview. Thank you so much for coming on. We always end the conversation with one question, which is always what's the one thing we're not talking about, but we really should be. I would really say to go back to what I've said is let's talk about, you know, the role of families, the role of fathers in kids' lives and just culture in general. Because that's, you know, people like David Lammy used to make this point a lot. And it's sad that he doesn't really do it anymore. and there's nobody in the mainstream talking about, you know, absent father's culture, the role of culture in driving a lot of these disparities. Whether we can do anything to fix it is another issue, but you just can't talk about, you know, as somebody, I grew up in a single parent household and I am a single parent.

So I've had a firsthand experience of, you know, not having a father in my life. It's an issue that is close to me in a way because I know that if you look at the statistic, it derives massively, you know, absent fathers and strong families is, I would say, the most important thing probably, just generally in life and for outcomes. So I would hope we talk about, you know, culture and families more, and especially in relation to young guys. We don't talk about boys anymore. It's all about women.

So that's something I hope we can talk about more, but, you know, I'm not going to hold my breath. Well, I mean, you say there's nothing, we might not be able to do much about it. But actually, as we all know, the first step to solving something, acknowledging that it exists, right? And that's probably step number one there. But anyway, Mercy, thank you so much for coming on. You breathe out a sigh of relief. Thank you. It hasn't exactly been the Paxman treatment.

But thanks for coming on. Where can people find you online if they want to follow you because you may have. things in the future that they're interested in. Yeah, so I'm on... We won't tell them exactly what they are. But you should definitely follow her because interesting things are coming. We'll watch this face.

Yeah, so Twitter is probably the best place to find me at my name, at Mercy, Maroki. Mercy, thank you so much. And thank you for watching. We will see you very soon with another brilliant interview like this one or live stream. All of them go out 7pm UK time. Take care and see you soon, guys.