On institutional racism
How many racists does it take to make an institution racist?
Chapter 5 - Narrative
The Macpherson Report (1999) following the tragic murder of Stephen Lawrence is always in the news. The recommendations of this very good report have a troubled history of implementation. In part this derives from a basic misunderstanding that institutional behaviour comes from the environment in which the institution exists, not from the misbehaviour of its staff. The result is that public time and effort was wasted trying to correct something that didn’t exist in the police at the time, whilst simultaneously failing to address problems in other institutions and in society at large.
When I first started working in London the racism didn’t happen all the time, but it happened often enough that my colleagues would talk about it and we discussed ways both to cope with it and to counter it. The coping was less easy, I found it deeply upsetting and baffling. I simply couldn’t understand why race was important, let alone a basis for decision-making at work. It was also illegal; the Race Relations Act 1976 – a decade earlier – forbad discrimination on the grounds of race. I think my travels across Africa made me more attuned to the kindness of strangers, irrespective of race. I was not neutral or agnostic about race, I was and am deeply against racism.
When I encountered the racism at work, it was through set phrases: “Yes, but is he/she British?”, the question was innocent and valid, but the emphasis was not. The implication was unmistakable, this was a question about race.
Another set phrase was: “It’s not my view, of course, but I don’t think the Head of Department would want a candidate like that”. The Head was not consulted about this, of course, or even present on the phone call. It was vicarious, cowardly racism.
Occasionally, I even got berated after the event: “I told you not to waste our time with that candidate”.
As colleagues in several small offices we talked about how to counter it, we would affirm that the candidate was British, ignoring the implied racism. We even, where possible, put deliberate typos into CVs, turning the surname Yung into Young or anglicising a name by editing out a vowel at the end. That way they might get though a racist paper sift. Our institution was against us, however. Hence the title of this note, whatever we thought or did, our institution was in the business of getting the job done.
This was all a couple of years before joining the police. I had wandered into an employment agency looking for some kind of work in finance. They offered me a job as an employment consultant with them and it was here, every now and then, that these conversations with HR professionals took place. We had a lot of client companies and a few displayed this kind of racism. As an institution, an employment consultancy gets people into interviews; more interviews mean more job offers. Job offers being accepted means commission payments on which we individually and collectively depended. I don’t think any of my colleagues were racist, quite the reverse, but some clients were. Ultimately, unsuccessful interviews waste everyone’s time so there is a business imperative to put forward the candidate with the best prospect of succeeding. You can see where this ends up, fighting against racism is bad for business and for consultants personally.
I was only there a year – 1984. I did not leave in an anti-racist huff, nor in a blaze of counter-racist insurgency. I was just a young man in a big city. I simply moved on to do something more interesting.
Scrolling forward to 1999 the Macpherson Report concluded that my then employer (the Metropolitan Police Service) was institutionally racist. I reflected on my pre-police experience at the employment agency. Using Macpherson as a guide there was no doubt that the employment agency was institutionally racist. It put forward the best candidates for the jobs and, over time, it would tend to put up candidates to racist clients on a racial basis and discriminate against those whose racial profile did not fit. Anti-racists like me would do less well with certain clients. Did the agency ever report any of its clients to the Commission for Racial Equality? It is hard to imagine. Even if it did, what would be the evidential basis, transcripts of the phone calls above?
How many agency consultants were overtly racist? None at all, that I could tell. How many were overtly anti-racist? Some cared about this more than others, I know because I spoke about the topic. How many were covertly racist? I don’t know and it is, of course, impossible to know either there or anywhere else. Hence, my evidence-based answer to the question “How many racists does it take to make an institution racist?” is emphatically: none at all. The main factor is being in a racist environment.
In 1986, I joined a shift of London police officers in uniform as a fellow constable. I went on to do fifteen different police roles in five ranks in eight different locations. I never heard any overt racism by any colleagues over that entire period nor saw any evidence of racist behaviour. When I speak to other Londoners about this they are surprised, but it is obvious when you apply a moment’s thought to the issue. The Brixton riots in the early 1980s had shocked the city and its police. The subsequent Scarman Enquiry had made it crystal clear that racism in the Metropolitan Police would not be tolerated. So, it wasn’t. The police live within a legal framework, they live and breathe evidence all the time. They also work in a disciplined, hierarchical environment. If this is not an environment familiar to you then I should add that in a truly disciplined and hierarchical environment there is no need to apply discipline and hierarchy; it is institutional.
Overt racism was anathema, just something that didn’t happen. The Macpherson Report confirmed this. After exhaustive and thorough examination of the circumstances of a racist murder it said of the Metropolitan Police:
Paragraph 6.3
“In this Inquiry, we have not heard evidence of overt racism or discrimination”
In relation to the actual case, the Report said:
““…nobody in this case suggests that any officer was guilty of overt racism.”
To put it another way, if the Macpherson Enquiry was reconvened and asked:
“How many racists does it take to make an institution racist?”, it would have to give the reply, “None.”
Yet, I would concur with the Report’s main finding, that the Metropolitan Police was institutionally racist, adding a caveat that the evidence showed that no officers were overtly racist. Squaring this apparent contradiction hinges on the meaning of the words “institution” and “institutionally”.
Any institution can behave in an overtly different way from the staff within it. Indeed, the institution behaves according to the environment that it is in, rather than staff who work there. Thus, the employment agency continued to have racist clients even though its directors and consultants were not overtly racist (and would have been appalled at this suggestion), indeed many were overtly anti-racist. In my view, it was institutionally racist.
The Macpherson Report reached the same conclusion about the Metropolitan Police, I think, for similar reasons. There are differences between the two findings. The Police as an institution was definitively, overtly and publicly anti-racist and this had been conveyed successfully to all the officers in a way that meant there was no evidence of overt racism, seen by Macpherson or by me.
The employment consultancy had not been scrutinised by any public enquiry requiring its management to consider racism. It had no internal staff policy. It had no external policy concerning racist clients, although it could, I suppose, choose its clients, unlike the Police.
The answer for both institutions is an awkward truth. The UK has racists. It has them in its general public, its public and private institutions, its politicians, its juries and courtrooms. As a consequence, the UK (to its credit) makes strenuous efforts to combat the racism – the Racial Relations Act being an early example. The Scarman Enquiry responding to the Brixton Riots created a police environment that was not racist. Personally, as an anti-racist, this was a bit of a relief after my experience at the employment agency. I went on to enjoy decades of police work in an environment free of racism.
The Enquiry raised an alarm call to other institutions: “our conclusions as to the Police Services should not lead to complacency in other institutions”. The phenomenon of institutional racism was immediately obvious elsewhere in the criminal justice system, where racial disproportionality was also noted by Macpherson (in charging and sentencing decisions). The alarm bell was rung but misheard, and the answer was muted.
The Enquiry led, correctly in my view, to recommendations for police to better address racism in the community, including police training in racism awareness to help them identify it. The training, in my experience, started from the premise that police needed to counter overt racism within the police, even though this had not been found. This is also the message that reached the public and the media and was recently reinforced by the Casey Report 2023, which tried to connect evidence of overt racism to the earlier report: “Racism in policing, and in the Met in particular, has been analysed and reported on at length since the Macpherson report in 1999.”
The police workforce had been found by Macpherson to be overtly non-racist, in line with my own experience. I feel that this is an important point to make as it is so often missed in this ongoing debate on how to make the public, all of the public, safe.
I agree with your analysis. The Lawrence Inquiry findings, and the Government action plan which followed, were aimed less at tackling specific acts of racism, but more at addressing the ways in which organisations develop ways of working - and ways of thinking - which reflect the majority dominant interests in the organisation; and which disadvantage the minorities. It's about culture and how power is exercised. The public sector equality duties which followed were an attempt to shift those behaviours. But the duties have been applied in too transactional ways; and they were never properly understood by some senior leaders in the police and elsewhere.
1. Until the term 'Institutional' is defined, it is not possible to form an accurate opinion of whether any organisation is institutionally biased. After 12 months on MPS DPS, I saw no policy or procedure designed to disadvantage a particular community.
2. Culture starts with the behaviour and values of its staff, and after facilitating discussion on this issue with over 1500 diverse officers and staff of the MPS as part of the NMfL programme, it was apparent that a handful of Black & Asian officers & staff believed the Met to be racist. The vast majority stated they received the vast majority of racism from the public, not colleagues. They also pointed out that Baroness Casey was very selective as to those she interviewed, limiting her encounters to those who had a negative perspective! Most considered that there were Met officers & staff with racist views but that the organisation was not systemmically racist, misogyinist or homophobic!
3. I received a 3 hour briefing on The Macpherson Report/Stephen Lawrence Murder investigation in 1997. It was a seriously flawed investigation, mainly due to the incompetence of the SIO. The 'examples' given of perceived racism by the officers in many cases concerned lacked merit, hence the reference to 'institutional' rather than 'overt' racism. I spoke to the daughter of the PC who was the FLO for Mr & Mrs Lawrence. He advised her that they were anti police from the outset, and he was unable to support them effectively as a consequence.