Human rights experts with the United Nations have blasted a report by the British government for attemptinh to “normalize white supremacy” by claiming that there is no systematic racism against racial minorities in the UK.
The UN Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent in a statement “categorically” condemned the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities (CRED) and urged the government to ignore its findings.
The CRED report, released last month, describes racism as a “real force” in Britain but that the system is not “deliberately rigged against ethnic minorities”.
Its chairman said it had found no evidence of “institutional racism”, and the report criticised the way the term has been applied, saying it should not be used as a “catch-all” phrase for any microaggression.
The group has urged the Government to reject the findings and called for the Commission to be “disbanded or reconstituted.”
The UN experts said the report “repackages racist tropes and stereotypes into fact, twisting data and misapplying statistics and studies,” according to a statement released by the UN Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner.
“The report cites dubious evidence to make claims that rationalise white supremacy by using the familiar arguments that have always justified racial hierarchy,” they added.
“This attempt to normalize white supremacy despite considerable research and evidence of institutional racism is an unfortunate sidestepping of the opportunity to acknowledge the atrocities of the past and the contributions of all in order to move forward.”
The report’s findings were so controversial that it prompted a top black aide of Prime Minister Boris Johnson to step down.
Johnson has said that people need to consider the report’s “original” findings.
“I don’t say the Government is going to agree with absolutely everything in it, but it has some original and stimulating work in it that I think people need to read and to consider,” he said back then.
The UN group said the report has failed to recognize institutional racism in health, education, employment, housing, the justice system and other areas in the UK.
It also accused the government of refusing to pay attention to domestic reports and the works of the international human rights experts, who have in the past raised the alarm over the existence of such issues.
“(The) mythical representation of enslavement is an attempt to sanitise the history of the trade in enslaved Africans,” said the UN expert group.
“The distortion and falsification of these historic facts may license further racism, the promotion of negative racial stereotypes, and racial discrimination,” it added.
