This week we’ve seen the Prime Minister at pains to call out the Reform party’s racist policies, while insisting that people who vote for Reform are not themselves racists. It’s a tightrope walk, with journalists repeatedly inviting politicians to call their opponents racist.
For those ready to milk offense for political gain, the distinction between policy and person is quickly blurred again. Nigel Farage told his voters that “by implication” Starmer was calling them all racists. In a piece in the Daily Mail, he declared that “if you believe we should control our borders, you are – by the definition of the Prime Minister and his entire cabinet – racist.”
It’s no surprise that Farage would weaponise the Prime Minister’s words in this way, but it’s an important distinction. We need to be able to discuss racial inequality without being sidetracked into the identity question of who is or isn’t racist. Here’s Ibram X Kendi on this subject in his book How to Be An Anti-Racist:
“‘Racist’ is not… a pejorative. It is not the worst word in the English language; it is not the equivalent of a slur. It is descriptive, and the only way to undo racism is to consistently identify and describe it – and then dismantle it. The attempt to turn this usefully descriptive word into an almost unusable slur is, of course, designed to do the opposite: to freeze us into inaction.”
Kendi calls this one of the core principles of anti-racism, being able to highlight where racial injustice is occurring without making it a judgement call on people’s prejudices. Unfortunately, “Americans have long been trained to see the deficiencies of people rather than policy,” says Kendi, and that would be true in the UK too. “It’s a pretty easy mistake to make: people are in our faces. Policies are distant.”
This is exactly the problem we’re seeing play out in the news today. Keir Starmer is trying to focus on the policies, particularly the profoundly racist Reform policy of overturning the settled status of existing UK citizens. Farage makes it about people again – his personal offence, and the offence he insists his voters should take. Then he goes on to say that Starmer is unfit to be Prime Minister. The policy goes unexamined.
Is Starmer’s nuance going to come through the Daily Mail’s hate machine intact? Of course not, especially when there are cabinet members who are quite happy to make it personal again and declare people racist. But there’s a case study in anti-racism here for the rest of us.
In the conversations that we have with friends and family, especially in person, use the distinction between people and policy. Political ideas have different outcomes for different people. If the outcomes of an idea are worse for people of colour, then that policy is unfair along racial lines. It is therefore racist. The effect may be unintended or indirect, so it is a distraction to get into who thinks what. Keep it about the policy. This is practically impossible in a media soundbite or an online comments box, but we can do it in conversation.
Making it about people and their views breaks relationships and drives people apart. It is only when we identify and oppose racist policies and power that the world becomes more fair.
The Earthbound Report 