The U.K. is one of the least racist societies in the world

From The Misguided Moral Panic About Racism in British Universities by Wanjiru Njoya and Doug Stokes.

According to one of the most extensive surveys ever conducted by the European Union, the U.K. is one of the least racist societies in the world, and what racism that remains is diminishing. These trends have been helped by the U.K.’s university system, which has educated millions of people across the globe and long been at the forefront of progressive social change and the promotion of equality of opportunity in Britain.

However, in October 2019 the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) released a series of reports that purported to show that racism is widespread in Britain’s higher education sector, to an extent that is “seriously damaging to individuals and our society.” The reports argued that the problem was so large it could only be properly addressed by new laws and regulations.

All the anglo-phone countries tend to be very open, tolerant, and assimilationist with much lower indexes of discrimination and bias than other countries. It is a shared cultural trait.

It is also an irony of modern times that the fear and belief in structural racism is the greatest in those countries which are least tarnished by that condition.

That is not to deny the reality of racism or any other prejudiced-based bias or inclination to judge individuals by group attributes and not by individual conditions. All people will display those conditions at different times, under different circumstances, to different degrees and with more or less transience. Otherwise we would all be saints.

I do not wish to focus on the charge of racism however.

I think this article illustrates a different problem. We have two seemingly credible studies reaching diametrically different conclusions.

The danger is to assume into existence a crisis which is not yet evident in robust and agreed upon data and then to take mediative or restitutional action when the very existence of the purported condition (structural racism) is unquantified and whose definitions and causation are not understood.

If you have two credible studies pointing in different directions, you know you need more knowledge. Instead, we too often asymmetrically elect to assume one of the studies is correct and the other is wrong or to focus on one and ignore the other.

Diametric opposing seemingly robust studies is the best evidence that nothing should be done until we have reached greater understanding.

We too frequently see calls for action based solely on the assertion that a condition is true (people suffer material racial discrimination from undiagnosed bias), that the condition is harmful, and that the solution is net beneficial. Virtually all social programs originate in this fashion - rhetorical calls for improvement without a robust empirical evidence of the condition, without a reasoned proof of the causes and without any accounting for the value of the improvement and the cost of the intervention. And virtually all such programs or solutions end up being damaging or, at best, non-consequential in beneficial impact.

As Richard Epstein has argued, any legal framework that abandons classical ideals of formal equality in which all people are equal in virtue of their humanity, and chooses instead to prioritize specified group features as “protected characteristics,” is bound to limit the scope of individual liberty. The preoccupation with protecting certain designated victim groups from discrimination causes us to overlook the increasingly oppressive nature of the new campus rules. What began as a laudable desire for racial equality has led to the present situation: the prospect of being guilty of unconscious bias, even in the absence of any discriminatory intent, based on multiple alleged microaggressions that together are said to add up to unlawful conduct.

[snip]

The ideals and aspirations behind such measures are not in doubt. But the methods chosen to achieve the stated goals, namely an ever-expanding definition of unlawful conduct that depends largely on the perception of the ‘victim,’ must be subjected to rigorous scrutiny. We should not abandon basic norms of respect, fairness and rational adjudication.

We should be ignoring these rhetorical arguments and ignoring the calls for action based on contradictory evidence.

Data and evidence is hard to amass, causation is hard to disentangle, trade-offs are hard to settle. But that is preferable to randomly selection actions based on plausible but unsupported emotional rhetoric.