"Cast your mind back to the furore when the shadow justice secretary, Robert Jenrick, was revealed to have said that he didn't see another white face in the Handsworth area of Birmingham. It was reported as if it would be of real consequence to his political future but enough time has passed, I figure, to confirm that it was not. Why did some seriously consider this a turning point?"
"Though he claimed it's not about skin colour, it was a naked reference to race and an evident rebuke to British communities where there was a predominance of people of colour. The lack of consequence, however, was unsurprising, because within the public sphere the question of racism has been rigged for quite some time and the rules around who gets to say what about race in Britain have been rewritten."
Robert Jenrick openly described not seeing another white face in Handsworth, a remark that explicitly referenced race. The remark attracted temporary outrage but produced little lasting political consequence. The permissiveness around such statements reflects a deliberate erosion of standards governing public racial discourse. Other politicians have quickly followed with similarly provocative positions, exemplified by calls to deport legally settled families to preserve cultural coherence. The mainstream right has shifted from a one-nation conservatism that recognized systemic racial disadvantage to a reconfigured stance that moves the goalposts and narrows acceptable challenges to racism in public life.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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