Red Flags: Return to Openly Racist England?

He grew up in Coventry, the first black child to ever attend his school.

As a young man he got a scar across his face from a pub brawl started by a racist; he regularly ran for his life from National Front skinheads, who were particularly angry if they ever saw him with his white girlfriend. Racist language was an every day thing; racist violence never far away.

But my dad’s experience sounded like a foreign country to me, who - a generation later - was one of dozens of mixed race kids in my south London primary school. I had the privilege of feeling unremarkable, as far as skin colour was concerned.

Today, many of the social divisions I notice at my children’s schools - also in south London - are connected to wealth and social class rather than ethnic background. My children are the first generation in our family to talk about anti-racism as standard. All of this points to hard-won progress - and there has been progress.

And yet racism, over these years, has not gone away. At best, it was stripped of its acceptability, driven from open conversation into private spaces, later anonymous online spaces. The mask would slip occasionally to reveal old-fashioned abuse, but racism became more often visible in institutional outcomes for Black and minority ethnic people. 

A teacher expecting lower grades of you is a less obvious villain than a shaven-headed thug chasing you down the street, but it can arguably have just as devastating an impact on your life.

When Reframing Race measured underlying beliefs about race and racism in a huge study of 20,000 people, we found that:

• 20% of people in England belief that some races or ethnicities are born less intelligent than others.
• 40% of people in England believe that someone’s race or ethnicity has a bearing on their character. 

In other words, if you are in a room with 5 or more people, chances are that there is straight-forward biological racism in that room. To follow through with the logic, every staffroom, boardroom and classroom is likely hosting a deep-rooted and dangerous belief in the nonsense of white supremacy.

Racism has always been mainstream.

And so while we argue about whether the recent flag-raising is deliberately divisive and racist (it is), and whether or not it has the intended effect of intimidating black and brown people (it does), we continue to miss the point.

As Toni Morrison wisely identified, "the very serious function of racism is distraction - it keeps you from doing your work."

So as the 2020s begin to resemble the 1970s - openly racist language and symbology is painted on shop fronts and walls and racist intimidation in the streets becomes normalised - what is our ‘work’ that we must not be distracted from? 

For us at Reframing Race, the work is solutions.

At the beginning of the summer our Solutions Summit 2025 brought together people whose powerful ideas and practice are working to create a future without racist structures.

We heard about some transformative approaches, from thinking beyond school exclusions, to talking to young black men in prison about love and nurture.

This is what you can expect to hear from us from now on - with specific insights from the event specifically coming shortly.

We have spotted the red flags that tell us the conversation is not serving us; instead we will spend all available energy making a world beyond racism understandable, engaging and inevitable.

By Nina Kelly, Reframing Race's Director of Communications and Content

Photo credit: Mtaylor848