The trouble with institutional racism

Dr Dermot J  Ward

A few years back, my wife and I were at a large social gathering hosted by two dear friends. It was around the time that London had secured the venue  for the 2012 Olympics thanks in no small way to the endeavours of super athlete Sebastian (now Lord) Coe. The male of the couple sitting opposite hinted darkly that Coe was, well…not a good egg, as we used say. Intrigued and truth to tell a little intoxicated by a good wine, I scented a bit of gossip.  I declared that Sebastian (I don’t know him personally from Adam) was the kind of clean cut chap that any mother would like to see dating her daughter. The response came with awkward body language. “Well, (half-embarrassed pause)…he looks Jewish”. I was astonished. It was naked racism.

Earlier this year the disgraced anti-Semitic historian David Irvine got his long overdue comeuppance for his denial of the Holocaust. He was jailed for three years in Austria. Now the Jewish people are not all saints -any more than the rest of us- but their diaspora has been powerfully influential; their industry and their humour legendary. As shorthand just think Einstein and Woody Allen. The Holocaust is fact: must never be denied, and always remembered.

I raise the matter of racism because it is a current preoccupation in developed countries including these islands and rightly so. Even in the 1970s I recall a medical meeting of an Irish Medical Organisation chaired on that occasion by Dr Paddy O’Grady. During it a racist remark was made not as it happens by an Irishman but by a doctor who himself was of different ethnic origin. Cue: awkward , deathly hush. After a solemn seeming-aeon silence was duly broken by the chairman who ordered that the offender either apologise forthwith or leave the meeting. I’m glad to say he apologised.

In a lighter vein Dave Allen told the tale of an Irishman sitting in a London Kilburn pub drinking alone mumbling incoherences into his lonely pint when a burst of laughter rang out from a nearby group of imbibers. He rounded on them demanding ‘are you laughing at the Irish?’ One of the group turned to him, quite alarmed, reassuring and placatory, ‘No, no, we weren’t even talking about the Irish.’ At that the feeling-insulted soul returned to his pint but a minute or so later again rounded on the innocent revellers with ‘..so the Irish aren’t worth talking about’. Like so many of the best jokes, there is a serious point to this one; that while probably there will forever be a quantum of racism, no matter how small in the world (still unacceptable and hopefully an ever diminishing one) there is a dimension to it that has not been adequately addressed or explored. I’m referring to the projection, by a racially sensitised mindset to perceive racism where it might not exist at all. Like our pub Irishman.

Let it be clear also that we are talking here about genuine feelings of racist abuse and not about false allegations of it for compensation purposes. An entirely different matter.

You may recall the 1999 Stephen Lawrence (a murdered black boy) inquiry conducted by Sir William Macpherson. No one has been found guilty of the crime so far. Macpherson appears to have left a legal legacy of twin miseries. One was his 19-word pronouncement: ‘A racist incident is any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person.’

The second was his accusation that the police force was guilty of institutional racism. Both are capable of causing much mischief and a capacity to cause miscarriages of justice. As a psychiatrist one is more aware than most of false  perceptions, perhaps of a paranoid person, that another individual is hostile, even plotting harm against that person when there is no evidence whatsoever that such is the case. In some extreme examples such false belief can be held  against a perfect stranger. To rely on ‘perception’ as proof seems to run contrary to accepted rules of evidence , natural justice and due legal process. Perception is not proof.

Accusing the whole police force of institutional racism tends to stifles proper legal enquiry and in particular the pursuit of identifying guilty individual offenders.  Macpherson, single handedly,  appears to have introduced into case law thinking that old unreliable  ‘we are all responsible’. What a pity he didn’t seem to have heeded the late great Alistair Cooke’s Letter From America broadcast on 8^th June 1968.

On  Tuesday 4^th June Cooke was in Los Angeles in the same room and at the same time as Bobby Kennedy when he was assassinated. In his subsequent Letter from America he spoke unforgettably of the shock and disbelief of seeing..’in a pool of light on the greasy floor was a huddle of clothes and staring out of it the face of Bobby Kennedy, like the stone face of a child’s effigy’. In his attempting to talk rationally only four days after that tragedy and in his own traumatised state, he  particularly condemned the contemporaneous media cry blaming a ‘sick society’.

He declared, and I think it worth its being recorded verbatim, …’I reject, almost as a frivolous obscenity, the notion of collective guilt, the idea that I or the American people killed John Fitzgerald Kennedy and Martin Luther King and Robert Francis Kennedy.

I don’t believe, either, that you conceived Hitler, and that in some deep unfathomable sense that Europe was responsible for the extermination of six million Jews. With Edmund Burke, I don’t know how you can indict a whole nation. To me, this now roaringly fashionable theme is a great folly. It is difficult to resist because it provides emergency resuscitation to one’s self-esteem. It deflects the search for a culprit. It offers cheap reassurance, cut-rate wisdom, but is really a way of opting out of the human situation: a situation that includes pity for the dead Kennedys and the living, compassion for Sirhan Sirhan (Bobby Kennedy’s assassin), and sympathy for the American nation at a time when the vicious side of its frontier tradition (to which it has owed its vigour and variety) is surging up again for reasons that no one has accurately diagnosed…’

It is to be hoped that an individual culprit for Stephen Lawrence's homicide, rather than a potentially mischievous community proxy, may one day finally emerge.