A panel of United Nations human experts has joined the chorus of denunciation of a British government report that minimized the impact of racism on the life chances of the nation's ethnic minorities.

The report, commissioned in the wake of last year's Black Lives Matter protests, said geography, culture, family influence, socio-economic background and religion were more culpable than racism.

Its conclusion that Britain should be seen as a "model for other white-majority countries" has been met with widespread derision.

In a reaction, the UN Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent called the report's claim that family structure, rather than institutionalized and structural discriminatory practices, is the central feature of the Black experience in the UK a "tone-deaf attempt" at rejecting the lived realities of ethnic minorities.

"In 2021, it is stunning to read a report on race and ethnicity that repackages racist tropes and stereotypes into fact, twisting data and misapplying statistics and studies into conclusory findings and ad hominem attacks on people of African descent," Monday's statement by the Geneva-based group said.

It continued, "The report cites dubious evidence to make claims that rationalize white supremacy by using the familiar arguments that have always justified racial hierarchy.

"This attempt to normalize white supremacy despite considerable research and evidence of institutional racism is an unfortunate sidestepping of the opportunity to acknowledge the atrocities of the past and the contributions of all in order to move forward." 

Slave trade rationalized

The report, released on March 31, concedes that racism remains a "real force" in the UK but found that the system in the country is no longer "deliberately rigged against ethnic minorities."

The experts rejected that assertion. "The report's conclusion that racism is either a product of the imagination of people of African descent or of discrete, individualized incidents ignores the pervasive role that the social construction of race was designed to play in society, particularly in normalizing atrocity, in which the British state and institutions played a significant role," they said.

One of the most controversial conclusions of the report prompted critics to complain that the authors were glorifying the trade of enslaved Africans to the Caribbean and elsewhere.

"There is a new story about the Caribbean experience which speaks to the slave period not only being about profit and suffering but how culturally African people transformed themselves into a re-modelled African/Britain," the review says.

The UN experts called on the British government to categorically reject the findings and to ensure the "accurate reflection of historical facts" as they relate to past tragedies and atrocities.

But a spokesperson for Prime Minister Boris Johnson defended the report and said it had been misrepresented by the experts.

"This report in no way condones racist behaviour and in fact it highlights racism and inequality are still problems for our country," the spokesperson told reporters.

A day after the report was published Lord Simon Woolley, a former UK equality and human rights commissioner, said it did not answer why so many ethnic minorities suffer inequality in education, health, housing and employment.

"To have published it any time in the last 20 years would have been seen as a whitewash," Woolley wrote in The Guardian. "To do so after the months of heartache and the awareness-raising of the past year is almost criminally negligent."

The UN working group warned that the report's "distortion and falsification of historic facts may license further racism, the promotion of negative racial stereotypes, and racial discrimination."

The independent panel of five experts was established in 2002 with a mandate to study the problems of racial discrimination faced by people of African descent.

Top Photo:  Black Lives Matter protesters react to the death in Minneapolis police custody of George Floyd in Trafalgar Square, London, Britain, May 31, 2020. /Reuters