Abolishing institutional racism

Abstract

In 2020, anti-racist campaigns mobilising under the banner of Black Lives Matter challenged liberal reforms to policing as they made calls to defund the police. In the same year, the UK government’s Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities rejected not just the radical demands of Black Lives Matter protesters, but even liberal analyses of institutional racism in policing. This article examines how these two political interventions, analysing the same place at the same time, arrived at such divergent conclusions. This is done by tracing critiques of institutional racism from the Black Power movements of the 1960s and ’70s, through to the more liberal interpretations of institutional racism following the 1999 Macpherson Report. It goes on to argue that the failings of Macpherson provided the impetus for the political developments of 2020. The dearth of political, historical and economic analysis by Macpherson helped embolden the government to denude interpretations of data on racial inequalities as constituting institutional racism. Simultaneously, the endurance of police racism in post-Macpherson Britain has served only to underline the necessity for more radical demands in challenging institutional racism. The author argues that this has spurred on present-day activists to draw on the radical Black Power politics of the twentieth century to complement their abolitionist demands.