The gap between perception and reality makes for a hoary old debate but for a long time English law has been fairly clear on the distinction.
These days, however, largely as a result of the Stephen Lawrence inquiry and the ensuing Macpherson Inquiry, the boundary has become rather confused. The Macpherson report stated that a ‘racist incident is any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person’, and as Robert Skidelsky writes in the Civitas booklet Institutional Racism and the Police, the ‘notion that the perception of a fact makes it a fact’ is a ‘legal and philosophical monstrosity’. As Michael Ignatieff comments in the same publication: ‘What is most dismaying… is that it [the Macpherson Inquiry] became a story about just one thing – race. But the central issue was not race, it was justice.’
Race has become such a sensitive issue that anything can be converted into a racial crisis or crime by anyone that chooses to manipulate the evidence, and anyone who opposes such a manoeuvre can expect to be accused of being racist.
Last Sunday in The Observer, Jay Rayner outlined ‘a long and desperate list of hate’ [sic.] in a catalogue of race crimes. It is a particularly disturbing article, arguing that the problem is far worse than generally suspected, but a quick glance at the Home Office statistics reveals that, while the risk of being victim of a racially motivated incident is supposedly higher for members of minority ethnic groups than for white people, the estimated number of racially motivated incidents has been declining. What’s obvious, moreover, is that figures for any crime defined by perception are likely to be radically divergent depending on… well, yes, perception. And the criteria for judging perception are, to say the least, mutable.
This is not for an instant to deny that racist crime exists, nor that it is a profoundly disturbing social ill which we should attempt to cure. But we must avoid the assumption that everything bad that happens to a non-white person does so as a consequence of racism. Most of the crimes that Jay Rayner is talking about are not clearly defined as racially motivated.
It is not good enough for any crime against a person of ethnic minority origin to be labelled racist. Someone who murders an Asian woman does not necessarily do so because she is an Asian woman. If all crimes against racial groups including whites are dubbed race crimes then the word ‘race’ becomes otiose and we may as well simply talk about crimes. If people have committed a crime they should be punished according to the nature of the offence, irrespective of whether the victim or the criminal is of one race or another. The blood runs red whatever the skin colour, religion or country of origin. And it goes without saying, of course, that greater discernment would make it easier to identify genuine instances of race crime and address causes more effectively.
Comments (2)
That is a clear distortion.
What is NOT up to the victim is the choice of MOTIVE. The murder/rape/burglary CLEARLY happened and it's up to the victim to report it, but if it happened to you you don't have the right to assume you were the chosen victim merely because of race/religion/ideology.
Motive shouldn't matter, except to help prove guilt. Crime is crime.
To say "they only did it to me because I'm a different colour" is far more racist than burgling a house that just happens to be owned by someone in a minority!
And as far as speech, no one has the right not to be offended. Free speech is far more important than one person's feelings, and if people didn't overreact to cruel words there would pretty much be no racism.
If there was a penalty for calling a black person 'nigger' then it should be the same penalty even if it's another black man saying it. It's treating people differently because of race that's racist. Clearly this is a preposterous idea to penalize a black man for calling another black man 'nigger' so in order to treat everyone EQUALLY just let people say what they want, and let us all learn to deal with offence.
Posted by joe | September 29, 2007 5:18 AM
Posted on September 29, 2007 05:18
The "‘notion that the perception of a fact makes it a fact’ is a ‘legal and philosophical monstrosity’"
It is not perception of a fact. Race is not fact. Race is a perception, a social construct.
Meanwhile, if it's no longer up to the victim to decide if an act is racist, why not apply that logic in other areas... The next time you're burgled, just remember that's it's no longer up to you to decide you've had your possessions stolen.
Posted by Evert | April 2, 2005 12:18 AM
Posted on April 2, 2005 00:18