Civitas

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.