Keon West: The far right is flat wrong on racism

When the far-right talking head Sophie Corcoran launched her campaign against 10,000 Interns, she said she was suing the charity because they turned down her application for a training scheme. But her post on X reveals why she thinks this programme supporting young Black people is “anti-white”:

“What disadvantages do [Black people] actually have?” she asked. “None.”

Corcoran’s claim is so deeply, horrifically inaccurate that it makes our work more straightforward. Even so, we must keep doing that work, because what’s at stake here is a total resetting of all the gains made to reduce discrimination in the UK.

I’m a scientist, with a doctorate in social psychology, over 15 years of research experience in the field, and more than 80 peer-reviewed papers that have been cited more than 3,300 times. I could answer Corcoran’s claim with my opinion, but I’d rather show you the scientific evidence that she’s wrong.

What could we expect to be true, in a world where Corcoran’s statement is accurate?

In a world where there are no disadvantages faced by Black people in the UK, if you submit two, identical pieces of work to teachers – except you put a Black name at the top of half of them and a white name at the top of the other half – then both should get the same grade. 

If you submit identical CVs for jobs – except you put Black names at the top of some and white names at the top of others – then both should get offered identical jobs.

If people go to the doctor and present the same symptoms – but half the people are Black and half are white – they should all get offered the same treatment.

But that never happens. We know that doesn’t happen because scientists have run experiments exactly like this hundreds of times. Thousands of times. I myself have done experiments like these many times.

Black people get lower grades for the same work. They’re less likely to get job offers and are offered less pay for the same types of work, even with exactly the same skills and qualifications. They’re less likely to receive all kinds of medical treatments – painkillers in particular – because of the myth that Black people experience less pain. These are just a handful of examples from a wealth of research.

So Corcoran’s claim that Black people face no disadvantages is just wrong. Every time we run these thousands of experiments, we keep finding not only disadvantages, but a remarkably similar, statistically reliable set of disadvantages that we can predictably measure.

If you pretend that Black people don’t face disadvantages in society, including employment, then of course any attempt to make things more equal would look like discrimination. But that reaction is either shockingly ignorant, or done in bad faith. In the UK, progress towards racial equality has been hard fought. Any victories we have won have been achieved by working incredibly hard, fighting for a better world for everyone.

These attacks on equality put our progress at risk. We must acknowledge that this is the goal that some people want to accomplish and, in some ways, they are winning. 

Corcoran’s statement is ridiculous, but when people make these ridiculous statements in public, with an increasingly high budget, with PR campaigns behind them, they can sway larger and larger portions of the UK. The more people in power believe these lies, the more mistakes they will make trying to address them. Inevitably, when something terrible happens, they will not be able to understand why.

We must be brave enough to talk straightforwardly about racism and discrimination, and the mountain of evidence that proves their existence. We can’t just talk about outcomes such as that Black and Brown people are disproportionately poor or unhealthy. We must be willing to discuss the plain, scientific evidence that these disparate outcomes are due to racism.

If we don’t, we open ourselves up to the low shot, the below-the-belt hit, the fallacious claims that society is meritocratic and these outcomes come from a supposed inferiority of ethnic minorities. And that puts all the hard-fought gains we have made to reduce discrimination in the UK under threat.

• The Science of Racism by Keon West is published by Picador.