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| Britain |
| Trevor Phillips (again!): Political correctness towards ethnic minorities is racist |
| 2004-04-27 |
| EFL The head of the [UK] Commission for Racial Equality launched an attack on liberal Britain yesterday, claiming "misguided" polices on ethnic minorities were inherently racist. Trevor Phillips accused council leaders, health professionals, social workers and police chiefs of practising a culture of political correctness which he claimed led to the "benign neglect" of ethnic minorities. Mr Phillips hit out at a number of targets, including Manchester City Council, which he said allowed Bangladeshi parents to take their children abroad during term time. "The reason given is that these trips are part of their children learning about their heritage and culture," he said yesterday. "Rubbish. What better way to say to these children, ’We don’t care where you are born - you are brown, you are still foreigners and we’ll treat you as such?’" Mr Phillips then criticised Clive Wolfendale, the Deputy Chief Constable of North Wales, for addressing a meeting of the Black Police Association (BPA) in a rap-style speech. "Presumably this was an attempt to get down with their supposed ’culture’. How wrong. How patronising," he said. Most members of the BPA were British-born, Mr Phillips said. He also criticised social workers who failed to intervene in the case of Victoria Climbie, an eight-year-old girl from the Ivory Coast who died in 2000 after months of abuse and neglect by her great aunt and her great aunt’s boyfriend. The inquiry into Victoria’s death heard that social workers believed the girl’s fear of her great aunt was part of her African culture, which emphasised respect for elders. "There is no aspect of African culture that demands that we turn a blind eye to the degradation and murder of a human being," Mr Phillips said. He also used the speech to warn that HIV and Aids infection rates were soaring among African men in Britain, partly because of homophobic attitudes and ignorance among their community about safe sex. He said health professionals should not shy away from addressing the issue, despite the cultural taboos around it. "The argument that we should be sensitive to the culture of this community only makes sense if you are ready to put the right of African men to hold their homophobic views about sexuality ahead of the right of African women to equal protection," he said. His comments will once again ignite the debate over multiculturalism and race relations in Britain. In the speech to civil servants, Mr Phillips said: "When we stress our foreignness instead of claiming our right to be British, we surrender our place in society. We all know how patronised we feel when people talk to us as though we are foreigners, even though their intent is to make us feel at home. The fact is that we are at home already." |
| Posted by:Bulldog |
| #1 Nice one Trevor. You can't please all of the people all of the time. Having taught in a secondary school in ethnically mixed South London, I quite agree. Political correctness does pigeon-hole people to their disadvantage. The alternative? Hopefully not a return to the racism of the sixties/seventies but a more common sense approach - hence the French banning religious icons in schools. |
| Posted by: Howard UK 2004-04-27 7:31:39 AM |