- Perry Blankson
The 2021 Sewell Report: a Vindication of the Young Historians Project
On the 31st of March 2021, the British government’s Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, commissioned by Conservative Prime Minister Boris Johnson, concluded that there is ‘no evidence of institutional racism’ in Britain. One might wonder what monumental structural and societal upheaval has taken place since the publication of the Macpherson Report in 1999, the Race Disparity Audit in 2017, or perhaps most recently, the Windrush Report, published in July 2018. All of these investigations illustrated the pervasive nature of institutional racism in Britain. In fact, including these aforementioned audits, reports and reviews, there have been six independent reports in the past four years, each meticulously outlining the existence of institutional racism within Britain.
So, has Britain ‘solved racism?’ Anyone familiar with the work of the Young Historians Project will know that the work we do in highlighting the inadequacies of the British education system and curriculum demonstrates that the answer is a resounding ‘no’. One passage from the report was particularly egregious:

Reframing the wholesale brutality, plunder and genocide perpetrated by the British Empire during colonisation and the transatlantic slave trade as a positive moment of cultural reinvention is grotesque, but this erasure is nothing new when we look at how the story of Britain’s relationship with race and Empire is approached in the curriculum. I can only think back to my school experience of Black History Month, where for thirty days we acknowledged the contribution of a handful of exceptional black individuals to Britain. The customary hagiographies of Mary Seacole and Olaudah Equiano were supplemented by fables of Martin Luther King and the ‘peaceful’ Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. But what was happening in Britain at the same time? We were taught about the Montgomery Bus Boycott of 1956, while the Bristol Bus Boycott of 1963 was ignored. We knew about Jim Crow and racial segregation in America, but not about Britain’s Colour Bar, which saw Black and Asian people in Britain barred from bars pubs, and restaurants, refused housing by landlords and prohibited from jobs in certain industries, such as British railways. The Colour Bar was legal until 1965, just one year after the American Civil Rights Act abolished discrimination based on race, colour, religion, sex, or national origin.
