The Sewell Report through ESEA eyes: Part Two

Vy-Liam Ng writes his feelings about The Sewell Report for besea.n. The article assesses the Sewell Report through a personal lens and, in the spirit of progress, through the lens of the ESEA experience.

This is a two-part article, and we recommend reading Part One first here. Both articles are long-form pieces of writing, so grab a cuppa and settle in for a good read.

Under scrutiny, the Sewell Report falls apart at its seams. In Part 1, I analysed the very real evidence of institutional racism that impacts the ESEA community within education and employment. In Part 2, I’ll take a look at how the same threads of institutional racism are prevalent in both policing and healthcare.

POLICING

Believe it or not, my dad used to be a policeman. Yes, he was a Chinese copper in the UK back in the mid-nineties. It didn’t last long. He would eventually quit and, without telling me the exact reasons as to why, I understood from context clues that the culture of the West Midlands police force probably didn’t sit well with my dad. He was an old school man, filled with old school pride and principles and he would view the institution of policing in a very specific way. It was clear that he was socially incompatible with the classic boys' club environment of the British Police. 

This isn’t to say he couldn’t hack it. My dad is one of the most stubborn people I know, but this is just an anecdotal reminder that the undercurrents of an exclusionary culture force those minorities within a majority, be that minorities of ethnicity, gender, disability, sexual ity or neurodiversity, to compromise upon their own personal identity in order to conform. Having an outward policy that declares inclusivity without addressing a culture that sustains exclusivity, especially along the lines of race and ethnicity, is akin to Michael Scott declaring bankruptcy by simply saying it aloud. Google it if you don’t get that reference.  

In my own time as part of the British Territorial Army, as much as I enjoyed my growth and experience there, I look back in shame at the times I threw people who looked like me under the proverbial bus for the benefit of fitting in. I normalised racist jokes at my own expense, at my own ethnic background, just to show that I was 'one of the lads'. And I got to personally benefit from this banterous environment. I could feel included and safe, but I wouldn’t realise until my later years, with good mentorship and introspection, that all I did was reinforce this fragile notion that I was one of the 'good ones' among the brown faces they so infrequently see. That I could assimilate, and I wasn’t like the rest.

Never again. Never again will I internalise racism to benefit a racial hierarchy.  

Now, I understand that the impact of crime and policing on the ESEA community is generally analysed along two tracks, how the police treat us and how we see them. Both issues are interconnected but providing solutions usually starts with the police since they’re the ones with power and resources.

The Sewell Report notes that: 

One of the biggest concerns about unfair treatment of minorities lies in crime and policing.

P.137, Sewell Report

Unfair treatment can relate to many things, but for the sake of this analysis, we can focus on the complacency of the UK police to protect the ESEA community and the reasons surrounding this.  

This is not to write off the issue of over-representation of ethnic minority groups in the criminal justice system and I definitely did not know that:

People in Asian and Other (including Chinese) ethnic groups had the highest custody rates in 2018. 

P.148, Sewell Report

But for the sake of simplicity, I will focus on the failure of the police to protect us for now. The over-representation of ethnic minority groups in prison is a huge and complex issue prevalent across the western world and it warrants its own article. 

Now, it’s been widely covered that the ESEA community in both the UK and the US have experienced a surge in racist hate crimes since COVID. Communities are rallying and some local police groups have reached out to provide information about how to handle racist hate crimes.  

Image: Jason Leung

I attended one of these Zoom sessions in Birmingham last year and, while I do commend the local police for at least reaching out, the question still stands. Why does it take physical violent assaults for people to take notice? What is it about our society that normalises reactivity as opposed to proactivity?

Overt and covert racism towards the ESEA community is an open secret in the UK. We have been talking about it for a lifetime and there has been advocacy, academic analysis, studies, old and new media reports, all of which contain a consistent theme that racism towards the ESEA community in the UK is not being taken seriously at all levels of society, including the police. 

The police aren’t ignorant to this. An experience something many of us growing up in takeaways know all too well is acknowledged within the Home Office Research Study 244 (2002 Racist offences – how is the law working?):

There is an overlap with the racist incident directed against the fast-food outlet or corner shop. The most repetitive yet least recognised of these are often in small country towns where evening after Friday evening local youths insult and taunt the long-suffering Asian or Chinese staff.

The above report also mentions that:

Everywhere it was acknowledged that there were certain ethnic groups – such as Afghans in Loc-2, Arabs in Loc-4, Somalis and Vietnamese in Loc-5, and Chinese everywhere – with whom it was particularly hard to make police contact and who were unlikely to report any sort of crime unless really severe.

The prevailing question is why this experience remains common today if not due to racism? All other possibilities are just as bad, if not worse, and I’m pretty sure there’s no genetic aversion to the police ingrained in the DNA of these groups. This is not a question of biology, but a question of society’s biases, where those who have power are unable or unwilling to yield it properly.  

If the police system is not institutionally racist, if it is argued that the police do actually provide an appropriate and professional service to all people irrespective of race, then is it complacency, laziness or apathy on part of the police towards us which in turn renders our communities vulnerable to racist hate crimes? Noting here that the Sewell Report makes no mention of confidence in the police from the ESEA community (these figures can be found elsewhere but again, only the Chinese are mentioned specifically). So how frail are these tethers in real terms? Where do the facets of distrust lie?

Image: Ehimetalor Akhere

It is mentioned in the joint response to the Commission: 

A common theme and complaint among ESEA victims of racist and hate crimes is that the police do not take their cases seriously enough, often refusing to recognise the crime as a racially-motivated act, and do not provide enough support.

And on this point, how many of us know the story of Mi-Gao Huang Chen? A 41-year-old takeaway owner who was beaten to death outside his own place of business. This was after confronting a gang of teenagers who tormented him, and his girlfriend, with racist abuse for months. 

Detractors may question how this is the fault of the police? And how they can be everywhere at once? But we know the couple had consistently contacted the police about the racist and anti-social behaviour leading up to the attack, and their pleas for help were left unanswered. To secure their own livelihood and wellbeing, the couple were instead forced to defend themselves.

On the night of the murder, it was Jia Ming Yah, the victim’s girlfriend who was initially arrested for carrying a stick to defend herself, and it was only through the intervention of the Monitoring Group and a public campaign that charges against her were dropped. 

The Monitoring Group would state that Jia Ming:

Felt betrayed at being arrested and charged simply because she was carrying a stick to defend herself and the business. It took the intervention of The Monitoring Group for the racial motive to be recorded and a public campaign to have her case reviewed and the charges against her dropped. After the murder, Eileen still managed to live on the premises and keep the business running without any protection or safety measures until the trial. During this time, she had to endure the constant presence around the shop of those closely associated with the perpetrator group, who waged a vociferous local campaign in support of the attackers while continuously demanding her re-arrest.

Race is not mentioned in the death of Simon San, a takeaway delivery driver who died in Edinburgh after being assaulted following a confrontation with teenagers sitting on and rocking his car. While this attack was described as a random incident, reporting notes that: 

The takeaway has been targeted by local youths since it opened about eight months ago.

Many of us who have grown up in takeaways, including myself, have faced this exact scenario and it is only through cosmic forces, good graces or pure coincidence that the abuse we received didn’t escalate to the point that life was lost. I have no issues with deviating from academic analysis here because I know what is true through my own experiences and that of my family.

Security camera footage of racist, drunken mobs harassing us and our livelihoods is like a screen burn-in in my memory. I remember frame by frame seeing them strike without fear of reprisal. This is an identifiable pattern of abuse which for too long has been ignored or trivialised by the police. These racists would recognise that their abuse resulted in no repercussions. Such lethargy towards tackling this behaviour simply normalised for both the victims and the perpetrators, that such racism is to be expected and treated like it was a local community event. 

Again, this is an open secret and has been talked about for years and years, and continually ignored by those who purport to protect us. Older reporting highlighted years ago that it is restaurant and take-away workers who are ‘used to hassle from customers, often spilling over into racist abuse’; and when they are forced to defend themselves, a pattern emerges of victim blaming where it is the ESEA community who are arrested before the assailants. 

Who reading this also remembers the Defend the Diamond 4 protests? When in 1988 at the Diamond restaurant of London’s Chinatown, eight white customers would refuse to pay their bill and would then go on to attack the waiters when confronted. And when police were summoned, the waiters were arrested and charged with grievous bodily harm. Reports at the time state: 

To make the charges on the waiters stick, the police had to argue, at one point, a single slightly-built Chinese waiter was able to beat up five white men.

Similarly, the linked article speaks of a 'Mr C' who was arrested and charged with grievous bodily harm with intent when he was forced to defend his takeaway and family from racist attackers. 

Jabez Lam would note that:

When we are attacked and we defend ourselves then another stereotype kicks in: we are all kung fu fighting Triads.

This isn’t just a humorous musing. The police have been accused of acting upon this exact racial bias when approaching hate crimes towards the ESEA community. 

The National Civil Rights Movement back in 2000 stated that:

This is such a crude stereotyping of a racial group. We have asked the police to delink the so-called Triad wars from racial attacks, and they said they would do that.

But just because the police said that they would do this doesn’t change the fact that it was only after a public campaign that the charges against the Diamond 4 were dropped, and the actual assailants arrested. Damage has already been done yet the restoration of confidence in the police system seems to be left at the feet of the community.  

While the Sewell Report acknowledges that ‘mistrust [toward the police] are often steeped in a terrible legacy of historical incidents of racism and racist behaviour’, it also argued that this must be counterbalanced by attacks towards police - as if that is of equal measure. 

Of course, no reasonable person will condone violence towards anyone, let alone the police. But to acknowledge a legacy of racism in one breath and to then minimise how the fabric of that legacy is still interwoven into both unseen and public practice today, despite these incidents still being fresh in the memory of our communities, is genuinely frustrating. 

Image: ._c

One cannot expect reconciliation without meaningful and actionable changes, and when the ESEA community states that progress can still be made and relationships mended, to have the police ignore recommendations such as disbanding the London Chinatown Policing Unit, only adds to this frustration. 

The failures of the police to protect us and other minority communities are not just limited to trivialising and disregarding our experiences with racism, both from the police and around their lack of care for our community. On the larger institutional failure of government and policing, how about the Morecambe Bay Cockle Pickers who had to work at night for fear of racist abuse from locals and from the police? We cannot talk about broader institutional failures without speaking about the Dover 58, Essex Lorry deaths, and the Home Office Chinatown raids. I understand the issue of race, migration and people smuggling is a complex beast with many arms moving in the shadows, but it isn’t wrong to say that these vulnerable people were failed by a system that was supposedly designed to protect them.

There is no single resolution as to how the police can rebuild confidence with not just the ESEA community but all ethnic minority groups. But to say that enough progress has now been made is worryingly dismissive. 

The joint response mentions that fair representation of ESEA police officers would be one recommendation the police can enact toward a path of reconciliation. However it’s important to remember that it’s all ethnic minority groups who are underrepresented in the police force:

The culture of the police as experienced by my dad, and other ethnic minorities is still at its core, a boy’s club for white men. For example, it was acknowledged in 2020, only a few months ago, that for Sikh police officers:

Almost half (47%) had considered leaving their career due to their treatment. The majority (62%) of people reported suffering some form of racism at work, and 59% felt they had been overlooked for opportunities some or most of the time due to racism or unconscious bias.

P.191, Sewell Report

These are not small percentages. When such sentiments are normalised in a majority group; a group who wields authoritative power over us, it is revealed that this system is not meant for us unless we accept the norm of being othered for our skin colour.  

Looking outward, we see how racial prejudices from the police, especially toward the Black community, is still evident today. We see unchecked power, enabled by a system which looks after its own when disproportionate force is used against other vulnerable groups like at the Sarah Everand protests. What we have is an institutionally uneven policing system where racism, misogyny and self-conceit are left to fester on the inside, without meaningful checks or balances. 

It is the police, with all the tools at their disposal who have to reckon with the reality that racism and prejudice is inherent in their culture. 

Just because the Sewell Report says massive strides have been made in police attitudes towards race, it does not mean that this is the reality. Saying something does not make it true and, as they reference in their own report, ethnic minority officers still face unfair treatment within the boys’ club. As found by the National Police Chiefs Council, there is disproportionality for Black, Asian, & Minority Ethnic police officers in their own complaints and misconduct investigations, with significant disparity found in how ethnic minority officers are treated where:

Several PSD’s [Professional Standards Department] rarely consider the wider context other than that officers discipline/conduct history, particularly failing to explore if there is a ‘trigger incident’ e.g. whistleblowing or complaints of racism and that this can happen at any point in their career, at any rank.

If this is not a clear example of racism or at the bare minimum, ignorance of race, within inner echelons of the police, then what hope is there for the public ESEA community to regain trust in them?

How about you manage your own damn households first before you ask us to trust you?

HEALTH

The Commission rejects the common view that ethnic minorities have universally worse health outcomes compared with White people, the picture is much more variable.

P.199, Sewell Report

Some wonder how healthcare can be institutionally racist? Surely something like cancer is colour blind?

And admittedly, this is one of the few sections wherein no matter how much I research, I will lose nuance over the biological or scientific aspects relevant to this field. While I am training as an academic doctor, I am not one that actually helps people. 

For the ESEA community, unfortunately, there is no wider data reference except on the Chinese ethnic group and I can quickly summarise what the Sewell Report themselves present, recognising here that this data is very limited. 

• On life expectancy, drawing from a 2016 Scottish study, life expectancy at birth was 74.7% for White Scottish males and 79% for Chinese males. White Scottish females were 79.4% while Chinese females 83.4%. 

• On premature mortality measured by years of life lost, the conclusion is that the Chinese ethnic group in Scotland has better health outcomes in more than half of these.

  • The Chinese group is significantly better compared (less likely to die) to the white population across the following health categories:

    • Most cancers (except stomach cancer where we measure significantly worse)

    • Ischaemic heart disease

    • Stroke

    • Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)

    • Lower respiratory tract Infection (RTI)

    • Self-harm/suicide

    • Cirrhosis alcohol

    • Other cardiovascular diseases

  • But there is no significant difference in:

    • Colorectal cancer

    • Neonatal preterm birth

    • Pancreatic cancer

    • Road injuries

    • Leukaemia

    • Lymphoma

  • No data on Dementia/Alzheimer’s disease, congenital defects or drug use disorders

  • And as mentioned, we measure significantly worse, as in we are more likely to die from:

    • Stomach cancer

    • Cirrhosis hepatitis c

The Sewell Report purports that despite higher levels of deprivation (again, the Commission wants us to believe that this is for any other reasons besides institutional racism), ethnic minority groups actually have better health outcomes than the white population. Objectively speaking, this may be true, and the commission does acknowledge that disparity in health outcomes is not simply a binary structure in which we say some people are healthy and others are not. Disparities in health relates to socio-economic, behavioural and cultural elements as well as genetic risk factors

Image: Online Marketing

However, they present this data in defence of themselves. Even after acknowledging that there is a complex interplay between all of these social factors and health, they present the data without this context. Yes, they do reference some societal disparities such as the white population tends to smoke more, or drink more and which group is more likely to exercise. But they highlight and then trash the 2010 Marmot Review which looked at socio-economic disparities in health outcomes. The Marmot review expanded on what the healthcare community understands as the 'social gradient of health'. The review states: 

People with higher socioeconomic position in society have a greater array of life chances and more opportunities to lead a flourishing life. They also have better health. The two are linked: the more favoured people are, socially and economically, the better their health.

So who are those in society with the highest socio-economic positions? Without saying the quiet answer out loud, this goes against the wider narrative (within the Sewell Report) that the UK isn’t rigged against groups who experience the most deprivation e.g. ethnic minority groups. 

The Sewell Report, in its presentation of being 'objective' and only evidence-based, disregards the scholarship and the evidence of the 'social gradient of health', i.e., the ‘so-called social gradient in health’.

They recognise that there are of course social-economic disparities in some health issues such as obesity and diabetes, but they essentially conclude that because ‘disentangling the effects of socio-economic status and ethnic background is complex’, and that the data shows ethnic minority groups have overall better health outcomes, then there is a paradox, and that we need more data. 

I don’t disagree with this. I don’t think anyone would, but to frame this within the broader context that race within the healthcare system has no discernible impact upon health in ethnic minority communities is, for fear of repetition, lazy-ass scholarship. It is to forget that racism is also about racial disadvantage. 

Healthcare and medicine, like many things in the Western world, have progressed over time, and undoubtedly for the benefit of everyone. However, much has been written about the evolution of medicine wherein the white male is presented as the 'universal model' that medical science has been based around.  

Just research 'medical racism' and we see how minority communities, especially the Black community, have been neglected in research and progress. This is compounded by the fact that the science and resources that come from this, have historically been centred on the white male. This is simultaneously an issue of both race and sexism, which is covertly embedded in the healthcare institution, On the other end of the spectrum, we cannot forget about the overt reality of some medical discoveries made at the cost of minority communities - I am referring here again to how Black people were used as test subjects.

This is not to say that medical professionals, researchers or policy makers are still acting with racist intent - his is the opposite assertion. I want to praise those on the inside, much like within the education system, that recognise that their wider profession needs to actively disentangle itself from a racist history that placed white men at the top of a social hierarchy. These were the thinkers and doers that helped emphasise different models of thinking, such as putting forward a social gradient of health to help add perspective to healthcare.  

But to then have the Sewell Commission minimise that effort is disappointing. There is an indifference toward the experiences of minority communities prevalent throughout this report, and this is much more revealing when looking at how ESEA people have been treated in the healthcare system both before COVID-19 existed and now, during the pandemic. 

Image: Michael Amadeus

Racial discrimination towards ESEA healthcare workers and ethnic minority workers as a whole is not a new story. Studies dating back years note that racism from both fellow staff and patients has been directed at staff from ethnic minority backgrounds. Data from the Workforce Race Equality Standards show that 82.7% of NHS Trusts report a higher percentage of ethnic minority staff experiencing bullying, harassment, and abuse from colleagues than white staff.

Notably, since Brexit, further studies have found that migrant nurses have faced higher levels of racism and discrimination, and it is unclear how this is being handled at the higher levels of leadership. It has now been reported that a massively disproportionate number of Filipino nurses have died due to Covid. The linked article states: 

No one is sure why Filipino healthcare workers appear to be so vulnerable to coronavirus, but the figures are stark and wildly disproportionate.

Again, it is the community that sheds light on this. Kanlungan, a charity working for the welfare and interests of the Filipino and other migrant communities in Britain, put forward in numerous studies and in contributing to the joint response stated that:

Filipino workers have been singled out and pressured to work in dangerous settings without proper PPE and risk assessments. This has also been an issue prior to the pandemic, with nurses from ESEA countries like the Philippines, Japan and China reporting that they have been pressured by their managers in the NHS to take on a disproportionate number of risky or dangerous tasks within hospitals, which they often accept, for fear of losing their visas and right to stay in the UK if they don’t.

Further to this, studies find that there is an executive ignorance of the lived experiences of Filipino workers in which the normalisation of their unfair treatment intersects with the structural and spatial issues which preceded and were exacerbated by COVID. The Filipino cultural values of volunteerism, organisation, and collaboration would be a coping mechanism for the group but something which could also be easily exploited. 

As someone who has worked in immigration law for most of his professional career, I understand how the language of immigration plays upon the dynamics of fear and coercion. It places the subject in a precarious position of subservience in 'having a sponsor' and 'upholding visa conditions', and the worry of deportation is a life changing experience many of us do not have to ever contend with. 

It is argued that migrants give consent within this system and therefore it is in fact a give and take; a chance at a 'better life' in exchange for following visa rules. But in the case of Filipino nurses, I do not believe they consented to being treated unfairly in a system that needed them in the first place.

CONCLUSION

The Sewell Report reads like a case study of 'whataboutism'. Their underlying tone can be encapsulated in this paragraph:

Also, if it were true that Black and South Asian groups were suffering from systemic racism throughout their lives – adversely affecting their health, education, income, housing, employment (the key determinants of health) – this would be reflected in overall mortality figures across the life-course. 

P.30, Sewell Report

I argue that maybe we are progressing in the face of ever-present institutional racism, not in the absence of it. 

These sections of life in which the Sewell Commission conclude that institutional racism is a myth sustained by a woke mob of academics, scholars, activists and everyday people is again just lazy scholarship. There is an abundance of evidence available in the public domain and submitted directly to the commission demonstrating that ripples of institutional racism are omnipresent in British society, and we have much more work to do in order to eradicate it. 

In denying this evidence, then, this is more than just a 'difference of opinion', it is an outright denial of reality. 

To divert from this reality, the Sewell Report says:

Although the continued presence of discrimination gives cause for concern, it is important to see how the UK has improved race relations more rapidly than in other countries. The fact that the UK is more active in collecting data on ethnicity and discrimination suggests a willingness to address racial inequalities compared with the rest of Europe, where data-gathering is less comprehensive, ad hoc, or even illegal.

P.47, Sewell Report

Just because you suggest a willingness to address racial inequalities, it does not mean there is an absence of institutional racism. You cannot compare bad apples to even worse oranges and then claim our apples aren’t as bad just because you can cook them in a pie. 

And except for the media, we can expand more about institutional racism in other aspects of British society. Such as with our history, in how we erase the contributions of the ESEA community, such as with the forgotten Chinese Labour Corps in WW1. Or the underrepresentation of ESEA actors in theatre and TV. 

Along these ardent steps, no matter the length we’ve walked, further progression is not made by burying truths behind a veil of ignorance. If we honestly strive for a more equitable society, then we must continually recognise how racist attitudes have been both ingrained and sustained in British institutions. 

We must remember that the contours of British society are not built along even paths. Our laws, our political frameworks, our societal norms and the fabric of our very democracy was created through the eyes and experiences of old, rich white men who quite literally viewed other people as lesser beings.  And let’s not forget that this sentiment is not only confined to the past, such as with Winston Churchill’s own comments towards other races and the Chinese; very real people today that have held positions of influence and power, still hold true to these antiquated ideals of racial superiority. 

And before people misunderstand, white men are not the enemy. Supremacist thoughts are.  

It was only through the struggles of grassroots movements who bucked the status quo against supremacist thought that we find ourselves where we are now, where such explicit racist sentiments are pushed to the fringe. But the fear holds that this report will arm racists with tools of false legitimacy and further entrench racist sentiments into public consciousness.  

Progress cannot be made without acknowledging the rules of the past and reminding ourselves of our collective mistakes. The burdens of history do not forget so easily. 

It was only in 1833 that slavery was abolished, and even then, there were political voices such as Isaac Gascoyne and George Hibbert who stalwartly justified slavery as a God-given right. 

It was only in 1928 that women were allowed to vote, and even then, there were those who argued that our boat of societal norms should not be rocked, and women were already 'equal'.

And it was only in 1965, around 50 years ago that the Race Relations Act was passed. The first piece of British legislation that specifically addressed racial discrimination. 

We can save face all we want, but in the long struggle towards equality, addressing all forms of racism is not really something that calls for a British stiff upper lip. 

Vy-liam Ng is a writer, legal specialist, and PhD student in international human rights law, contributing regularly to platforms such as Resonate. His articles draw from his background in law, specifically, immigration and human rights. His current research focuses on the Rohingya, genocide and statelessness in East and South East Asia. He is also an International Student Adviser at Aston University. You can find him here on Twitter: @liam_vn, Instagram: @vyliamng and Resonate: https://www.weareresonate.com/author/vyliamng/