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Attacking Nastase Hides Real Racism: The Times

The article argues that while Ilie Nastase's comments about Serena Williams were inappropriate, the outrage over them obscures more significant issues regarding racism. It notes that unconscious biases, rather than overt racism, now present the main barriers to racial equality. The article advocates celebrating the progress made in reducing overt racism and focusing efforts on addressing subtle unconscious prejudices that negatively impact minorities' life chances.

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54 views2 pages

Attacking Nastase Hides Real Racism: The Times

The article argues that while Ilie Nastase's comments about Serena Williams were inappropriate, the outrage over them obscures more significant issues regarding racism. It notes that unconscious biases, rather than overt racism, now present the main barriers to racial equality. The article advocates celebrating the progress made in reducing overt racism and focusing efforts on addressing subtle unconscious prejudices that negatively impact minorities' life chances.

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MATTHEW SYED

april 26 2017, 12:01am, the times

Attacking Nastase hides real racism


‘Chocolate with milk.” These are the words that have caused a racism storm on both sides of
the Atlantic. They have been described as “disgraceful”, “unforgivable” and “gut-
wrenching”. Serena Williams, whose unborn baby was the putative target, said: “It
disappoints me to know we live in a society in which people like Ilie Nastase can make such
racist comments.”

But isn’t all this a little over the top? My father often refers to my skin colour as
“cappuccino”. I have seen mixed-race kids in the US walking around with T-shirts
proclaiming: “milk chocolate”. Nastase may be a nasty piece of work, who outrageously
insulted Johanna Konta and Anne Keothavong on Saturday, but the response to his comments
about Williams seems disproportionate.

And this is symptomatic of a deeper problem with the debate around racism. Too often,
racism is positioned as a bad news story. A story where people shake their heads and purse
their lips. Where trivial comments by Nastase are met with faux outrage. I noted that some
people on Twitter, eager to berate the Romanian, needed guidance as to what they were
condemning. “Why was it bad?” one asked innocently.

It is worth stepping back. When Nastase was born, black people were banned from competing
in many mainstream sports. The United States operated a system of de facto regional
apartheid, with black people south of the Mason-Dixon line living lives of tawdry
segregation. Many scientists believed that black people were intellectually and morally
backward due to some speculative genetic inferiority.

When Nastase was in his teens, interracial marriage was still illegal in 16 US states
(“chocolate and milk” children were outlawed by statute). It was legal in the UK to bar
people from jobs because of colour, a problem my father encountered when he arrived from
India in 1965. It was a time when mothers of mixed-race kids, like my mother, were insulted
on the streets. In my teens, I was called the P word when walking around suburban Reading.
One of my teachers used the term liberally, along with incessant jokes about curry. When I
played in my first World Table Tennis Championships in Delhi in 1987, some of my team
(including the coach) called me “Punjab”. Any time I entered a new social group, I was
acutely conscious of my colour and vigilant for signs of rejection. For a long time, I was
ashamed of my background.

And this is why stories about racism should be placed in context. I struggle to find words to
express the joy of living in a country where overt bigotry is being routed. Where I can walk
into a room without having a single thought about colour, or exclusion, or being judged.
Where I would never, not for an instant, worry that criticism (and I am pleased to report that I
get my fair share) is racially motivated.

Can’t we congratulate ourselves on that? Can’t we, just occasionally, drop the pursed lips?
Can’t we celebrate that the lives of ethnic minorities in this country have been transformed by
this shift in attitudes? Indeed, far from leading to complacency, I am confident that this
would inject overdue positivity into a debate (indeed, a world) that so often accentuates the
negatives. Moreover, it would give a fillip to the fight that still needs to be won.

And this brings me to the other problem about the furore over Nastase: it obscures the deeper
issue. The problem in much of the western world is not overt bigotry of the kind I grew up
with. It is not people using the P word, or the N word, or older people, unsure of the nuances
of political correctness, using inappropriate vocabulary.

No, the problem today is subtler. It is not overt bigotry, but unconscious prejudice. The way
in which decent people — people like you and me — subliminally stereotype those of
different colour. The way that, to this day, enlightened employers are less likely to invite
“Leroy” than “Lee” to an interview, even if they have identical CVs. The fact that Leroy has
an archetypally black name leads to him being judged differently.

It is worth emphasising that this discrimination happens at an unconscious level, in much the
same way that if you are walking towards a black rather than a white man in an alley, your
adrenaline and heart rate are likely to spike higher. These unconscious responses are now
well studied, and have an obvious explanation. We tend to judge black people not as
individuals, but as group members.

Black people are, on average, less well educated than whites (largely due to the legacy of
institutionalised racism), so we deduce that the next black person we meet will be less
educated than a white person with a comparable CV. Similarly, black people are 
more likely to be criminals, so we conclude that this black person might be a criminal. The
tragedy is that these unconscious judgments exert real effects. Black people don’t get the jobs
they deserve and are marginalised in other subtle ways.

I am not denying that prejudice of the old-school type exists (or that some of the remaining
bigots support contemporary politicians), but this shouldn’t obscure the huge strides that have
been made against the haters, the name-callers and the assorted pseudoscientists who still
cling to the idea that variations in skin pigmentation denote profound genetic differences. No,
it is unconscious racism that is the real barrier to the life chances of ethnic minorities, and
which needs creative solutions rather than today’s synthetic outrage.

“Chocolate and milk”? We can get our knickers in a twist all we like, but it is, to use a phrase
Nastase might be familiar with, to risk taking our collective eye off the ball.

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