Despite the fact that the United Kingdom is claimed to be the “model to the world” on issues of diversity, civil rights leader Reverend Jesse Jackson could not disagree more. In a statement, Rev. Jesse Jackson labeled the United Kingdom the “mother of racism,” and went on to say that it must confront its role in maintaining slavery and centuries of structural racism worldwide.
Despite the fact that the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, which Tony Sewell heads, a Black man, states there’s no proof of institutionalized racism in Britain, 79-year-old Jackson disagrees. He feels the organization’s findings should be questioned since Britain has had a long history of slavery and racism that it appears unwilling to address.
Jackson believes that Great Britain could do a better job of modeling how a multicultural society might develop, and he worked with civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. Jackson was present when Dr. King was murdered in 1968.
Jackson told Times Radio: “Britain has a certain responsibility to face up to racism and change it. I’ve traveled across Britain, and clearly, there’s a pattern of racism.”
After the conversation, Jackson was asked if he thought the Royal Family was racist, following Prince Harry’s comments about Meghan Markle and Oprah Winfrey’s interview. “Blacks cannot… be part of the Crown,” he added.
Even as he trod lightly on the subject, refusing to claim that the Royal Family was racist, he did acknowledge that by Harry marrying Meghan Markle there had been a shift in the air. “Change is in the air.”
“In a democracy, everybody has the chance to be everything,” he said. “(There is) no superior race and no inferior race. All of us have royal blood. We’re all God’s children. Everybody matters.”
After British Prime Minister Boris Johnson established the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities in response to the Black Lives Matter protests in the United States, Sewell made his allegations about Britain’s past with racism. Although the commission’s findings suggest that Britain is not yet a “post-racial society,” it may be viewed as a model for predominantly white nations looking to it for inspiration.
Sewell asserted that Britain was a “Sewell claimed that Britain was a “successful multi-ethnic and multicultural community” which was a “beacon to the rest of Europe and the world” which served as a “beacon to the rest of Europe and the world.”
Baroness Lawrence, whose son was murdered in a racially motivated assault in 1993, claims that the report’s authors are “not in touch with reality.”
“When I first heard about the report, my first thought was it has pushed [the fight against] racism back 20 years or more,” Lawrence stated at an event organized by De Montfort University Leicester’s Stephen Lawrence Research Center. “I think if you were to speak to somebody whose employer speaks to them in a certain way, where do you go with that now? If a person is up for promotion and has been denied that, where does he go with that now?”
Do you think the United Kingdom handles racism in the same way as the United States?
