Martin Sullivan, obviously, is incorrect.

One wonders why Martin Sullivan is allowed out of the house without a hard hat and a minder. But, this being the internet, there is a possibility that he is not.

http://ithp.org/articles/obamatruecolors.html

it might all add up. Suppose the sole determinant of life chances, or whatever, is class … or socioeconomic status, to avoid debates about what counts as working class.

now, suppose ethnic minorities have on average lower socioeconomic status. That means they’ll be disproportionately represented in crime states (relative to population proportion, versus whites) and also that policies targeted at helping ethnic minorities have some validity from statistical discrimination even if they suffer no particular direct disadvantage from racism (I don’t suggest that’s true).

However, while lower than whites on average, not all ethnic minorities occupy the lowest socioeconomic status, so if you specifically select the group of white from the lowest socioeconomic status, you would expect this group to perform worse than the ethnic minority average.

This story “fits the facts” without any policy maker neglecting any particular racial group, like white working class (all that’s happening is the working class are doing badly relative to others).

As I explained on my blog this morning, he contributed nothing to the debate over opportunity and social inclusion and merely pointed out that Labour have failed white working-class boys through their endless obsession with promoting the interests ‘minorities’ instead.

“Britain is no place for the white, working-class male”
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/labour/6990777/Britain-is-no-place-for-the-white-working-class-male.html

Compare this analysis:

“Though white children in general do better than most minorities at school, poor ones come bottom of the league (see chart). Even black Caribbean boys, the subject of any number of initiatives, do better at GCSEs”
http://www.economist.com/world/britain/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14700670

And despite that call, I don’t believe anyone has so far come up with an effective prescription for the malady.

True enough. I’ll ignore the terrorism aspect, because there are many fine explanations why race based profiling is not just immoral but stupid.

I think that we need to be a bit more probing about why non-white people are more likely to be questioned on the street by the police. Racism (deliberate or unconscious) and unconscious racial profiling are almost certainly factors. But there are other (potential) reasons why, and aggregate figures about how many people are questioned fail to provide clues.

Black and Asian kids may hang out on the street corner where they live in the evenings. If they live in an inner city area or even a small town ghetto, they’ll probably be in a higher than average crime area with more police activity. So owing to their presence at the wrong time, wrong place (insufficient to be defined as profiling), they are more likely to be questioned.

The same thing happens to white kids on the street corner. But there are more of them and they blend into the numbers. Perhaps they do not live in a high crime area with active policing.

In a city as big as London, reporting street interview statistics across the capital as a whole is simply misleading. The data needs to be much more discrete.

from Herman Ouseley, chair and chief executive of the Commission for Racial Equality from 1993 to 2000
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jan/14/john-denham-race-equality

1. The government has not compelled Oxbridge or anywhere to take candidates with low grades. (It could be argued that by operating admissions figure targets across universities, the government has allowed more lowly qualified students into higher education, but that is not to the exclusion of those with better grades.)

2. Many universities have noted that the current A Level examination system, UCAS form and university interview does not meet their admission requirements. The mechanisms exaggerate the talents of those who are bright and eloquent at the age of 17/18, underestimating the potential of others. The mechanisms are poor predictors. So changes, voluntarily adopted by universities and pre-empting government meddling, are not about enforcing social mobility but about finding the best students.

3. It is not in the interest of universities to recruit students who may not fit into their environments. Highly ranked universities only admit students who are likely to succeed in order to maintain their place in league tables. Lower ranking universities (predominantly post-1992 institutions) have to accept students with a lower probability of success, and adjust their practices accordingly.

I think Carl is right about this. Saw a BBC headline earlier that said Denham was saying this only because the BNP was on the rise.

Which is completely stupid. One of the main reasons I started writing about race was because I got annoyed with people like Lee Jasper who lumped all minorities together.

Sunny I expect you want to move the discussion on from race to class because you think this will deal with the threat of the BNP more. But when it is almost impossible to define working class, comments that we should move away from asian and black victims to white working class concerns essentially means: “dropping concern for the wogs and going to help the whites”. Class is absent from your analysis.

It is always frustrating to miss out on a job, but if you have been told that you were the “second best” candidate a couple of times you will get one soon. When I was jobhunting I liked to have several applications on the go at any one time so that I could quickly move on from any rejections.

Mike, I’ve twice had feedback from interviews over the last few months where I apparently did nothing wrong, but they selected another candidate. As one decision took three days to be made, and as I performed well in both cases, I am inclined to believe the people giving me feedback that it was down to effectively who they felt would fit best, not the stand-out candidate. I doubt my race or gender was part of these decisions (if so, I’m well out of there…), but people have to be able to decide between two-equally impressive individuals, and if targets are there to be met, this may be the deciding factor. I’ve worked in target-driven environments enough to know that managers sometimes become automata as a result of targets, even if that was never the intention.

Anyway, arguing that the possibility of racial discrimination happening does not exist because you do not believe the in possibility of two equally good candidates is rather a strange argument. Just because it is indeed unlikely does not make it impossible, and try deploying that argument against some BNP idiot who would be able to crush it by asking you if the theory was impossible (probably in shorter words).

http://www.devilskitchen.me.uk/2009/04/ukip-homophobic-shit-for-brains.html

http://www.leftfootforward.org/2010/01/ukip-crisis-over-extremist-views-of-euro-allies/

Read down for more fun times including holocaust denial: http://www.whatnextjournal.co.uk/Pages/Back/Wnext29/Ukip.html

Of course I suppose you think negative discrimination on the basis of race or skin colour is not racist. That must be why UKIP can get away with being racist and say they aren’t racist: http://ukipwatch.org/2009/10/godders-bloom-in-paki-race-row.html

In my experience, there is always one and only one candidate who stands out at interview – because there’s only one job, you look for one person and human beings tend to find what they’re looking for.

If the situation you envisage ever arose a proper Equal Opportunites employer would toss a coin. But somehow that never becomes necessary, even in the most right-on outfits.

[11] OK. I just thought you might work for a political party, and if so that ought to be disclosed.

I’d like to see ‘Iqbadal’ pitch a load of toss like ‘The Red Dahlia’.

La Plante hasn’t produced a good script in over a decade.

no, that’s up to interested parties to find out themselves (of which I’m sure is limited). It so happened that there was a brief discussion of this story before the libcon article appeared, and so I thought I’d include it in my comment. Where I work is of no reflection to the report or to what I think of John Denham.

Regardless of how it’s portrayed, and what he says, it’s less about racism ending or not (though it should be evident that racism is on the decline in this country?) and more about not dictating policy based on statistics that aren’t necessarily relevant to the problem at hand.

Minorities will still need support, but can we really be so blind as to think that rich ethnic minorities receive the same type of racism as impoverished and unemployed ethnic minorities? So yes, good announcement.