Objective racism, subjective ‘racism’ and arbitrary prejudice
Alka Sehgal Cuthbert was one of the speakers at the session ‘What is racism anyway?’ at the Battle of Ideas festival on 17 October 2026, at Church House in London. This is an edited and extended version of her speech.
There are three terms I’m going to introduce in order to make sense of the current public discourse on race: objective racism, subjective ‘racism’ and arbitrary, localised prejudice. I will argue that the first of these – objective racism – does not exist in Britain today, whereas arbitrary, localised prejudice continues to exist, and subjective ‘racism’ is proliferating.
Many policymakers and commentators would have us believe that these three phenomena are all part of one and the same racism, which only becomes more virulent as the years go by. I will show that this is not the case, and I will also explain why, as Mandy Rice-Davies might say, ‘they would say that, wouldn’t they?’
Objective racism refers to a mode of racial thinking and a set of oppressive practices that existed systematically and consistently throughout British society and its major institutions, including national and local government, and the labour movement (yes, at the time, it was a major institution).
From the 1950s to the 1990s, ethnic minorities faced differential and negative treatment in employment, housing and schooling. A nationwide system of racial oppression was underpinned by immigration law, by the policies of union officials and labour movement leaders, and enforced by two-tier (anti-black) policing.
Some examples: virginity tests for Asian women on arrival at Heathrow (thankfully revoked soon after the Guardian broke the story); the tacit agreement between management, union leaders and drivers to enact a colour bar on the buses in Bristol; and the allocation of council housing along segregated lines.
These are just a few examples of race-based policy, which laid the ground for further expressions of unofficial racism, such as widespread, hostile media coverage, and racist attacks and murders.
Objective racism in Britain was systematic and consistent, even if it was less consolidated than in the USA and far less explicit compared to apartheid South Africa. Accordingly, there was scope for differential experiences of racism among new immigrants. My parents, for example, did not experience overtly racist violence or racist discrimination on a regular basis. But when they were the first non-white family to move into a suburban all-white area in the early 1970s, they soon felt that they had transgressed a boundary: such houses were not meant for the likes of them. Thankfully, after a while they were seen to fit in, and in this instance the hostility subsided. By no means all immigrants had it so good.
In Britain today, however, successive studies suggest there is no such system of racial oppression. King’s College London’s analysis of the World Values Survey showed that the share of respondents who admitted not wanting immigrants for neighbours fell from 10 per cent in 1981 to one per cent in 2022. ONS data on the ethnicity ‘pay gaps’ shows a complex picture where findings vary according to adjustments made in the statistical analysis. With regard to education, the Centre for Social Justice’s report shows that white working-class boys ‘continue to record some of the lowest results in key exams’.
In contrast to the objective racism of the past, today’s subjective ‘racism’ refers to perceptions of racism: perception-based interpretations of everyday, interpersonal relationships. These have been seized upon by a caste of institutional managers, and used by them to regulate interpersonal relationships in work and social life. This trend is legally endorsed through the requirements and definitions of the Equality Act, which shapes other legislation and institutional practices.
The capacity for subjective ‘racism’ to be presented as an all-inclusive category derives precisely from the fact that it depends primarily on individual perception, without reference to socially verified reality. Hence a vast range of human interactions which would previously have been condemned as vile, cruel, nasty, etc, can now be presented and ratified as ‘racism’ by someone who claims membership of almost any group with a protected characteristic listed in the Equality Act. Plentiful evidence of ordinary grievances being reinterpreted as racism, with the likelihood of material rewards and cultural affirmation for its self-designated victims, is to be found in the analysis of Employment Tribunal cases in DDU’s report, The Equality Act Isn’t Working.
New concepts of unconscious racial bias and race-based micro-aggressions have been woven into the weft of all manner of policies and official precepts that hold sway in primary schools, Civil Service offices and corporate headquarters. In a wide range of institutions, little space is left for either individual intentionality or for individuals to sort out their grievances informally. Protocols for mandatory monitoring and reporting ensure such spaces are colonised by bureaucratic imperatives that sacralise some groups and demonise others; and in such networks of patronage, everyone is subordinated to the patronising authority, even those client groups who are favoured by virtue of their protected characteristics.
Ironically, the shift from objective racism to subjective racism is mirrored in the changing methodologies that are used to advance proliferating claims of institutional racism.
Recognising the flaws in such advocacy research, the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities report (2021) pointed out that disproportionality in statistically based studies cannot simply be treated as confirmation of the existence of systemic, systematic or institutional racism. Much more research using objective methodologies (which can be qualitative as well as quantitative) would be required to support such claims. A realist (as opposed to a constructivist or standpoint) epistemology, and a combination of theoretical and empirical methodologies, which constitute a form of triangulation, have been proposed by academics such as Nigel Kettley in relation to education, and such methods are applicable more widely. But to date, they have not been adopted either in academic sociology or in policy research. Instead, our institutional culture is being shaped by highly speculative ideas derived from critical race theory, which are uncritically legitimised as valid, organising principles.
The pattern is for academic papers based on perceptions of racism to be mobilised in support of corporate and government policies that outlaw any form of behaviour which might be perceived as racist – a perfect circuit of mystification. Moreover, there are repeated attempts to institutionalise the assertion that today’s, perception-based ‘racism’ is the same as the objective racism of yesteryear; and dissent from this groundless but unfalsifiable claim is treated as a form of heresy which prompts ostracism rather than open-minded engagement.
Let’s be clear: bigoted speech and actions have not disappeared; they continue to occur, but such behaviour is no longer part of a largely consistent pattern that is generalised throughout British society. Instead, prejudice against a particular group tends to be localised; in another locality, the roles may be reversed – outliers become the in-crowd and vice versa. It all depends on which network of patronage you happen to find yourself in.
Hence this kind of prejudice should be understood as arbitrary: not random, because there are local, determining factors; but not generalised either, as racism once was throughout Britain. Furthermore, rather than colour prejudice, the groups now subject to such arbitrary prejudice are as likely to be white-skinned Romanians and Poles as black Africans or brown South Asians. There has been an alarming rise of antisemitism in Britain, with the CST reporting 3,700 incidents in 2025, the second-highest on record. (2023 was even worse.) Taking these figures together with reports of informal or tacit antisemitic attitudes and discriminatory conduct across public institutions, we could say that if objective racism exists today, it is in the form of antisemitism; the target is specifically Jewish people, not black or brown ethnic minorities.
So why would Britain’s elite, which has proved skilful in managing its century-long decline, agree to reconfigure British society into a seemingly ungovernable amalgam of local networks and arbitrary prejudice?
Bear in mind that in the midst of an existential crisis, people will do almost anything in the attempt to validate their existence. Accordingly, I suggest that Britain’s elite – having first lost an empire and then failed to sustain either social democracy or the privatisation of everyday life, and without even the ‘communist threat’ as a cohering influence – now sees a vital social role for itself as the arbiter of the arbitrary, the honest broker who adjudicates between competing groups defined by their protected characteristics, and thereby becomes the patron and protector of all.
This is a role uncannily like that of an Edwardian colonial governor, except this is to be played out in the home theatre, and all in the name of ‘anti-racism’.
To conclude, what is racism? Objectively a thing of the past – in Britain, at least. The caveat is the recent growth of antisemitism, especially since Hamas’s terrorist atrocities of October 7th. This has significant features of objective racism, but thankfully, there is also, more organised opposition among politicians, individual public intellectuals, and grassroots organisations. Subjectively, racism is whatever you say it is, assuming you are qualified to speak. And who decides whether my perceptions have the necessary qualifications? The British upper caste, of course, who regard such adjudication as the long-awaited return of their rightful role.
No wonder they welcome it, and the segregated society which would ensue if we allow it to be fulfilled.
