Maria Patsalos, Partner
Welcome everyone, and thank you for joining this Mishcon Academy session, which is part of a series of online events, videos, and podcasts looking at the biggest issues that we face today. Before I introduce myself and my eminent guest, um, there are some housekeeping points to mention. If you're online, you've joined this session automatically on mute and without video. If you have a question, you can use the Q&A function located at the bottom of your screen, and I will pick this up, or someone in the room will. If you have any technical issues during the event, please feel free to let us know via the chat, and one of the Mishcon team will help you. And of course, if you're in the room, just raise your hand. Um, I thought that was a hand already. It was just stroking their hair. Okay, so my name is Maria Patsalos. I am a partner in the private department. I specialise in immigration and human rights. And a few years ago, I was voted by the partnership to be the equity, diversity, and inclusion partner. And as a result, I sit on the management board. Thank you very much. Um, I sit on the management board to make sure that all business decisions are made with an EDI lens.
So over to my guest. This is Professor Keon West. He is a social psychologist at the University of London, and he's a visiting professor at the London School of Economics. He has a PhD from Oxford University. And he has written over 70, I say 7-0, papers, uh, in relation to, quantitative papers, in relation to prejudice and discrimination. He's written for various newspapers, uh, he's appeared on TV, on radio, and luckily for us, he's here today. Um, so, this, ‘The Science of Racism’, is his second book. His first book is called ‘Skewed: Decoding Media Bias’, which I'm sure is also a must-read. He's a citizen of 3 countries, just like me. Um, he's a husband, a father of 2 boys, a hobby photographer, and he's a fan of Star Trek. Most of you won't know what that is. Um, it was a show from many years ago. I actually used to watch it as well because my dad was a huge fan. Professor Keon West, he draws on quantitative experimental methodologies to address urgent social issues including racism, sexism and anti-gay prejudice. So this may not be his last visit. He's got lots to say. This book was recently published in the UK and the US, and it was also translated in French and Japanese, or soon to be.
Professor Keon West
It has been. I've got a French copy at home.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
It has been. Fantastic. Um, it has been positively reviewed by leading media and has been described as illuminating, surprising, unnerving, and moving, an utterly must for this time in history. And I couldn't agree with it more. I have two young kids, a 1.5 and a 3.5 year-old, and this is the first book I've read in 3.5 years. And it was absolutely worth the wait. It's actually taken over my life. I think about it all the time. And I'm not exaggerating. Even yesterday, we had a team lunch, and someone in my team told me that they are doing Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and they have a brown belt. Ding, ding, ding. I suddenly started thinking, martial arts is anti-racist. It's the only sport that I know of where brown and black are the top.
Professor Keon West
Are higher than white.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
I don't know if you've ever thought of that.
Professor Keon West
I hadn't thought of that, actually.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
Well, honestly, the things that are going through my mind after reading this book is amazing. Um, so, back to the book. Um, ‘The Science of Racism’, that's the title here.
Professor Keon West
Yes.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
But in French, it's called ‘I'm Not Racist, But’.
Professor Keon West
Yes.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
Which I thought was brilliant. So tell us why the difference. Why in the UK and the US you have this title, and in French you have that title? And is there a different title in Japanese?
Professor Keon West
I actually have no idea what the Japanese title translates to. I do speak French, so I was able to go through and make edits and recommendations on the French version. I, however, speak no Japanese, so I have lost all rights to understanding what's happening. For all I know, it's an entirely different book with my name on it. Um, but actually, this title, I had to fight for this title. Um, Conor's here as a representative of Picador. And the initial response to this title was that people didn't like it and probably wouldn't like it. Uh, people felt that it sounded dangerously like I was a Nazi or eugenicist, and that I was writing this book to explain why some races are better than others. And it's true that if you go out and you look up books with the words science and race in them, you do get a lot of books written by Nazis and eugenicists. And it was felt that that might cause a nightmare for the marketing team when the book finally came out. Um, however, I was very insistent on it. I really cared about it because the thing about this book is that you don't learn a lot, I hope, about me, although you can tell me if I'm wrong about that, reading the book. So you read it and you don't know, um, my political orientation, you don't know who I voted for, you don't know much about my history, you know very little about me. But what you do learn an awful lot about is about science. It's about how it's done, how it works, what the experiments have done, and what the experiments show. And I think that's how scientific books should be written. And I didn't think that the pseudoscientists and the eugenicists should have all the claim for the linguistic space around science and racism, especially when they have none of the evidence. There is so much evidence, and most people are devastatingly unaware of it. So I thought I'd make a dent in there and put that over in a way that made it clear this is a scientific book, not a political one, not an emotional one, not an empathetic one, not a personal one, not a biography. It's a science book, and I want you to understand it in those terms. Unfortunately, the French came down much harder and said, we don't care, no one will buy it, we have to change it. So that's why the title's different.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
Interesting. Okay, okay, that explains it. I was going to try and pronounce it in French, but my French is awful, so I avoided that. So what is the science of racism? Can you just briefly explain the methodology of your book?
Professor Keon West
Yes, uh, so I think one of my friends, Natasha Devon, um, who I've worked with on other things before, I really like her, she pointed out that one of the nicest things about the book is the first two chapters really don't do much with racism at all. Like, you really don't get to find out much about whether anything is racist or what it looks like because they're kind of a gentle introduction to the scientific method and what it means. And I think that's absolutely important, because we have a debate that rages in our society on a regular basis. Every few years, the BBC will say, so you can time it, it's like 3 to 5 years, like clockwork, "Is Britain racist?" they'll say, question mark. And I think, such an odd thing to do. It's like if every 3 to 5 years we had, "Do vaccines work?" "Is the world round?" Now admittedly, these are also hot debates in the scientific community, apparently. But actually, they're settled debates, and we're doing ourselves a real disservice if every few years we ask, "Does racism exist?" as if it's a question. And the way we talk about racism at the moment is mired in opinion and anecdote and in things that don't really work. So someone will say, "Oh, well, I saw this happen, therefore racism," or, "Well, I saw that happen, therefore no racism," which to me is a debate that feels about as silly as when people, and I say this out loud, but people do this, when people look out of their windows and say, "Aha, cold today, no climate change." Like, that's not how scientists decide things. There is a methodology to figuring out what's true and what's not true, and that we should be aware of it. And when we take that methodology and apply it to racism, the results are incredibly clear, they're incredibly consistent, and it shows us not just what racism looks like, but how much of it there is, where it exists, where it exists less, where it exists more, and what we can do about it. And if we've had this knowledge for decades, I thought it was a crime that people didn't have access to it, so I wrote it down.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
Do you want to just give the audience, because obviously no one's read it yet, they've just received the book today.
Professor Keon West
Oh, nobody's read it yet. Hands up, anybody? Oh, one person's read it. Okay, great.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
Perfect, they will be reading, don't worry. Um, do you want to give some examples of the areas that you touch in your scientific exploration? Experiments and things like that?
Professor Keon West
Yeah. Um, so one of the areas I touch, the one I start with, is employment discrimination. And the way a lot of people do this, including a lot of very well-meaning and really good charities and really good think tanks, really good people who work on it, is that they'll publish a statistic that says something like, "Black people are twice as likely proportionally to be unemployed in the UK as white people," which is true. Or they'll say, you know, like Bangladeshis and Pakistanis are so much times more likely to be unemployed than white people, which is also true. They'll just, they’ll do that. They'll use those stats. The problem with that is that the immediate response, if you don't think racism exists or if you're a racist person, and that is a Venn diagram with a curious amount of overlap, which is odd because you think racist people would know racism exists, but they don't, um, so you would say, "Well, maybe it's because something's wrong with them." Maybe they're less qualified, maybe Black people are less intelligent or less hardworking or whatever else, or maybe they are lacking in soft skills. Um, so you know, maybe Black and Asian people just don't know how to present themselves as well, or they don't dress as nicely, or they don't answer interview questions as well, or something like that.
Uh, so what you want to do scientifically is weed out all of those other factors. You want to say, "How do we know that this isn't something they're doing?" this is because of racism. And that's fairly straightforward. There are more details in the book that I think are well worth reading. But what you do is you set up an experiment in which you, for example, take CVs, and I've used this example so many times that I worry people must know I've said it before. But you take the CVs and you take about 1,000 of them and you cut them in half. 500 of them have white names at the top, 500 of them have black names at the top or Asian names at the top. But they're otherwise exactly the same CVs. And then you release them into the world wherever you want. So if they're academic CVs to universities, or if they're lawyer CVs, you release them to law firms, and you see who gets a call back, who gets invited to interview, who gets offered a job. And these CVs are exactly the same. So we know the only difference, all the differences that come out of this are because of race and racism.
And when you do that, you get an incredibly reliable effect, which is that the white people get more job offers, they get more calls to interview, they get better treatment. And in fact, we know how much better treatment they get. In the UK, they get 50% better treatment according to the meta-analyses that we see. That's a lot of better treatment. That is 15 replies for every 10 that an equally qualified, and we want to be clear about this, a perfectly equally qualified Black person would have got. But then there's other numbers, so you can do this other ways. You can do it in education. You take the same essay, you put a white name at the top of an essay, a black name at the top of an essay, send it to thousands of teachers. Who gets the better grades? The white students get the better grades. Or you can do it again. This is one I did myself. You take the same crime, you put a white name in the box, you know, in the newspaper, you edit it so it looks like a white person did the crime, or you edit it so it looks like, in the case that I did it, a Muslim person did the crime.
And I understand that Muslim is a religion and not a race, but in these studies, it functions a lot like a race in the way that people respond to Muslims. And then you ask people, "Was this a bad crime? Is this a bad person? Is it a terrorist?" And it's funny how the numbers shoot up when a Muslim does something but stay much lower when a white person does something. You call doctors' offices pretending to be black or white, you present the same symptoms and ask for appointments, you see who has to wait longer. You see who gets offered different medicine. In everything you do, whether it's friendships or dating or employment or healthcare, or justice, the racial effect exists. Racism impacts how much people get almost every kind of treatment. And because of that, we know scientifically that racism is a problem. And actually, we have known this for an incredibly long period of time. That isn't a question, which is why you sense my frustration when the BBC does it next time. Oh, is Britain racist? And then I think, oh, does the common cold exist? I think why, why must we do this? We already know the answer, and we know it very well.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
Excellent. I mean, yeah, I think a lot of us have heard the CV comparison before. But for me, some of the stuff that you mentioned in there, like the dating apps, was really interesting because I'd never seen that kind of data before. But, um, going back to the beginning of your book.
Professor Keon West
Yes.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
Almost quite near the introduction, the introductory chapters, you talk about we can't even agree that racism exists.
Professor Keon West
Yes.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
So we have around 50% of the population saying that it does and 50% saying that it doesn't. And two prominent MPs on either side of that, you mentioned Dawn Butler, uh, as someone who very much believes that racism exists and Kemi as someone who doesn't believe it exists. And Dawn Butler, I know, she's my MP, she's amazing. Um, and I follow her on Instagram.
Professor Keon West
Oh great.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
And this is where I'm going to pull up.
Professor Keon West
Hi, Dawn.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
You should, it's fascinating. So, once a month she does a feature on Instagram called Block of the Month. And you can probably guess where this is going. Um, this is things that have been actually messaged to her. Let's put this gorilla back in the Congo. You're not English. I'm looking forward to deporting Dawn personally back to Africa. Um, really disgusting and ugly people, go home, etcetera. I'm not going to carry on. But blatant, blatant racism, and to a member of Parliament, and normally with their first names and surnames, just absolutely no impunity. Um, how can people say racism doesn't exist in the face of evidence like that?
Professor Keon West
Yes, so the responses I've got, um, generally revolve around a couple of things, uh, which is why I say the pool of anecdote is not data in the book.
Maria Patsalos
I know.
Professor Keon West
And I want to say that that's a genuine scientific principle. So you cannot extract an overarching effect of a community on a community from a number of smaller anecdotes. You actually have to run some proper data analysis. I would say that I am less generous, um, so I'm framing this in very neutral terms towards someone who could read all those things and think, "Oh, well, that doesn't prove racism exists," because the truth is I would not like such a person. I wouldn't enjoy their company. But you'd have to admit philosophically there is a point to the idea that the pool of anecdotes is not data. So they could say, well, you know, Maria, maybe you on your Instagram get a whole lot of angry comments as well. Maybe you similarly get insults and threats of deportation and whatever else. And my cousin's white. I mean, usually they're also white, so they don't have to say that. But I'm white and my cousin's white and, you know, they get insulted by people, so this doesn't prove disproportionate treatment.
So that's why I think it's worth it in the book to take those arguments and say, let's, let's pretend these things are 100%, um, honest and face value what they are, that they are genuine good faith arguments. Nonetheless, what should we expect? What we should expect is when you take the same article or the same public appearance or the same Instagram post, but you have it look as if it's sent by a white person versus a black person, you should get the same kind of reactions. You should get the same level of insults, the same level of hostility, the same threats of deportation, but you don't get that. You never get that. Whenever you do these experiments, you don't get the same treatment. The Black people get worse treatment, and we are very, very sure of that because we keep doing the experiments and we keep finding it. And I think that would be the reply someone would say if they didn't want to believe in racism, but that's also why I wrote the book, because I think we do sometimes rely on the shock value. Um, and when I was writing the book and I tried to pitch it to other companies that weren't Picador, because Picador is really good on this, they did say, "Oh, you know, no one wants to read a book full of experiments." They want to hear about the time someone called you the N-word.
And I've always thought, I couldn't imagine a human being on planet Earth who could learn something new by finding out that I was once called the N-word. Not once, by the way, several times. But to find that out and to think, "This is new information," I think you'd have to be really quite thick not to have figured that out before. Um, but it doesn't tell you anything. It doesn't tell you about the prevalence of these activities. Or of these particular kinds of sufferings across populations, which is why I thought the science really matters. The anecdotes, they hurt, and they draw more of our emotional attention, but the science proves things, and that's why we need to rely on that.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
Absolutely. My follow-up question was going to be, is this only anecdotal rather than scientific? So you absolutely answered that. Um, I mentioned at the beginning, obviously, I'm an immigration lawyer, I was really interested in your reference to the immigration system.
Professor Keon West
Oh no.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
Um, yeah, well, I didn't know this. Um, so you say that in the early '60s, the then Prime Minister Harold Macmillan introduced a skilled-based immigration system.
Professor Keon West
Yes.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
Which started off as systemic racism.
Professor Keon West
Yes.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
Um, and then you, at the end of the book, you say that we need to address that system in order to make change in the immigration system and make sure that it's no longer systemic racism. Um, and then, um, so, but I want to know how, but I'll ask the questions in a second. Last week, the Spanish government announced that they were going to give half a million of their undocumented migrants, uh, permission to remain in Spain.
Professor Keon West
Oh.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
Yeah. And their former minister said, providing rights is the answer to racism. So my question is, how was the immigration system systemically racist back in the '60s? What can we do to change it? And does Spain have the answer?
Professor Keon West
Yes. So I think the immigration system is a great example of one of the times that the racists said the quiet part out loud, because they don't normally do that. So, normally, when you want to do something racist, um, so, the other example in the book that I give is the system of using voter identification. Now, voter identification is demonstrably racist. It operates in such a way that it predictably and systematically disadvantages people of colour. It makes them less likely to vote. It's applied more stringently in areas where people of colour are more populous. It has been documented for a very long time in countries where they use it that wherever you apply these laws and the more stringently you apply them, the more people of colour stop voting. And it doesn't have the same effect on white people. It has a disproportionate effect on people of colour. But we don't have, at least to the best of my knowledge, maybe we do, we don't have a document somewhere where somebody says, "Hee hee hee, I'm going to be really racist and devise this system. I'm not going to say I want to stop people of colour from voting" but I'm going to do this thing. I'm going to put down this law that effectively makes it so that they'll vote less. Uh, racists tend not to do that, not because they're not racist, but because it's incredibly silly to write down the evil intention and put it in a book somewhere where we can get it. But the immigration system is one of those few cases where they did write it down. They actually sent letters to each other and they said, well, we want to stop the coloureds. How do we stop them? And they actually said, well, we're going to change the system to make it based on this particular kind of paperwork, which they knew they didn't need. Like, the point of it wasn't to keep out particular skills or whatever else. But they literally wrote down, I can't remember the exact phrasing, though it is in the book as a quote, but this will stop coloured people from coming in while ostensibly having nothing to do with race. They actually wrote that part down. So that was on purpose. It was designed that way, and it worked that way. It worked brilliantly. And I use that as an example of systemic racism, where if you start to look for these things, you ask yourself, well, what are the laws? What are the systems? What are the rules that disproportionately impact people of colour? I think, A, it's very generous to assume all of that is by accident, that all these governments keep saying, ooh, whoops, sorry, redlining. Like, that doesn't make sense. That's not how that works. They're doing it on purpose. But also, even if they aren't doing it on purpose, or they're not doing it on purpose anymore, we still have a responsibility to examine every system that does that and stop it. Stop it completely. So I'm not a lawyer. So how to make the British immigration system, but you know what, I am, I am an immigrant, um, and I don't talk about that as much, but I don't think most people in the UK realise what immigrants do to be here. I think there is a bizarre fantasyland in which we are just eating up benefits and stealing jobs somehow simultaneously while having the easiest life in the world. Um, I personally have paid more than enough to buy a car, and not a bad car, like a nice car, the price of a nice car, just to stay here and to eventually transition from a new immigrant to someone with a British passport.
It's been ridiculously expensive. If you have a family doing this, you have a down payment on a nice house. You keep doing that, you get whole lives, like net-worth’s gobbled up by this system. And we are expected to do it and to carry on. But sorry, that's just a tangent about the immigration. Uh, it's not easy. But what I'm saying is, if you want to do that, I want you to find every single law on the books, every one that disadvantages people of colour, every one, whether it's a two-child benefit cap or whether it's a voter ID registration or whether it's a requirement for specific paperwork. If this thing produces the effect that people of colour have a harder time getting through this system than white people, get rid of it and replace it with something that doesn't do that. That would be my advice.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
Brilliant, thank you. Um, in the book you say that racism without power is prejudice, and therefore to have racism you need power plus prejudice. Can you give some examples of that so we can, um,
Professor Keon West
I'm not sure I actually say racism without power is prejudice, but I'm running the, I'm doing the algebra in my head, and I'm guessing prejudice plus power equals racism. So racism minus power must, it adds up, actually.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
Yeah.
Professor Keon West
It does, although I don't think I ever put it that way. Um, so yeah, so why do I say that? I think, so the point is that, uh, when we talk about racism, again, we sometimes take away from the big effects like the systems we have to deal with, like the voter IDs and the immigration system, we take away from the overwhelming preponderance of evidence that says where a black and a white person, or a white and an Asian person apply for the same job, the white person will get predictable benefits just from being white, nothing else from being white. And then we say, "Oh well, but you know, everyone can be racist. Like, black people can hate white people too, and Asians can hate white people too." I'm like, "Yes. Yeah. I mean, that's true." Um, and, in fact, I do have some sympathy for the arguments around whether we call it racism if, you know, black people hate Asians and Asians hate black people. I do understand the complexities of those arguments.
Um, but what I want to talk about is the real world in which we actually live. Yes, of course, ethnic minorities, people of colour, we can hate white people. But, (a), generally, we don't. If you look at the numbers, actually generally we like white people a lot. Like, we're really nice to white people. Sometimes, and in some cases nicer to them than we are to ourselves. And that is something we have to take into account when we ask ourselves about reverse racism and what it looks like. But the reality is also that if we decided en-masse to, we're going to flip the tables, you know, we'll make life incredibly hard for white people, white people would be fine. They just, they would be, they'd be fine. They'd just keep going. Um, we just do not have enough. We don't have enough MPs. We don't have enough lawyers. We don't have enough judges. We don't have enough police officers. We don't have enough CEOs. White people have disproportionate power in almost every area of British society and American society and French society. And I don't just mean disproportionate because white people are a bigger part of the population. Even taking that into account, they have disproportionate wealth and power. So when they decide to do bad things to us, they can do a lot. And when we decide to do bad things to them, which we don't do very often, we don't do as much. The power is quite different. And because of that, I want to hear that, yes, I as a black person could get up and decide today, I just, I hate white people, or I hate blonde people in particular. I'll get them. And you know what? They'll all be fine. But if they were to do the same thing In reverse, I would not be fine. This would have quite big effects on my life, and that's something I want people to take into account.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
Perfect. Exactly. Um, you suggest in your book, and hopefully I'm getting your suggestions correct, um, you suggest in your book that Guardian reading lefty people who voted for Obama are still racist, potentially. And you say, yeah, I just read it. Um, you effectively call the reader of the book racist.
Professor Keon West
Racist. Do I? Wow.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
In not so many words.
Professor Keon West
You should buy it anyway though, even though you're racist.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
And my question is, do you think everyone is racist, and if so, why?
Professor Keon West
Uh, so the simple answer is yes, but that's kind of the headline catchy answer that the Daily Mail would run with and say, oh, he just says everyone's racist.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
There's no one from the Daily Mail here.
Professor Keon West
Okay. I mean, also, you know, I've had great interactions with people from the Daily Mail. Some of them have written up my research in ways that I quite appreciated and was even reasonably, reasonably accurate. So I want to say that. Um, I always find that when people say, is everybody racist? And then, you know, as a scientist who studies racism, I'm forced to say yes. And then everyone goes, oh. But I kind of feel like, do you know, let's imagine I were a priest, um, but like a good priest, like one that you like and you could trust. And you could say the same thing, is everyone dishonest? And as a priest, I'd be forced to say yes, because everybody, everybody has lied or lied by omission or twisted the truth at some point in their lives. All of you have done this. And I can say this, and it's not a controversial thing to say, nor do we kind of suddenly fall back into bizarrely childish black and white thinking. We don't say, well, everybody's dishonest, so I can just lie in this form, lawyer. No, we don't do that. We understand that some people lie more than other people, and actually the ideal state is that you stop lying. You never lie. That's what we're going for. And we can acknowledge that everybody lies while simultaneously acknowledging some people lie more than other people. And when it comes to friends and marriage partners and everything else, I'm going to pick the ones who don't lie so much, and I don't want to be surrounded by a pack of liars. That's how I can think. But when we talk about racism, we kind of get all or nothing in a way that's unhelpful. But we don't have to. Yeah, everybody's racist sometimes, just like everybody lies sometimes. But some people are a lot more racist than other people. We can measure how racist people are, and the ideal state is that you're not racist at all. And when it comes to me choosing my friends and my partners and the people I'm hanging around with, while I'm not expecting perfect honesty or perfect anti-racism from everyone all the time, yes, I will deselect you if you're one of the more racist people. I think that's a reasonable thing to do, and I think we should all do that.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
Absolutely. And moving on from that, um, in the book you talk about implicit versus explicit racism, which I think we can all understand is direct versus indirect discrimination. But you talk about a concept which I hadn't heard of, which is aversive racism, or how you like to call it, conflicted racism. So let's talk about that a little bit.
Professor Keon West
Yes.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
So let’s talk about that a little bit.
Professor Keon West
Yes, so aversive racism, it's an old, it's an old, um, it's an old concept and it's an old name. It's a name I don't like because I think it comes out of the idea that people, white people, and this started in America, so white Americans were averse. They had aversions to black Americans, but they also had a great aversion to the idea that they were racist. So they called it "aversive racism" and, you know, I think it goes to show that maybe psychologists shouldn't be in charge of marketing because I don't think that that name really sells it. I don't think anyone hears it and says, "I understand what you're trying to say." But the idea was that there was this conflict that you had at one point, like, strong racist feelings. You wanted to do racist stuff, but you felt really bad about ever thinking of even yourself as racist. Like, it really hurts your feelings. What this means, it creates a testable hypothesis that wherever there's a situation where your behaviour would clearly be racist, even to yourself, you're not going to do it because you'd feel bad. You don't like to think of yourself as a racist person, so you're not going to do it.
But if you have a situation in which there is an excuse, even to yourself, and this is important, not saying, it's not the same thing as saying you're lying to other people, which of course also happens, but that you are trying to preserve the image of yourself as a good and egalitarian person. So if there is an excuse to be racist, then you apply it. And where does that show up? That shows up in places where there is doubt or ambiguity. If there's rumours about someone, if there's allegations without proof about someone, if there's instances in which you've heard something that, "Ooh, maybe goes this way, maybe go, but let's just be safe," you are much more likely to take that negativity and apply it to the black people than you are to the white people because now you have a good excuse. You can fire people, get rid of people, treat them badly, put them in prison, 'but you're not racist, you know, you just have all this vaguely ambiguous evidence that clears you of that charge.' And that's how aversive racism works, and it is something that's been proven quite a bit in the scientific literature.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
Yeah, I found that really interesting. Um, another thing which I found less, still interesting but more sad, was the children experiments that you have in the book, and it shows the depth of racism, including race-on-race racism, in children as young as 3. And this is where they showed a preference for a white skinned doll versus a dark skinned doll, um, regardless of if they were white or black themselves. Um, so the question is, how can we talk about racism with our kids? And when should we start?
Professor Keon West
Yes, I would say start immediately. I'm always, I think it's probably because I've been a social psychologist too long, but I'm always really surprised when people tell me, oh, I can't believe children are racist or sexist. And I always think, have you ever met a child? Like, also, people like, oh, how could they be getting these ideas? Children get aggressive ideas about who is good, who is bad, who is beautiful, who is ugly, who should belong in different places in society. Of course they get that. Like, go through any of the material you're giving your children. And I think I wrote this in the book, or maybe I wrote this in the other book now I'm suddenly not sure. I mean, you're better at quoting me than I am. Um, but I do challenge people, um, on multiple occasions, if they have children, to identify 2 books in the library of books they read to their children, one in which there is a black man who has a child and takes care of the child, and one in which there's a woman who has a job, and that's not the whole point of the book. And most people fail at both of these tasks. And I think that shows how easily and how rapidly we teach children these really aggressively biased ideas. And if you can't, if you're going through your own library thinking, "Oh, goodness, I don't have those. " The books exist, but also, I feel like I shouldn't have to say this, black men do take care of their children. I have children. I take care of them all the time, I promise you and women have jobs. Maria has a job. Like this is a thing that happens. And the fact that we never show our children books in which these things happen is frightening. Um, so yes, so there's quite a lot of research. The research I cite in the book, I think the earliest is 3 years old. And I think that's probably practical in many ways.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
Yeah.
Professor Keon West
Social psychology relies a lot on communication, and under 3, communication just gets a bit patchy. But I'm certain that there are other ways of testing where you'd find even younger children are quite viciously racist. And if we want to talk about racism to children, the first thing I say would be, "Talk to your children about racism, like actual racism." Don't talk to them about, "We should be nice to everyone." Yeah, that's true, but that's not talking to them about racism. Don't talk to them about, "Oh, well, everyone's different," or, "Let me tell you about the Festival of Lights," because they did that with my children in the school. And I want to encourage that. Like, yes, tell your children about the different, I want them to hear about Hanukkah. I want them to hear about Diwali. That's not racism. That's different cultural practices. Tell your children some people, through no fault of their own, are treated badly because of the race we assign them. Tell them that so that they can understand it. Because by the time they're 3, they're already doing it, and if they're not white, they're already receiving it. And so if you don't tell them about it, you leave them to stew in this racism until such a time, you could wait till they're 13 or 16, but that's over a decade in which they've just had to live with it without any help or guidance from you. And I'd say it's much better that you just have a frank conversation with them and say, racism, this is what it is, this is what it looks like, this is what we have to deal with. Even if you do that imperfectly, it is much better than just not doing it at all.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
Duly noted. Um, so I also just wanted to talk about colour blindness.
Professor Keon West
Yes.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
Because you mentioned that in the book, and I think that was also really interesting. Um, so can you tell us what colour blindness is and why you vehemently disagree with it?
Professor Keon West
Yes. Um, colour blindness is the mind-set, the approach to dealing with race, uh, and racial differences that says the goal here is to not notice them or pretend not to notice them. So the examples will be like, "Well, we don't really think about colour. We just hire the best person for the job," or in more interpersonal settings, um, when people say, "Oh, I don't even think of you as black." You know, they say, "I think of me as black." Um, "What do you think of me as?" is always a thing that crosses my mind. Um, and I think the idea is that this is helping because if we don't notice race, then we can't be racist. But that's not true on a number of levels. So you say, "Why do I vehemently disagree with it?" And a couple of reasons that are really straightforward: a lot of research, including some of my own, finds that if you just measure how much people agree with colour blindness, so how colour blind they are, and you measure how racist they are, and you can measure this any way you want. You can just ask them explicitly, "How much do you like people of colour?" Like, just openly ask them that. Or you could make them do one of the implicit bias tests. Or you could ask them how much they support specific things like Black Lives Matter, whatever else it is. The more colour blind they are, the more racist they are. And that is an incredibly reliable finding. So if you're using colour blindness as a way to be less racist, just stop doing that. It is one of the lowest effort things you could do to become less racist immediately. Just stop doing that. Stop pretending. Um it doesn't work. All the research says you notice that people are black or white or Asian or whatever else straight away, and the pretence that you don't notice is not fooling anyone and not even fooling yourself. Acknowledge this and you'll become less racist. Um, but also the problem with colour blindness that is perhaps even bigger is if you don't notice race, then you're probably looking at just a lot of things and thinking, oh, what a curious set of bizarrely inexplicable events. I can't think of anything in the world that ties together George Floyd and Sandra Bland and Breonna Taylor and Chris Kaba and all of these other people who mysteriously died at the hands of authorities. I wonder what they had in common. It just doesn't help. It is a way of ignoring real racial things, real racism in our society. And it functions to make the person who's colour blind feel better, but actively to discourage addressing the problems. So just don't do that.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
You've been told. Uh, so, um, shifting slightly away from the book, just for your views on politics.
Professor Keon West
Oh.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
Um, do you think we're going to have a Reform government soon? And what do you think the impact would be?
Professor Keon West
I actually don't know what kind of government we'll have soon. Um, also, I'm not sure if, if I'm not sure legally if I'm allowed to have specific views on whether it would be good to have a Reform government. I'm almost sure I'm not allowed to openly have those views, but I can comment on specific policies. So let's start with this. I think it's become clear that the British populace has grown tired of the two central parties. That there is a disenchantment with both the Labour Party and the Conservatives, and that people are, in relatively large numbers, moving away to what used to be called the political edges, to both Reform and the Greens. So I've seen that. Um, I would say that how well any government does and remember, I am legally prohibited from saying anything about any particular party, I think, um, so I would say the issue for me would not be a specific government, but would be a careful examination of the kinds of policies each government brings to bear. It is simply not true that the average British person is much poorer than they were 20 years ago because of dark skinned people or migrants or people in boats. That is simply not a true thing. And any party that bases its decisions to increase the standard of living for the average British person on primarily attacking these populations will cause these populations enormous amounts of harm, but will not help you in any way. It is simply not true that people who have dual nationality are out committing more crimes than people who don't. Actually, quite a lot of research finds that rises in immigration come with rises in overall standards of living and decreases in crime, that as these things go up, they don't, they don't go up together. One goes up, the other one goes down. Quite a lot of research finds this. It is simply not true that deporting huge numbers of people who have multiple citizenships or access to these citizenships will in any way improve your life. It will cause a lot of suffering. It will probably make things worse and it will not help make anyone in the UK happier or richer. And I think we have to be very careful about politicians and political parties whose strategies appear to be limited to attack people who are differently skinned or differently, um, citizenshiped, I suppose. If that's, if that's all you have, it isn't much. And everyone who's actually run the numbers on this can see where that will end, and it won't end with people being happier or richer or healthier. So I would recommend people stay away from anyone supporting those policies.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
Brilliant. Let's ask you a question you're more comfortable answering. Um, AI.
Professor Keon West
Yes.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
AI is trained on, um, publicly available data on the web, which as we know is, um, can be sexist and racist, etcetera. Um, so it looks like we're heading into a kind of a parallel universe where our real life and our digital life are converging in this respect. Um, what do you think about that, and what can we do to change that?
Professor Keon West
Yes. So what I think about it changes really fast because AI changes really fast. I don't think I ever mention AI at any point in this book. And that's…
Maria Patsalos, Partner
You didn't? That’s why I…
Professor Keon West
Yeah. Well, I mean, I wrote it— gosh, when did I write it? It came out a year ago, so I must have written it about 2 years ago. And even then, AI wasn't as big a deal as it is now. Even then, it wasn't evolving as quickly as it is now. What I think I'm comfortable with, what I'm happy about, is that more people have got the idea that AI isn't unbiased or objective. I think there was a big selling point in the beginning that, oh, the machines, machines aren't racist or sexist. We'll just let the machines do it and that will handle all the problems. And then you turn the machines on and they instantaneously start spouting racial slurs and rape threats. And we know that actually the machines are not perfectly neutral objective parties. They are deeply affected by what we do. I think there's some really great books out there. I think The AI Mirror by Shannon Vallor, who's a philosopher who are not a scientist, but is really good at examining the problems we have with thinking of these things as being able to solve our problems. So you can't solve the problems of our societies by setting up machines that take all the data from these societies and expect them to spit anything back out except the problems we have. I think one of the great metaphors she uses is noticing that your face is dirty and trying to clean your face by vigorously scrubbing your mirror. It just won't work. It's a fundamentally bad idea. And I think people have got that now.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
Yes.
Professor Keon West
So we know that the machines have absorbed what we teach them. So that means we now know some of where the limits are. We can make ourselves more cautious, more prudent, and more careful. And if you're doing things like blanketly using AI to write things, to generate images, or in things like your employment processes, you should be aware that this is what they do and in some ways they do it better and faster and in a way that is more organised and more regimented than we would do it as natural biological entities. For me personally, with AI, I'm quite cautious around it, and I want to acknowledge that it has the potential to do great good um, in, you know, much the way loads of things have potential to do great good, as does a brick or a sword or a car. Uh, but if you don't know how to use these things, you'll probably just end up getting hurt.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
Excellent. I want you to start thinking about your questions because this is going to be my last question before I open it out to the audience. So at the end of the book, you've obviously established that racism exists in a very scientific way. Um, and you, you give some solutions or some practical tips of what to do to combat racism. You say that diversity training is overhyped and mandatory.
Professor Keon West
Did I say that? Wow.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
Yes, you say that. You might not use my dramatic language, but effectively.
Professor Keon West
Okay.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
Um, and you say that mandatory unconscious bias training has the opposite effect and in fact increases racism rather than decreasing it.
Professor Keon West
Mm, I did say that, I remember saying that.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
But you give some real solutions, so can we hear those solutions and make this a bit uplifting?
Professor Keon West
Mm, yes, okay. Um, so I do want to say, first of all, the solutions are very much possible. Um, sometimes we get into a bit of a doom and gloom or say, "Oh my goodness, so much racism." Oh yes, but you know, we could just stop it. Like, we started it at some point, and now we can just stop. Um, this is a choice we have, and every day we choose not to do this. I want us to recognize it as a choice that we actually have, that there's loads of data, not just in my book, but loads all over the place showing how we can reduce it in a number of different ways, and that we've had access to this for decades, and every single day we choose not to employ that is a choice. We just don't want to be less racist. So if we do want to be, let's just do it. Uh, and I want to split being less racist into two different camps. And the camp that I think most people instinctively lean towards is the, well, how can I, as a person, be less racist? So they get really excited about that part. They're like, well, how can you get us to be less racist? Uh, and the idea then is that if we can train people or get them to uncover and reduce their unconscious biases or get them to understand and empathize more, this will be good. And do you know what, that is good. I'm not going to knock that in any way. The part that I think is better, and this is the part I like and appreciate more, is getting to the point where I don't need you to like me or I don't need you to be nice. I don't need you to love Black people or love Asian people. I would like the same level of systemic change that we used to be super racist in the first place now be applied to prevent us from being racist. The analogy I like to use is I imagine that in my marriage, for some reason, we both earn money, but it all goes into my wife's bank account and she gives me money so I can spend on things that I want. And if I said, I really need help with this situation, and you said to me, don't worry, Keon, I'm going to run your wife through some training so she really likes you and gives you more money, I'd say you were terrible at solving the problem. The obvious solution is that I should just have control over half of the money. And I think when we're doing anti-racism work, we sometimes get really caught up in how can we make whoever is in charge, like people of colour more? And I always think, for me, I, I think that's great that you want to do that, that's fantastic. But I think until people of colour can exist in the world and just take up space and be safe and not give a damn if you like them or not, until that is an option, we haven't actually fixed racism.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
Excellent. And, and the, the solutions that you also set out in the book are intergroup contact, education, and media literacy.
Professor Keon West
Yeah, yep, so those three are the make you like people of colour more strategies. So intergroup contact: if you don't know anybody who is, let's say, Bangladeshi, go out, spend time with some Bangladeshis today. Do it right now. Um, if you don't know anyone who's Black, obviously not the case for anyone in this room, there's loads of us in here, so that's nice, um, just go out, spend some time with Black people. Uh, that works with every group you have. Education, I think, is relatively self-explanatory, though do read about how it works and why. And media literacy, that's important too. Yes.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
And then the real kind of conclusion is that you, um, that we need effective strategies relied on authority, transparency, and accountability.
Professor Keon West
Yes. Yeah, so that would be the changing of the system that we have. Uh, the, the example I like to use sometimes is universities. I don't know, I mean, I assume most of you went to university in this country, although I don't know, maybe you went to other universities. Do you know that we, in most universities if not all, we mark exam papers blind? Like we don't see names on the top of exam papers. And I think that's a brilliant example of something that isn't called a DEI strategy but effectively functions as one. Um, we could spend eternity training all the teachers to make sure that all the university lecturers and professors and everyone else, that they were completely not racist, and they could do a million implicit bias tests, and we could train them in all of these ways, and then do it again for sexism, and then do it again for anti-immigrant prejudice, or we could just take the names off the papers. Like, that is an option as well. That takes away our ability to do racist things. And I want you to think really in terms of transparency and accountability, things like, I want to measure what the, I want to measure what the ethnic achievement gap is in your company or in your university or in your classroom. The more data we have on that, the better. And I want to look at where that is allowed to happen and what strategies we can employ to make sure it cannot happen, no matter how racist you personally are. These things are possible, and they are already applied in a number of different systems. And if we're not doing that, if we're creating a system in which people can still be racist and get away with it, in which we're not actually changing the structure of it, it's the equivalent of trying to solve a spate of burglaries by convincing all the burglars to just be nicer and not think so much about stealing people's stuff, as opposed to just locking all the doors. That's what I want us to get to.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
Brilliant. Over to you.
Professor Keon West
Oh, wow.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
Excellent. OK, whichever. Yep, whichever. Doesn't matter.
Audience
Umm, I was curious about your thoughts on, um, people claiming to be colour blind and whether those thoughts extend to sort of the recent trend in the media, TV, movies for colour blind casting and what your thoughts are on that.
Professor Keon West
So I don't think people are colour blind because the research just shows that they aren't. Actually, there's a study I didn't mention in the book. Um, or did I mention it in the book? I'm suddenly a bit forgetful. Um, no, I did mention this one in the book, actually. I did mention this one, but it involves a technique called back masking. So to explain that, I'll finish this. Back masking is a technique that psychologists use where they show you an image and then they very quickly cover it with another image, right? So you see the cup, you see the book, but it happens so quickly that you don't consciously process the fact that you've seen the cup. Do you understand that? And when you run experiments with back masking, that means you can determine how people feel about things that they're not even consciously aware of. And so what we know is that if you show people images of black people, and then you cover up the book, versus white people, and then you cover up the book and then you show them abstract images and you say, "How much do you like this abstract image? This image of nothing, really?" The images that were covering up black people, they don't like them as much. Um, so the idea that we are colour blind is quite silly. Uh, we are actually perfectly capable of judging a person's race before we even acknowledge that we have seen this person. Our ability to clock that race and by the way, it's not just on "I like" or "I don't like." You get specific stereotypes associated with the images as well. So if you show an image of black people versus white people, and then you show images of animals, uh, people who look at the images of animals are much faster to spot the apes when they've seen images of black people versus white people. I know, right? That's shocking. It's not just that we don't like them. It is a specific racial stereotype associating black people with inhuman apes, and we need to be aware of how fast that happens. So the idea that you could then go into a situation and say, "Well, I personally am colour blind," is ridiculous. Nobody is. I don't buy it. Now, I will accept that across different cultures there are different racial categories. So white people in the UK often don't recognise Latinos or North Africans as a different race necessarily. They just absorb them into the generalised race of whiteness. In the Caribbean where I grew up, we have different racial categories from the ones you have here. We don't recognise all sorts of races that you would recognize. Um, and that's because all race is made up. Even the ones you really believe in, they're made up. Um, and so they're culturally bound. So I can see that if you're from a different culture, you won't recognise always the same racial categories. But I don't accept that someone in a certain racial culture just doesn't notice or ignores them. That is just not true. All the science says it's not true. Uh, so what do I think about colour blind casting? I don't think it's colour blind. I don't think it happens. I think people know what they're doing, and I think that's what the evidence shows. Um, but if you're asking me specifically, like, do I mind a black Cinderella or an Asian Prince Charming? No, no. I think that's just perfectly fine. I think there are obvious cases where it becomes a little harder. So if you had a really dark skinned Snow White, I think you obviously need to change the name of the movie or it doesn't make sense. Um, but I think that we should have more varied casting. I think what the question actually should be is, are people of colour widely enough and positively enough represented in the media we have? And the answer is obviously no. So anything that increases those numbers, I'm pretty fine with.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
Brilliant. Back.
Audience
Thank you. Thanks so much. And I'm sorry if this is in the second half of the book because I haven't got to it yet. Um, you've mentioned, you've mentioned at the, I don't want to detract from race at all, but at the outset you've got other interests in kind of gender and sexuality. And I wondered, from a kind of scientific point of view, how much harder is it to measure intersectional effects? I know it comes up in the context of to the dating apps a little bit. But are people doing these experiments, or are there just too many variables?
Professor Keon West
Oh no, no, no. So the question is about how much harder is it to measure intersectionality or intersectional things. And it's not really hard, um, as long as you know what you're doing. So I mentioned the CV study where you take 500 CVs and you put black names on half and white names on half and you send them out. If you want to be intersectional, and again, we have done exactly this. Um, even some of my papers have done exactly this. You don't split them in half, you just split them in four. And so you get white man, white woman, black man, black woman. And then you see what the proportions are in terms of the job offerings that you get. Unsurprisingly, the person who gets the most job offers is a white man. The person who gets the least job offers is the black woman, because women get a hit compared to men and black people get a hit compared to white people. We know how that works. Now it doesn't always work that way. There are some studies that, so that would be what I call an additive effect and not all effects are additive. Some effects are interactive. So when you say try to get perceptions of who is dangerous, you know, you think about men who are dangerous, um, you get an interesting thing where there's a preference, and this is in some studies and not all studies, so I'm not going to say it's better. I know there are many ways in which it's much worse for this population but in some specific cases, It is better in some cases to be a black gay man than a black straight man because the, even though gay people are treated worse than straight people and black people are treated worse than white people, the, the, uh, stereotypes of black men and gay men clash. Black men are hyper aggressive, big, strong, beefy, they're going to punch you. Gay men are not aggressive at all. They're not masculine. They're weak and they're feminine. When you put those two things together, it kind of does a funny thing where people's brains don't, don’t go too much in either direction. So in some specific cases, that interaction occurs. Uh, but no, there's always research about the intersectionality. There's loads of it. Um, and it's not even that hard to do. It's maybe slightly hard to analyse, but it can be done. Yeah.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
We need to read more of that. Thank you. Any other questions in the room before we look online? Yeah, there's one at the front.
Audience
What are your opinions on microaggressions and how would you address them?
Professor Keon West
Yes, Oh, I have so many opinions. Well, first of all, I guess before I have opinions on microaggressions, I have facts about microaggressions. So microaggressions are generally, um, discussed as small or slight or ambiguous things that nonetheless communicate negativity or limitation based on your demographics. So what does that mean? That means when, um, this is actually something that happens to both myself and my wife, but for different reasons. Um, my wife is white. She's a woman. I'm black and I'm a man. I think you probably figured that part, but I thought I'd say that out loud. Um, and often, packages come addressed to us, and in both cases, they are addressed to Dr Whoever. Um, so Dr West, Dr Norridge. She never changed her name. You're finding out a lot about my marriage, actually. Um, nor did I think she should change her name. I'm happy about that. I think changing your name is a weird system, but we're not going to get into that. Um, but often people open the door and they'll say, "Oh, sorry, this is addressed to Dr West." And then they'll have that moment of bafflement as they try to put the idea of Dr West and me together. Like, "Black guy? Doctor?" And they really struggle with it. And it's a hard time. Um, but it also happens to her when they're like, "Woman doctor?" And it doesn't work. And so that would be a microaggression. That's what people call them. I don't, I've fallen out of love with the term. Uh, I used to think it was fine. Now I just think in general microaggressions are the inevitable result of a system in which overt expressions of bias are obviously discouraged, but in which huge proportions of the population are nonetheless very biased and believe things like, "Black people aren't very educated," "Black people aren't doctors," or conversely like, "Women shouldn't be called doctors or aren't called doctors or that doesn't work." Um, so they come out in those moments when people make mistakes like that, when they slip up, and they're called microaggressions. But the research shows a couple of things really clearly. Some populations experience more of them than others. That's quite a lot of research that shows that. Um, and also, and this is including my research, nobody likes microaggressions. And calling them microaggressions, I think, somewhat undermines what's happening, that if you are a white man in British society, and if you were just bombarded with a constant slew of the kind of racist stuff that people who aren't white men in society have to deal with, it would affect your mental health and it would affect your prospects in the same way that it affects everyone else's. Nobody likes being followed around a store or ignored in a restaurant or asked, "Oh, sorry, are you Dr Who?" Nobody likes this. Nobody likes that happening to them day in and day out. And yes, the individual ones are micro, we could call them, although some of them that are listed under microaggressions I think aren't particularly micro. Um, but the point is that they clearly have effects, and what they are is negative treatment. And I think they should be thought of and understood in that subsection of racism that you get in a population that simultaneously, we're coming back to the aversive racism again, really doesn't like certain people or believe certain things, but also really doesn't like thinking of themselves as biased. Microaggressions are the inevitable result of those two forces colliding. Does that answer your question?
Maria Patsalos, Partner
Thank you. Do we have any online?
Mishcon
Yes.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
Okay.
Mishcon
Okay, this is from Kira. As general societal attitudes to racism become less tolerant of it, do you think that we will see racism driven underground and to more extreme forms, as in, in incel culture with sexism and misogyny. I'm curious to know whether you think that this has already happened and whether my thought that society will become less tolerant is swayed by the company that I keep rather than reflective of society as a whole.
Professor Keon West
So I'm trying to follow that. It's a lot.
Mishcon
Mm, it’s a lot.
Professor Keon West
So Kira's saying that we're becoming more racist. In particular, I think her friends are becoming more racist, seems to be the implication, that she's being surrounded by…
Mishcon
57.03
Professor Keon West
Okay, let's talk. Okay, yeah, so she's, so her social groups get… [silence 57.08 – 57.40].
You are traffic. I'm like, oh, you know, that's, oh my goodness. Like, I am the problem here. The reason there are so many cars on the road is me. I am a car on the road. And that fundamentally changed my relationship to driving and cycling and public transport. And I always think that we kind of say things about society that, oh, society becomes more racist or less racist. But none of this was by accident. I think we have a very curious view of history in which one day the British woke up and said, oh my goodness, slavery is a terrible idea, get rid of that. That never happened. People fought for it. People died for it. People campaigned for it. Whole countries lost land and huge sections of their populations for this. The idea that one day men woke up and said, "What's that? Women can't vote? Terrible! No!" Like, women died to get that. And we do this, we do this thing where we make societal changes and then we kind of pretend society just moves, but it doesn't move. Like, you are a society… [silence 58.39 – 50.06].
We can make different choices. We can change the power structures of everything from our communities to our workplaces to the politicians that we're willing to vote for and the things that we're willing to support. We can teach our children what racism looks like. We can go to our schools and say what we're willing to put up with and what we're not willing to put up with. Like, you are traffic. So I do think that every time, every time progress is made in society, there is a wave of pushback. That is a given. If you look at history, people want to be treated better, and the people who are treating them worse don't like it. But I think we can also learn from history that we are perfectly capable of overcoming that if we educate ourselves on what that would look like and we simply act accordingly. So I hope that answers her question.
Mishcon
She does follow up, and she says, sorry, I didn't phrase that well. I think that society is becoming less tolerant of racism, and will this drive… [silence 1.00.05 – 1.00.51]
Professor Keon West
…actual meaningful changes over the long term. I would not want to live 200 years ago. I think most people in this room would not want to live 200 years ago. Our lives would be horrible. And so the effects of the history we have created for the last 200 years have been to improve the lives of huge numbers of people. I do, however, think that when politicians make blanket statements like the UK is the less, the least racist country in the world. Well, we can measure that, and it's not. Um, so that's something we can do. Um, I think we can make steps in the right direction. And I do think every time we do, we should expect pushback. We should expect some changing of the morphology of racism and/or sexism. But I still think that's winning. That's still progress, and we should continue to do that.
Maria Patsalos, Partner
Brilliant. Um, sadly, we don't have time for any more questions. We could be here all day, um, but I just want to say I want to say a massive thank you to Keon West. And he's happy, um, to stay behind for those in the room to personally sign books. And, um, I hope that you found this really as fascinating as I have, and you've learned as much as I have. If there's one thing you can take home, please remember, you are traffic. Thank you very much.