Racism has shades of grey

| Simon Woolley | Comment is free | The Guardian

t's said that the Inuit people have more than 50 words to describe snow. In one of the most contentious debates taking place in modern Britain, though, we have only one crude term to describe a whole range of individual and institutional practices and prejudices: "racism". This often blunt instrument becomes even more problematic when we consider that to be labelled a racist is only marginally better than being called a paedophile or murderer.

Last year Trevor Phillips, chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, angered many equality campaigners by declaring that the label "institutional racism" was "no longer a useful term". Phillips calculated that if he was able to park the definition – and in so doing remove the common emotive response, "you're just playing the race card", or "we're not racist" – one could have a meaningful conversation about how to make progress. The danger of this trajectory, of course, is that without clear terminology the issue you seek to address can be sidelined. Whichever way we look at it, it's complicated.

It is relatively easy to conclude that the BNP leader Nick Griffin is racist. Griffin's assertion that the only way to stop sub-Saharan Africans coming to Europe is to "sink several of those boats" leaves most people under no illusion. The problem occurs when we conflate the individual with a rude, misguided, or ignorant comment. Ron Atkinson, for example, had one of the best track records of any British football manager for promoting black players, and yet in racially insulting a player as a "lazy, thick n-r", many people labelled him as something his track record suggests he wasn't.

Carol Thatcher was also described as racist for her "golliwog" comment about a black tennis player, and refused to acknowledge she had caused offence. In both these cases we neither had the ability to separate the individual from the comment, nor the linguistic dexterity to effectively describe what had occurred.

Racism comes in so many different shapes and sizes it is astonishing that a nation which prides itself in the spoken word hasn't developed a meaningful vocabulary to express these nuances. At one extreme we have last year's brutal murder of 30-year-old Kunal Mohanty, stabbed and left to die while his assailants racially abused him and celebrated as if scoring a goal; the other end of the spectrum might be the taxi driver who refuses to pick up a black man at the roadside.

In between there are different degrees of racial insults: "N—r" and "Paki", for example, are much more demeaning than "those foreigners" or "darkies"; the writer Taki Theodoracopoulos asserts that Caribbean people "multiplied like flies"; Boris Johnson makes patronising and derogatory comments about Africans' "watermelon smiles".

But for all the examples of individual bigotry and prejudice, the most profound impact is at an institutional level. And again this is an area hampered by ineffective means of expression. A report this year found that the poorest-paid workers in the UK were from African, Caribbean, Pakistani and Bangladeshi backgrounds. Furthermore, in a study last year the Department for Work and Pensions found that, even with the same qualification, a job applicant had a much better chance of getting an interview if he or she had an Anglo-Saxon name rather than an Asian or African one. And yet to say either example of bias was a result of racism would lead many to an apoplectic fit of denial.

And when the EHRC reported the discrepancies in police stop-and-search rates by ethnicity, it stopped short of calling the force racist because it feared the use of certain language would have immediately closed down the much-needed debate.

The limitations of language are not only unfair to those individuals such as Ron Atkinson, but also for black and Asian people who from time to time would like to challenge a comment, an incident or an institution but feel the term racism is far too provocative.

With drastic spending cuts looming in areas such as housing, policing and the voluntary sector, minority communities could be disproportionately affected. In this environment, now more than ever we need a better understanding of the multifaceted nature of racism, and a language to help us avoid the polarised positions that have dogged the debate so far.