It’s a status that he has acquired slowly, without fanfare, through a steady drip of books, essays and lectures rather than dramatic public interventions. ![]() Today, he is widely regarded as the country’s pre-eminent scholar of race, culture and nationalism. Gilroy, 65, has since returned to Britain. Time moves forward but, on this issue, Britain stays still, having the same arguments over and over. Twenty years later, it can feel like little has changed. Several other non-white British academics had done the same: an article in the Guardian from 2000 about this exodus – headlined “ Gifted, black … and gone” – quotes one of Gilroy’s reasons for leaving: “Even to be interested in race, let alone to assert its centrality to British nationalism, is to sacrifice the right to be taken seriously.” The response to the Parekh report seemed to confirm that he had made the right decision. He had joined Yale University the previous year, having left Britain in search of greener pastures. Gilroy watched this “depressing and deeply symptomatic” episode unfold from across the Atlantic. This was the sentence that launched a thousand tirades, but where did this idea come from? Follow the footnote in the offending paragraph and you arrive at the work of an academic called Paul Gilroy. It said that “Britishness, as much as Englishness, has … largely unspoken, racial connotations”. Contrary to the Telegraph front page, it didn’t claim “British” was a racist word. The Parekh report, as it was known – its chair was the political theorist Lord Bhikhu Parekh – was not a radical document. Spooked by the intensity of the reaction, Straw distanced himself from any further debate about Britishness, recommending in his speech at the report’s launch that the left swallow some patriotic tonic. In the Telegraph, Boris Johnson, then editor of the Spectator magazine, wrote that the report represented “a war over culture, which our side could lose”. The line was clear – a clique of leftwing academics, in cahoots with the government, wanted to make ordinary people feel ashamed of their country. The Daily Telegraph ran a front-page article: “Straw wants to rewrite our history: ‘British’ is a racist word, says report.” The Sun and the Daily Mail joined in. It made the case for formally declaring the UK a multicultural society. ![]() It was honest about Britain’s racial inequalities and the legacy of empire, but also offered hope. The report was nuanced and scholarly, the result of two years’ deliberation. Launched by the Labour home secretary Jack Straw, it proposed ways to counter racial discrimination and rethink British identity. In 2000, the race equality thinktank the Runnymede Trust published a report about the “future of multi-ethnic Britain”.
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