2023-07-19 13:29:00
After the accusations of racism against the British royal family, it is the government’s turn to explain itself. The ‘N-word’ has been found in several official documents.
Racism is apparently recurrent in official British spheres. Earlier this week, a catalog of the royal family’s art collection which contained more than 40 times the word “nigger” caused controversy in the United Kingdom, and beyond its borders. But that’s not all.
The investigation carried out by the daily newspaper The Independent reveals that these racist terms tarnish many official documents across the Channel. A reporter recently pointed to two immigration documents, each relating to an asylum seeker’s right to remain in the UK. There is, written in full, the word “negroid”, an offensive term to define morphological characteristics attributed to blacks.
The first concerns the appeal hearing of a 17-year-old child, “a member of the Tunni clan” who had fled Somalia for fear of persecution, and whose refugee status agreement had been rejected at first instance by the Ministry of the Interior. The document, published in 2005 and updated in 2013, explains that there are two groups of Tunni: those of the Brava and those of the countryside, the Torre. The latter are defined as “a Negroid group federated with the Tunni of Brava as vassals”.
Ministry of Labour, Foreign Affairs, official site…
In the second document dated 2005, also dealing with a Somali’s right to stay in Britain, one can read about his physical appearance: “Negroid features, especially hair”, notes The Independent.
This racist remark is also the prerogative of other official documents. The British daily found it in Department for Work and Pensions guidelines for doctors assessing benefit claimants, in a report by Britain’s national meteorological service, the Met Office, on the impact of solar radiation on human health, on the UK Government’s Foreign Office website or on the official government website.
On the website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, a comment – under an article about the former UK ambassador to Somalia’s visit in 2012 – used the term Negroid. He also called Somalis “very cunning and greedy people” and said that Somalia must be “saved from itself”. A comment that had not been regulated until the media alerted to its existence.
Requests for in-depth investigations
Since these discoveries, the criticisms of a large number of politicians or activists have multiplied. And the demands for in-depth investigations into the presence of the “N-word” in government documents are becoming more and more pressing. This request was made in particular by the vice-president of the parliamentary group on race, Kim Johnson, to the Minister of the Cabinet Office, Jeremy Quin.
“It is absolutely outrageous that such language is still used in official government documents,” the letter read.
In column published in The Independent, she doubts that this is only “the tip of the iceberg”. She adds: “Such language goes far beyond offense. It reveals the impact of generations of dehumanizing government policies, used in decisions that could have a devastating effect on the lives of black people and people of ethnic minorities in this country”.
The Rishi Sunak’s official spokesman had denounced the presence of the “N-word” as “inappropriate and offensive” from the first revelations of The Independent at the beginning of July. Downing Street, however, refused requests for inquiries, saying it was “confident” that the word no longer appeared in any document. Missed.
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