The murder of George Floyd by police officers in the US in 2020 reignited the Black live matter movement and reverberated across the world. In the UK many young people demonstrated their determination to resist structural racism and a number of organizations subsequently acknowledged the need to take action to promote race equality and reflect upon their historical role in colonialism and slavery. At the same time, resistance to these challenges has mounted, with right-wing news media and the UK government drawing upon an anti-woke or anti-PC discourse to disparage attempts to combat structural racism and decolonise the curriculum. This chapter argues that the campaign to discredit anti-racism culminated in 2021 in the production of the Sewell report commissioned by the government. This chapter critically examines this report and the discourse which underpins the report. The discourse is consonant with that of the anti-woke campaign propagated by the right-wing news media and the UK government, and entails the reproductoion of rather than opposition to structural racism.
Part of the book: Effective Elimination of Structural Racism