But given that it takes the form during the coronavirus pandemic of disproportionate deaths, the growing calls to relax social distancing measures across the global north further signal societies’ disregard for the lives of racialised people. Racial inequality is expressed in all dimensions of life. It publishes links to articles by other sceptics whose past output has the common thread of opposing antiracism in the name of “free speech”. He has now started Lockdown Sceptics, a website opposing measures to stem the spread of Covid-19 by staying home. Young has advocated for genetically engineered intelligence to be offered “to parents on low incomes with below-average IQs”. The British associate editor of Quillette magazine, Toby Young, epitomises the worrying nexus between “free speech” advocacy, eugenics cheerleading and now coronavirus scepticism. The seemingly benign term “ race realism” is defended by a growing circle of pundits who argue for the spurious claims of behavioural genetics and differential IQ dividing the middle class from the poor white and Asian from black people. But race is not a category that antiracists impose on the world, or a debating point about individual morality: it is a factor that shapes the lives of the people who are racialised.Īt its most extreme, this discourse has enabled a return of eugenics – treating the pseudoscience as just another part of the marketplace of ideas. These antiracists see race everywhere, supposedly demonising and silencing everyone with “concerns” about migrants, Muslims or black people – the same people who are now dying disproportionately of Covid-19. Through books, media appearances and social media, these commentators have created a climate where the conversation around race is defined by “free-speech rationalists” pitted against “irrational antiracists”.

In response to an open letter against the event signed by more than 230 academics, two of the organisers, Eric Kaufmann and Matthew Goodwin, wrote that “large numbers of people across western democracies do feel under threat from immigration and rising ethnic diversity. In 2018, the online publication UnHerd organised a panel discussion originally titled “Is rising ethnic diversity a threat to the west?’, before this was changed following a backlash. The usual discussion of race in Britain is exemplified by conservative academics and political commentators who argue against what they see as an unhelpful leftwing moralism around issues of race and migration, which silences the concerns of a working class that they portray as uniquely white. But as BAME people die and suffer disproportionately from a virus, it is clear that “race” is about power – which is very much contrary to the way that it is usually discussed. An article in Quillette – the online magazine of the so-called “ intellectual dark web” – asks the question “ Do Covid-19 racial disparities matter?” before concluding: “The fact is our culture is obsessed with race.” These responses are the product of a discourse in the west that for decades has claimed that “making it about race” unnecessarily sensationalises an issue. “ Campaigners are twisting BAME Covid data to further their ‘victimhood’ agenda,” reads a commentator in the Daily Telegraph. Some voices are uninterested in this connection between race and the virus or treat it with derision. The US has seen a business-as-usual approach to police brutality targeting black people while, at the same time, groups of overwhelmingly white people in New York’s West Village freely breached social distancing. Data from New South Wales in Australia reveals that, although the richer, whiter Sydney beach suburbs have the majority of Covid-19 infections, it is in the neighbourhoods with larger numbers of people of migrant origin and indigenous Australians that people have received the most fines for breaching social distancing directives.

All around the world, minority communities are disproportionately targeted by ramped-up policing that has accompanied the enforcement of lockdown measures. And this is not the only way that race is playing a role in the crisis.

Unherd tv twitter