oe Biden and Kamala Harris’s election victory may be a signal that Americans are ready to leave Donald Trump’s inflammatory “race war” politics behind, but it’s clear that in the UK, disunity and culture wars are still driving forces behind Boris Johnson’s government. Last week a damning parliamentary report spoke of the shameful state of racism and human rights for Black people in the UK. Yet on the very same day the equalities minister, Liz Truss, appointed a supporter of the Home Office’s “hostile environment” to Britain’s race equality watchdog. David Goodhart, who denies that racism and Islamophobia are significant problems in the UK, was chosen as one of four new commissioners on the Equality and Human Rights Commission. He also believes white self-interest is not the same as racism, and that white people who want to reduce immigration to maintain population share have a legitimate group interest. We don’t have to look too far back to understand why the appointment is problematic. The EHRC is set up to “reduce inequality” and “eliminate discrimination”. Yet this summer, after the killing of George Floyd, Goodhart said racial inequalities were in part due to “self-inflicted wounds [among Black communities] of violent crime, fatherless families, anti-educational ‘acting white’ culture”. How can you be a commissioner on an equalities regulator if your response to Black Lives Matter is to say “False or exaggerated claims of victimhood are all too easy to make in the current environment”? But this kind of appointment is not an exception for this government; it is the rule. Again and again, those who deny or question the impact and cause of racism are selected for key equality positions: Trevor Phillips, who was suspended from the Labour party over alleged Islamophobia, was appointed to the inquiry on the impact of Covid-19 on ethnic minorities; Dr Raghib Ali, who denies racism has any role in disproportionate coronavirus deaths, was appointed a government Covid adviser; and Tony Sewell, who has questioned the idea of institutional racism, was appointed chair of the government’s commission on race and ethnic disparities. On top of this, Truss’s fellow equalities minister, Kemi Badenoch, has bizarrely claimed that the authors of some of Britain’s bestselling anti-racism books “actually want a segregated society”. With Munira Mirza, a strong critic of Theresa May’s Race Disparity Audit, installed as No 10’s policy director, it’s clear that the current government is unlikely to identify systemic racism as the cause of racial inequalities in health, criminal justice, housing, employment or any other area – regardless of the litany of independent racial inequality reviews that suggest otherwise. Under Boris Johnson we are not just in the midst of a culture war; anti-racists are also the target of an ideological anti-inclusion agenda. The fact that many of the government’s ideological appointees also happen to be people of colour is its way of playing the race card. No matter how many black or Asian people demonstrate that racism is a clear endemic problem in society, the government can roll out a totally unrepresentative brown face to say the opposite – that everything’s fine and a bit of hard work will solve everything. We have deep-seated problems with racial inequalities in this country. It’s not just that we haven’t made substantive progress in addressing racial discrimination since the 1999 Macpherson inquiry into Stephen Lawrence’s death, or that the proportion of black young people in the criminal justice system has increased, rather than decreased. It’s that we are being led by a prime minister who has repeatedly used inflammatory racial language to mobilise rightwing voters. America may be turning its back on a divisive era, but we are still very much immersed in it. Dr Zubaida Haque is the former interim director of the Runnymede Trust