The Illusion of Progress? Episode 1 of our new podcast
- brap
- 2 days ago
- 3 min read
Does the present moment feel different? There’s rising hate crime, flags, open season on racism on social media, and, in case we forget, it’s less than two years since a group of people tried burning down a hotel with asylum seekers in it.
This isn’t how it was meant to be. For years, many believed we were moving forward. Racism had not disappeared, but it felt less visible. Organisations adopted equality language, footballers took the knee, and Prime Ministers would tweet about Black History Month (although they never used the Black power emoji).
So what’s happened? Are we losing our hard-won gain or was progress always a veneer rather than a reality?
This is the question we address in episode one of our new podcast series, The Quiet Revolution. Here are six points we discuss in that episode and which may help us understand the situation we find ourselves in today.
Progress was often superficial, not structural
Much of what we are seeing today was always present, just less visible. Racism was managed and pushed out of polite conversation, but it didn’t disappear. We know this because structural disparities in wealth, health, education, and housing remained stubbornly intact.
As we put it in the podcast: “We saw that we weren’t very doing very well – you could see it in the stats… but if you asked policy makers they would talk about how fantastic multiculturalism was. ‘Oh, you know, we can get a curry.’ And so we ignored some of the deep seated work we need to do”.
Listen to a snippet of episode 1 of the The Quiet Revolution
Fear, scarcity, and survival shape how racism takes hold
The volatility of the current moment is not just about ideology. When people are worried about housing, heating, food, they operate with a narrowed sense of possibility. In those conditions, simple explanations travel faster than complex ones. Racism thrives here not because people are ignorant, but because they are vulnerable.
As we say in the podcast: “It’s really difficult to have conversations about cohesion or connectedness when people feel vastly under-resourced and are living on the edge of survival. If you think about Maslow’s hierarchy, you can’t do thoughtful psychological work when, day to day, you’re asking basic questions: Are we going to survive today? Will we still have a house tomorrow? Can we afford to turn the heating on?”
Racism operates as a system, not a fixed identity
Racism is not confined to one group. It is a system that anyone can reproduce when it appears to offer protection, belonging, or clarity. Simplistic ideas about who is racist and who is not obscure how oppression actually works and how easily it adapts.
Here’s how it’s explained in the podcast: “There are some interesting patterns playing out now around people’s racialised identities, particularly in how wealth and class are getting mixed in. The sorts of people offering commentary, anti-immigration stances, or even explicit racist views are very diverse. It’s no longer just a bastion of people who are white-presenting. You’ve got people of colour on that bandwagon too. So we’re in a genuinely complex space”.
Grief is present, but cannot be allowed to justify harm
Many people are grieving a version of society they believed in, or were promised. Long-held narratives about history, identity, and belonging are being disrupted. Silencing that grief doesn’t resolve it; but, at the same time, allowing it to go unchallenged can legitimise racism. Holding this tension requires spaces where difficult conversations can happen without collapsing into blame or denial.
This is how a brapper put it: “There’s a fantasy I hold about some of what’s happening, that collectively Britain is in the first stage of grief, which is anger. I think whoever Britain was, whatever it believed itself to be, is no more. I also think that sometimes people don’t realise they’re grieving something that’s never going to be the same again”.
Surface-level responses are insufficient
Surface-level responses consistently fail. Statements, training, and symbolic gestures may soothe anxiety, but they don’t alter the conditions in which racism grows. Real change demands that accountability sits where power sits.
As we put it in the podcast: “We often talk about the fact that it wasn’t very helpful, this idea of being politically correct.”
The current moment demands deeper transformation
This moment exposes a hard truth. The work was never finished. In many ways, it barely began. Whether this period becomes a turning point depends on whether we are willing to move beyond the veneer and reshape the conditions that govern how we live together.
The podcast line: “Perhaps the illusion was thinking that we could fix racism without fixing the conditions where it grows”.