Direct discrimination refers to discrimination which is explicit and open, whereas indirect discrimination refers to discrimination which stems from practices and policies whose outcome is discriminatory, even if not explicitly and openly so. In excluding the police and other state bodies from the most significant provision of the Race Relations Act, the home secretary has virtually declared state racism a no go area. But it is the state through its immigration and asylum laws, its administration of public services such as the police, prisons, immigration, and its courts and crown prosecution service that sets the tone and tenor of race relations in society. By refusing, therefore, to examine and outlaw the racism within its own structures, the state gives a fillip to popular racism and embeds it in popular culture. And, since public officers like the police are drawn from that society and culture, the virus of racism is carried back into the body politic.
State racism contaminates civil society.
The home secretary, by refusing to combat indirect discrimination in the state apparatus, while still paying lip service to the danger of institutional racism, has made a nonsense of both Macpherson and institutional racism. But collective failure derives from the make-up and workings, the structure, of an organisation, which includes not only policies, practices, procedures, behaviour, but also the organic relationship between them and the dynamics that that throws up. That is how racism becomes institutionalised, woven into the very fabric and culture of an organisation. To tackle procedures, practices etc., without tackling the whole structure, therefore, is not to dismantle institutional racism, but to treat it with palliatives such as cultural window-dressing and formulaic solutions such as head counts and quotas. And the language of 'unwitting', 'unintentional', 'unthinking' racism, in which Macpherson's findings are couched, tilts the definition of institutional racism dangerously back towards prejudice so that personal racism becomes elevated to institutional racism.