There is a TikTok meme doing the rounds where users mime along to an audio clip. “A win is a win,” it goes, as an unseen crowd objects and jeers, “a win is a win, I don’t care what y’all saying.” The joke is that sometimes things are so bad that you have to massively inflate tiny mercies in order to cope. Stuck on a flight that was so delayed that you missed your own wedding but got free drinks? A win is a win.
Celebrating Rishi Sunak’s rise to the premiership feels very much like “a win is a win” territory. The first British Asian prime minister finally walked into No 10 after a historic meltdown of government (twice); after he was rejected by his party membership; and then after not giving that membership the choice at all the second time. It was truly not our “Obama moment”. Still, recognition of this “historic” occasion was issued by his party and the opposition frontbench. A win is a win.
This is now the template for measuring racial progress – take what you’re given and be grateful. As another Black History Month draws to a close, it is becoming clear the occasion is becoming more corporate, performative and depoliticised with every passing year. In my head now, it is just another secular event on the calendar, like Halloween or Thanksgiving. Instead of pumpkins, it’s black people decorating the premises. For a few weeks, a few of them get paid, some white people sit through their mandated talks, and maybe some kids get to learn something not deemed important enough to be included in their curriculum every other month. The Black Lives Matter summer of 2020 began as an epic global movement of street protests, and it’s ended up as an annual presentation.
These are the wins we are allowed to have, a blah blend of “raising awareness” and “diversity and inclusion”. There must be nothing too close to the bone, nothing that suggests racial inequality cannot be rectified by anything more than white people educating themselves out of unconscious bias. Political and commercial institutions, so enthusiastically on the right side of the Black Lives Matter movement when it took off, with their black squares and their kneeling, chewed on the demands of racial equality and spat out the bits they didn’t like – rethinking policing, drug legislation, foreign policy and immigration. It wasn’t enough that these elements just be rejected, they had to be roundly trampled on as radical and communist.
In doing so, the goal of racial equality was watered down and redefined. It is now not about ensuring people from ethnic minorities are safe and supported so that they may rise out of the bottom of poverty and social exclusion, but about finding those already close to the top, giving them a seat at the high table and calling it a big heave-ho of progress. Racial justice has become about including people of colour into the winners category of the status quo, then using them as evidence that the system works if you are brilliant and hard-working enough.
The Tories now weaponise their diversity against other ethnic minorities, whose experiences of racism may happen at the hands of the police, at the jobcentre, at the border – not at Eton, Winchester or the City. Sajid Javid, never one to miss a cue, called Britain “the most successful multicultural democracy on Earth” in response to claims that Sunak’s appointment was not met with unalloyed joy by all. Black and brown people are allowed to have any politics they like, but they are only truly welcome if they bring with them this eager, feelgood testimony about the end of racism. No pompoms, no power.
The philosopher Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò describes this as “elite capture” – a process whereby white elites co-opt and disarm political movements that go against their interests by rebranding themselves through symbolic performances. The result is an over-celebration of the way the system secures equality in elite spaces for a few; everything else that is required to create a new system that promotes true racial equality for all is stigmatised as too radical.
Just look at how anyone questioning the significance of Sunak’s premiership has been chastised for not “putting politics aside”. Diversity in itself has become such a highly prized and stabilising feature of a system that is obsessed with maintaining illusions of social mobility, that a farcical orthodoxy has emerged: we must celebrate diversity at all costs. This is even if those costs are borne by the very people “diversity” is meant to serve: the ethnic minorities struggling with disproportionately high rates of poverty under Conservative rule, those Sunak is happy to remove to Rwanda, others who are sick and suffering in overcrowded detention centres in apparent violation of the law under Sunak’s pick of home secretary.
In this co-opted world, a Labour MP of the same ethnic background as Sunak, Nadia Whittome, can be ordered to delete a tweet in which she says Sunak is not a “win” for Asian representation because he’s a “multimillionaire who, as chancellor, cut taxes on bank profits while overseeing the biggest drop in living standards since 1956. Black, white or Asian: if you work for a living, he is not on your side”. White deference to Sunak’s symbolism is so important that it literally erased another brown MP’s opinion about his political substance. What a curveball.
When asked if he had weighed in on the decision, Keir Starmer said: “Let me be very clear with you about the position of the Labour party – and I was able to say that at prime minister’s questions – and that was to welcome the first British Asian prime minister as a real milestone for our country.” That is, indeed, very clear.
Bleak as this all sounds, we are not doomed to the endless hijacking of racial progress by the ruling classes. The very elite nature of this discourse will be its downfall. Sunak, as rumbled in Whittome’s tweet, has actually been useful in giving up the game. His extreme wealth and rightwing politics have been clarifying in exposing the vacuity of diversity as an end goal in itself. If having a first brown prime minister whose household is richer than the king, whose politics penalise asylum seekers and the poorest members of society, was what was required to unlock this realisation, then I’ll take it. A win is a win.
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
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