So from what I can tell from the intro, summary and recommendations, the report acknowledges that racism is still a problem, but that it does not manifest in systematic deliberate racism. To cherry pick a couple of paragraphs:
Put simply we no longer see a Britain where the system is deliberately rigged against ethnic minorities. The impediments and disparities do exist, they are varied, and ironically very few of them are directly to do with racism. Too often ‘racism’ is the catch-all explanation, and can be simply implicitly accepted rather than explicitly examined.
The evidence shows that geography, family influence, socio-economic background, culture and religion have more significant impact on life chances than the existence of racism. That said, we take the reality of racism seriously and we do not deny that it is a real force in the UK.
I think that’s fair, and even the most progressive types on here aren’t far off that view.
Just because systemic discrimination isn’t deliberate, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist - that’s part of the whole point. Deliberate racism would include job adverts that say “blacks need not apply”. You can still, through ignorance, set up a recruitment system that manages to disfavour minorities without any deliberate purpose. I have been working on gender equity (hardly a minority!) in recruitment at my place for years and with positive will from all involved it still turns out to be very difficult without implementing hard positive discrimination. It is the hidden commonly accepted details of selection criteria, definitions of merit, even dress standards that subtly bias the processes, and even a small %age bias (say 5%) has a dramatic compounding effect over 5years.