The Race Equality Centre Leicester

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The Race Equality Centre in Leicester & Leicestershire
 Address: 3rd Floor, Epic House, Lower Hill Street, Leicester, LE13SH
Tel: 0116 2999800 
Fax: 0116 2999801
Online Contact Form

 

ON INSTITUTIONAL RACISM!!!

By Chino Cabon, Senior Officer, The Race Equality Centre

 

The problems that we have experienced in addressing Institutional Racism, indeed the denial of institutional racism, did not begin with pronouncements by Jack Straw, Paul Stephenson or Trevor Phillips.

 

The denial characterizes the response of state organisations from the moment of Carmichael and Hamilton’s expression of the impact of institutional racism, through the many inquiries in the following 30 years, and even including the responses of state actors to the acknowledgement of Institutional Racism within the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry report.  

 

The denial of the centrality of racism, as an institutionalized, ie ingrained, force within society, in defining the relative position and opportunities of racial minorities, continued even after the ‘pretended’ acknowledgement and acceptance of inappropriate attitudes and prejudices by many of our public authority leaders. 

 

It went something like:
“hallelujah, we have seen the light – we are institutionally racist; why have we never noticed this before?”
Followed by
“of course, we are also institutionally sexist”
And then
“and disablist”

 

And before we had time to even begin to remedy the impact of the, now acknowledged, institutional racism, it had become just one of many inequalities that public authorities were more than willing to declare – none of which could be remedied without reference to all other possible social oppressions.  But eventually, we were told, addressing institutional racism is not as significant as the need to address Community Cohesion!!! No surprise that the then Home Secretary, David Blunkett, who denied the relevance of institutional racism even before becoming Home Secretary, was keen to promote the assimilationist and integrationist approaches advocated by the Community Cohesion agenda.

 

In looking around you will find a Race Equality Scheme being a 50+ page promotional document that described its intention to continue to successfully promote good race relations and community cohesion!!  No reference to inequality in service provision, no reference to inequality in education outcomes, no reference to inequality in staffing distribution, no reference to the rights of the consumers of public services to receive an equitable service, but lots of attention given to the right of the public authority to manage itself.

 

Even the definition publicly applied to Institutional Racism by MacPherson and his team represents a form of denial.  Racism does not consist of conduct or words or practices, as described by MacPherson, Racism is first and foremost an ideology of differentiation that not just legitimizes unequal life opportunities (or even opportunity for life), but particularly denies the legitimacy of the reality experienced and defined by its historical victims

 

It is not our acceptance of Institutional Racism that is inappropriate, it is the definition that has been allowed to promulgate, with its focus on overt actions instead of the force of ideology.  Consequently, and inevitably if the problem itself has been misdiagnosed, the remedy is, and will continue to be, inappropriate.

 

Even with the minimal, managerial approach to eliminating racial inequality, we find little development of understanding or progress: But we should not be surprised by this.  The prescribed managerial solution to Institutional Racism perceives state organisations as benign and value free rather than as a vehicle for maintaining the existing power dynamic – the established and respected forces of society.  If the organisation itself is value free, then all that is required is a fine-tuning of the organisation mechanics or replacing of the oil.  For mechanics, read Race Equality Impact Assessments; for oil, ethnic/racial monitoring.  But then, can we expect any other approach when the people, organisations and society where racism is maintained and transmitted are the very same actors that are empowered to find the solution?  Inevitably, then, they will not seek a solution that makes their own life seem less convenient than it is currently.

 

The defined solution to Institutional Racism included the development of a Race Equality Scheme for each public organisation in the country.  These schemes were due to state the functions of the relevant organisation and, following consultation, indicate where the organisation was unable to guarantee equality of outcome for people from different racial groups and, consequently, to establish an action plan to address the potential for unequal outcomes.  Better still, to avoid the stagnation that epitomized the previous race equality policies, the schemes had to be reviewed at least once every three years.

 

But, the creation of the first set of Race Equality Schemes demonstrated a significant lack of understanding of their purpose and potential worth.  Almost universally public organisations appeared to be surprised by the material that needed to be included; the schemes were limited in construction (even now, we still see schemes that “plan” to develop appropriate monitoring arrangements and conduct assessments of the understanding of organization boards/management); and no action plans were outcome driven.

 

It is enlightening to compare the difficulty in drawing up race equality schemes throughout the last 7 years in which they have been required, with the ease with which many public authorities have already written their single equality schemes (and the legislation against which there is this assumed requirement for single equality schemes is still be work through).

 

To date, we see little implementation of the need to consider race equality in strategic developments.  At best, interventions are still piecemeal and marginal, requiring specialist funding, initiatives and, of course, officers; proposed solutions to the institutional barriers to equality of outcome are still predicated by a patronizing perception that it is our knowledge, our attitudes, our CULTURE that is at fault or, worse still, our presumed (and presumably inate) inability to speak English!!!

 

For example, World Class Commissioning, the 10 year strategy for health care priorities.  In the absence of a Department for Health race equality impact assessment of the intended outcomes, local Health Authorities found that they were incapable of determining what needs to be done to reduce the inequality in life expectancy or in prevalence of peri-natal mortality, mental health diagnosis, cardio-vascular disease or diabetes or even to consider the need for sickle-cell anemia or lupus care.  When asked about racial inequalities, a health authority can tell us that professional Asians have greater life expectancy than working class Asians!!  And that has been their race equality analysis for the last three years!!

 

There are also strategies  which contain nothing to eliminate the differences in educational outcomes for children from different racial groups except, where it is perceived that white children are out-performed by their Indian or Chinese heritage counterparts.  For ever we have had to listen to the false justification of poor educational out-comes that place responsibility for poor outcomes on children and their families for not speaking English at home (ironic in the light of above-average outcomes for Chinese and Indian heritage children and the below-average outcomes for African-Caribbean children). 

 

Until now, we have still not heard a strategic acceptance that African-Caribbean children enter the state education system at a level of cognition and performance that is above all of their counterparts, and leave it with educational results that is below all of their counterparts, let alone a coherent strategy for eliminating the racial disadvantage faced by our children in the state sector.  At no time in the national “Every Child Matters” strategy, or its local interpretation, is there any reflection on the damage caused by a mono-cultural curriculum that defines and/or reinforces notions that one group of people are better than another people and therefore the latter should be subordinated to former.  Ask young people about the presence of Black people in the curriculum and, more often than not, it begins and ends with Black people were enslaved and White people abolished slavery.  Ask educational professionals, and you will hear that children are taught about the need to respect each other, regardless of background.  But how can you truly respect a person when you have no knowledge of what their heritage has contributed to your current privileged position?

 

The managerial approach advocates the use of equality impact assessments to eliminate the impact of institutionalized racism in new policies.  But when it is left to people who either do not understand, or do not wish to understand, the extent of their own racial prejudices, who believe that their position allows them to determine priority outcomes, it is no surprise that the assessments are little more than tokenistic.   Worse still, assessment processes become used to justify the further redistribution of resources away from poor Black communities – ref NRF, SRB, WNF

 

Then there is the abomination of the Criminal Justice System being touted as the example that demonstrates the elimination of the need to address Institutional Racism.  No other element of the British public sector better demonstrates the continuing force of racial inequality and racism. 
Within the latest report submitted under section 95 of the 1991 Criminal Justice Act (that is, the Home Secretary’s race equality audit of the CJS), before presenting any findings or conclusions, the author presents their excuses;  and so we are warned to be wary of ascribing unequal experiences and outcomes to the possible existence of racism in the system because:

“ … people from BME groups are often disadvantaged in social and economic terms compared to the White population. This disadvantage relates to factors such as housing, education and employment, factors that are in part predictive of offending behaviour and general involvement in the criminal justice process”

But isn’t that social and economic disadvantage itself caused by the existence of institutional racism.  The very prevarication of the Home Secretary’s report demonstrates one of the significant failures of the existing organizational mechanical approach to addressing Institutional Racism, in that each organisation is encouraged to perceive itself as an isolated self-considering entity, rather than as part of the whole institutional edifice that maintains the structural racial inequalities of the whole society.

 

And yet, despite the apology for inaction, even the then Home Secretary has to admit that, since the implementation of the general and specific race equality duties, the extent of disproportional representation of BME [sic] groups within the CJS has remained largely unchanged.  The only area of significant improvement is in the numbers of racial minority people employed within the CJS.  The report goes on to acknowledge that the imbalance is not simply the result of people from BME groups committing a disproportionate number of crimes, but refuses to enter into conjecture about the actual causes of the disproportionate representation.  And yet, the process of race equality impact assessment was supposed to allow those institutions to locate and eliminate the causes of disproportionate experiences for different racial groups.

 

In conclusion, racism continues to be a force in British society that gives a false legitimacy to the inequalities of life experienced by people from different racial groups.  The errors of past analysis of racism have sought to locate the responsibility for possession of the attitude and its removal entirely on individual actors.  The articulation of the nature and effect of Institutional Racism by Carmichael and Hamilton in 1968 offered a hope that the nucleic nature of racism, as a force that holds the current racially unequal structure of society in place, could begin to be overcome.  This was the hope that was, eventually, taken forward when Institutional Racism was given institutional recognition within the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry Report.  Unfortunately, it was the wrong element of institutional racism that was recognized – hence the emphasis, within the report, on racism as practice and processes, and institutional racism as the collective failure of an organisation to practice appropriately; rather than the recognition that racism is an ideology, as powerful and as ingrained as Capitalism and Authoritarianism.