The Changing Face of "Race"

- Written by John Root

I have just come across a box of booklets about ‘race’. One striking thing is how much somewhat ephemeral material has been produced over the past fifty years - and much of it seems to have been created hastily.

So in what ways has the understanding and reality of ‘race’ changed over the past fifty years?

1.     The rise of obviously successful ethnic minorities

Because post-war immigration was largely artisan and rural communities, there developed the assumption that 'immigrant' areas and people were poor. Ethnic minority settlement was taken as one indication of deprivation in an area; minorities were like a ‘barium meal’ that simply pointed to existing injustices in society. Now Barnet is as ethnically mixed as Brixton (though the ethnic groups are different). The laboratory that is multi-ethnic Britain includes groups that are outstandingly successful (in economic and educational terms) as well as those that struggle. This must shape our assessment of race and ethnicity.

The correlation between being comfortably well-off/poor and being white/non-white still carries some weight, but the increasing frequency of discrepancies calls for substantial qualification. The ‘face’ of race has changed substantially when the Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary and Home Secretary, plus a disproportionately large number of other members of a Conservative Cabinet, are not white. Similarly, during the Covid pandemic, a surprisingly large number of the numerous medical academic pundits were from minority groups.

Such success has clearly not been equally distributed amongst all ethnic groups, nor have they all excelled in similar areas, but increasingly, the idea that there is a glass ceiling to minority achievement is ineffective. The differing trajectories of ethnic minorities in Britain inevitably invite explanation. Why do Bangladeshis fare better than Pakistanis and Ghanaians more than Jamaicans? There are complex historical, class and cultural factors at work, but the once widely held view that racism is the only, or even main factor at work clearly needs qualifying. By contrast, more attention needs to be given to what can be learned and possibly replicated from minority successes, as well as the likelihood that strong family structures are central. A 1976 report from the British Council of Churches spoke rather disparagingly of migrants who had made a ‘prosperous adjustment’ to British society, as though all migrants should remain poor. Aspiration is rightly no longer regarded with such suspicion.

2. The emergence of religion as a major issue

Earlier discourse about 'race' was entirely secular. White people who were serious about racism or multi-culturalism tended to be left of centre, with an implicit worldview that religion was a thing of the past, from which mercifully we were increasingly becoming free. At best, it was a sub-set of ‘culture’ and therefore deserved distant and rather restrained respect—until people’s minds were re-oriented to recognising and working with the primacy of secularised political, social and economic issues. The explosion of Muslim anger over Salman Rushdie’s ‘Satanic Verses’ in 1988 marked an unusually distinct turning point here. Muslims took religion seriously, and secularists needed to work with them as people with strong religious convictions.

The continuing intensification of Islamic identity amongst some Muslim groups has made this ever more urgent, after 9/11 with fear of acts of violence, and more recently with Jihadists going to Syria. Other religious groups have received nothing like as much attention, largely because they are not seen to be as problematic. (‘How many people do we have to kill before people pay attention to us’ lamented one Hindu leader.) Nonetheless, the size of religious votes, especially of Hindus, means that government has to take pains to be onside with them.

The response to the rise of minority ethnic Christian groups is interestingly ambivalent in this respect. Are they ‘Christian’ and therefore a taken-for-granted section of the establishment who can be assumed to be fairly docile? Or are they ‘minority ethnic’ and therefore exceptional and in need of special acceptance?

A couple of incidents relating to the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) are interesting here. As Mayor of London, Boris Johnson invited black Londoners to vote for their favourite black Londoner as part of Black History Month. No doubt expecting a sportsperson or entertainer. Instead, the RCCG mobilised their members and Pastor Agu Irukwu won the poll, presenting Johnson with the dilemma of either celebrating Pastor Agu’s victory and alienating the gay lobby who disapproved of his opposition to gay marriage, or seemingly snubbing the RCCG voters. More recently Keir Starmer got his fingers burned, visiting RCCG’s Jesus House centre in Hendon to commend them for their extensive work for the common good (such as ‘Christmas with Jesus’ free Christmas dinners distributed to those in need). He was lambasted by LBGT supporters for guilt by association in keeping such company. Thus, it seems that while non-Christian ethnic minorities can dissent from mainstream secular attitudes without being punished, Christian ethnic minorities, along with white Christians, are currently expected to conform to the prevailing norms. Nobody presses a Muslim, such as Sadiq Khan about his views on gay marriage; he is assumed to be ‘progressive’, but is not pressed to say so in order not to lose the votes of his fellow, usually more conservative, Muslims.

A succession of legal cases over issues such as the right to wear crosses at work, the right of registrars not to officiate at gay weddings, or social work students being expelled for expressing disagreement with gay marriage have all featured Christians from minority ethnic backgrounds. In their closest approach to an Easter acknowledgement in 2021, the Sunday Times featured an article by Tomiwa Owolade highlighting the strength and surprising exceptionalism of London in relation to traditionalist attitudes toward abortion or gay marriage. This phenomenon is largely fuelled by the strength of minority ethnic, especially African, churches.

As churches such as the RCCG become increasingly confident and numerous in this country, it will be interesting to see whether or not politicians feel the need to take more divisive steps to court their votes.

3. The recognition of institutional racism.

As with the rise of religion, the concept of 'institutional racism' also has a specific event that brought it to the fore—namely, the MacPherson Report of 1999, which investigated the Metropolitan Police’s response to the murder of Stephen Lawrence. The Labour Government commissioning of the inquiry and the resultant report was probably the single most important event in British community relations since the arrival of the Empire Windrush. It also debunked the claim that conventional party politics doesn't impact 'race’ and largely validated the complaints black people had been expressing for the previous 50 years about official injustice. That, almost twenty years later the ‘Windrush scandal’ would erupt with the gross injustices of the Home Office’s mistreatment of people of Caribbean background, disgracefully underlined the racist institutional carelessness with which the authorities could still treat black people.

While the concept of institutional racism had been around since the 1970’s, the importance of the MacPherson Report was that it delineated in detail examples of it working in the less than professional response by the police both to tracking down Stephen Lawrence’s killers and their treatment of the family. The idea that ‘racists’ were simply people who took a personal and conscious decision to reject non-white people was far too limiting and simple to cover the manifold ways in which people were being disadvantaged.

But in some ways, ‘institutional racism’ was a victim of its own success. The term had an aura of intellectual and sociological seriousness and came to be applied to any outcome of ethnic inequality, but without MacPherson’s rigour in tracking the specific ways in which the institution operated to disadvantage minorities. It was this promiscuous use of the term that led the Sowell Report to downplay (but not deny) its existence. Meanwhile controversy continues as regards concepts such as Critical Race Theory and white privilege. While open to serious criticisms, they do flag up, like the concept of institutional racism, that racism is much more deeply built into ex-colonial societies than can be comprehended by seeing racism as simply prejudiced, ignorant evil choices.

It is within this framework that understanding history has come to such prominence recently. It is only by understanding ‘race relations’ within the context of deeply unequal and often exploitative relationships that we can get a rounded picture of our present situation.

4. The arrival of white ethnic minorities.

Ethnicity, culture, race, and immigration were all issues of debate where it was assumed that skin colour was a constant factor, until the entry of EU citizens from eastern Europe into the UK rocketed in 2004. Unlike migrants from English-speaking countries or from western Europe, linguistic and cultural differences became significant in a way that was not seen to be significant with, say, Australian or French migrants. The numbers were higher, the use of English was generally less, and the competition for skilled manual or unskilled work was greater.

So, when in the late 90s aggressive begging by East European asylum seekers became a cause of widespread anger, was that 'racism'? While that issue passed, the question of job competitiveness and cultural separation remained, fuelling a widely felt demand for Brexit in 2016. While some have seen that vote as being fuelled by a nostalgia for the Empire, I think the narrative of Britain’s role in World War II, of superiority over Europeans, and a Churchillian doughtiness fuelled a hostility to immigration from eastern Europe, leading to acts of aggression against people or premises.

Eastern European migration therefore brought a new level of complexity to discussions of ‘race’ in Britain. Colour was not necessarily a factor in producing hostility or new challenges. It was a reminder, as the Troubles in Ulster had long illustrated, that ethnic tensions between people who were physically almost similar could still be a real issue. Illustrated, of course, even more tragically in Ukraine—a conflict that seems to have particular resonance in Britain as a reminder of a heroic military (and successful) past.

‘Race’ is clearly about more than colour.

5. Superdiversity.

In different ways, Sections 1, 2, and 4 all emphasise the diversity within Britain's multi-ethnic population, encompassing variations in social class, religion, and regions of origin. One can also fold in the significance of differences in gender, age, and length of stay in Britain to emphasise that multi-ethnic Britain is a complex patchwork where simple binaries no longer apply. In the 1970s, it still wasn’t too much of a simplification to say that all of Britain’s ethnic minorities (and majority) loved cricket.

The Parekh Report, published by the Runnymede Trust in 2000, wisely warned against seeing Britain as a ‘95:5’ society—a white British bloc and a minority ethnic bloc. While the figures would now be more like 80:20 (including white immigrants!) the simple lumping together of white British and ethnic minorities as just two separate groups is untenable. Nonetheless, attempts to do that through the use of BAME and then more recently the clumsier UKME/GMH, still persist. One outcome of George Floyd's death has been a return to perceiving race primarily as a white/black issue, particularly as concerns with Islamist separation and violence have diminished. Curiously this has been reflected in a marked upsurge of black, or mixed, people appearing in tv adverts, to the neglect of people from other minorities.

But superdiversity emphasises, amongst other things, the very wide range of geographical and cultural backgrounds that people in Britain now come from. It not only tracks the proliferation of variables within the British population which increasingly qualifies all generalisations about race, it also underlines that the situation is so complex as to be unpredictable. It is this unpredictability that makes the present face of multi-ethnic Britain both challenging and fascinating.

So the changes from my first experiences of living in multi-ethnic communities are substantial. In different ways they have all added complexity to what once seemed a simple binary situation. This means the new ‘face’ of race has become less simple, less predictable but more dynamic and interesting, and with much more potential.

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John Root is a retired Anglican clergyman, living in Tottenham. He has been vice-principal of a Cambridge theological college and was for thirty years vicar of an ethnically ’super-diverse’ church in Wembley. He has also lectured part-time in early colonial history. His wife is Indian, from Malaysia and they have an adult son. You can read more of his work here.