Last summer a friend of mine, a man of south Asian heritage and a normally calm disposition, was spitting with fury. The reason for his anger was the Black Lives Matter protests. His problem wasn’t just that he disagrees with the movement’s aims — he’s more of a statue labeller than a puller-down — but also that he believes it encourages people to see the country’s social divisions in binary terms. “Life isn’t black and white,” he said. “There are many shades of brown as well.”
On Wednesday there was a welcome public recognition of his point. The BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 announced that they would no longer use the term black and minority ethnic (BAME). Given that the decision emerged from the epicentre of the metropolitan elite, you might think that it was the consequence of an oversensitive reluctance to talk about race and deal with its consequences. Actually, it’s the opposite. It’s a clear-sighted recognition that our society is more interesting and complicated than this blanket term suggests.
In some ways the term is convenient for white people. I’ve used it myself, on the grounds that it enables me to avoid more specific terms that might unwittingly cause offence. And, given that some ethnic-minority groups perform better, educationally and economically, than white people do, companies can use the term to claim that they have boosted diversity without making any effort.
But there are two good reasons for getting rid of it. First, it’s patronising. It ignores the fact that most people are proud of their cultural heritage and would rather it were celebrated than swept into a pile with everyone else’s. Those whose families come from Trinidad don’t want to be lumped together with those from Kashmir any more than I want to be bundled with Americans or Russians.
By averaging out differences between ethnic groups, the term allows society to avert its eyes from some of its biggest problems. The differences between “BAME” groups are larger than those between whites and non-whites. Take family structure: 19 per cent of white British children are brought up in single-parent families. For Indians, Bangladeshis and Pakistanis the figures are 6 per cent, 12 per cent and 14 per cent. For black Africans and black Caribbeans the figures are 43 per cent and 63 per cent. Or education: Chinese, Indians, Irish people, Bangladeshis and black Africans all do better than white British at GCSE; Pakistanis and black Caribbean people do worse. More than a quarter of Chinese students get three As at A-level, while a tenth of white British students and 3 per cent of black Caribbeans do. In pay, too, the gap between white and BAME people on average has shrunk to 2 per cent, but Chinese people make nearly a quarter more than white British people, and Bangladeshis make 15 per cent less.
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We should be grateful that we have these numbers. Neither France nor Germany collects data based on ethnicity. Resistance to doing so originates in historical memory of the misuse of racial data, but a reluctance to confront modern reality may also contribute to it. In the UK we at least have a detailed picture of the problems that groups face, which is the first step towards tackling them. Black Caribbean children evidently need more help at school than Chinese or Indians do. It seems likely that Bangladeshis — who do better than white people at school but are paid less than them at work — face discrimination.
Dumping BAME is a positive move towards seeing the diversity of our country clearly. It needs to go along with a recognition that race is not the only source of disadvantage: class and geography are too. The least productive and poorest places tend to be former industrial or mining towns in the north and Midlands — places like Barnsley, Dudley, Middlesbrough and Blackburn — that are largely white. The places where social mobility is lowest are overwhelmingly white. London and the southeast, where it is highest, is the most ethnically mixed part of the country.
The second problem with BAME is that it is polarising. By bunging all ethnic-minority people into the same category, it encourages the division of society between white and non-white. That feeds into a dangerous recent shift in the way we talk about race. Identity politics, which treats race, gender and sexual orientation as more important than class, economics and belief, has spread from America and influenced the discourse in Britain. Notions of “white privilege” and “white fragility” — which, by implication, group all other ethnicities in the opposite camp — have become commonplace. This is a dangerous road to go down. Both the far left and the far right feed on hostility, so the notion that society divides down the middle, along racial lines, suits their agenda.
There have been well-intentioned efforts to introduce more nuance to the discussion. The wrongly maligned report by the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, published earlier this year, was trying to do just that. Such initiatives tend to founder in the face of vocal opposition: on a subject as emotive as this one, the loudest, angriest voices tend to prevail. That the broadcasters have decided to take the commission’s advice and dump the term is a welcome sign that sensible views are cutting through.
None of this is to deny that racism is a problem. It’s real, it’s persistent and it harms people’s lives. Studies show that minority-ethnic people are less likely to get job interviews than white people. But the sooner everybody follows the broadcasters and drops this damaging term, the more clearly we can see our problems as they really are. Only when we do that can we properly deal with them.
