Under the banner of Inclusive Britain, the equalities and levelling up minister, Kemi Badenoch, on Thursday set out a raft of measures (68 in all) aimed at reducing disparities between black and minority ethnic people and the white population. She also committed the government to a new approach to data and language in this area: the term BAME will no longer be used in Whitehall. Instead, more attention will be paid to the specific experiences of different groups. That has raised concerns that broader issues of racism will be overlooked or dismissed. This much was expected, and had been trailed in last year’s report from the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities to which her announcement is the official response. The report earned well-deserved criticism for its Panglossian view of race relations and lack of enthusiasm for the term “institutional racism”.
Ms Badenoch’s response marks an improvement on the report itself, although she shares its authors’ determination to take a broadly positive view of multicultural Britain. This week’s news of a grotesquely inappropriate strip search carried out by police on a 15-year-old black girl in an east London school vividly conveys the limitations of this approach. Investigators decided that racism was likely to have been an “influencing factor” in the way the girl was treated, and she remains extremely distressed.
