Does race still matter?

It has become much harder to talk about race in relation to public policy. One reason for this is the welcome recognition of the diverse nature of our ethnic minority population. As this latest JRF review of poverty and ethnicity highlights, this has made it more difficult to analyse the nature of ethnic disadvantage, and also to offer policy solutions. But while 'intersectionality' (other aspects of identity such as gender, age, religion, disability, health and location) is vital in understanding the real experiences of black and minority ethnic (BME) people today, we must also recognise a second reason it’s become difficult to talk about race: a range of people, including many on the left of the political spectrum, no longer think race matters.

Indeed, some of the important data cited by JRF is also used by those who think that race has no independent role to play in unequal outcomes – for example, the high educational attainment of Chinese and Indian school pupils. Doesn’t this evidence suggest that 'race' is no longer an analytically useful concept, or that racial disadvantage no longer exists?

Of course not. Not only do Chinese and Indian pupils do worse in the labour market as adults than their education results would suggest they might, but many other groups are still doing much worse. Given that many BME people are now British-born, and so have British qualifications, social networks and accents, we might think they would do better than their foreign-born parents. But this isn’t the case: British-born black and Asian males are more likely to be unemployed than their foreign-born fathers.

So while there is increasing diversity among the BME population, all ethnic groups continue to do worse in one key area: the labour market. We now have increasingly sophisticated tools to analyse diverse data, able to 'control' for factors such as education, place of birth, family size, and so forth. The conclusion of many such studies is that race and ethnicity still matter, whether we call it an 'ethnic penalty' or discrimination.

Nonetheless, these statistical findings cannot explain how or why ethnicity matters. To do so, we need qualitative research such as that commissioned by JRF, and we must also admit that ethnicity is likely to be experienced differently, not only between, say, Chinese and Somali people, but also between younger British-born black boys and older women born in Pakistan.

By way of a conclusion, we return to policy: what is the role of policy in ultimately eliminating racial inequality and poverty? Cuts to benefits and increasing levels of youth unemployment will be drivers of further poverty for ethnic minorities in the near future. However, in good times and bad, during Labour, Conservative and coalition governments, ethnic inequality has remained stubbornly persistent. For example, in 2010 the gap between Black Caribbean and white boys in terms of GCSE attainment was the same as in 1982. So while we need better resourced and targeted anti-poverty measures, we should also consider specific policies for different ethnic groups if we want to ensure that the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the Windrush generation are less likely to experience poverty than their pioneering Caribbean ancestors.