Black Lives Matter
7min read
In this piece, and in all my future writing on this topic, I use the acronym BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Colour) in place of the perhaps more familiar BAME (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic). Less than 30 seconds Googling reveals the controversy around the term BAME which has been raging since at least 2015. It staggers me how the term remains so widespread in the mainstream media and even official UK Government publications.
We covered inequality in detail last month, but following the anti-racism protests that have swept around the world in the past few weeks it is only right to revisit this topic.
Full disclosure:
I'm a white man.
I am also heterosexual, middle class and an atheist.
I have no disabilities and I live in the country in which I was born.
I have never knowingly been the victim of racism or sexism and never been racially profiled or discriminated against in any other way.
I am the epitome of privilege.
So what qualifies me to talk about these issues? I'm human and I have a pulse – it is therefore my duty - and everyone else’s - to call out racism and all forms of discrimination when I see them. It’s a cliché, but if you’re not part of the solution then you are part of the problem, even if only by being a passive bystander.
Racism – and discrimination more broadly – most obviously impact on SDG 10; Reduced Inequalities. We talked about this goal at length last month, so I'm going to address it through the lens of Goal 16, and in particular Strong Institutions*. As we’ve talked about in past months, Strong Institutions are critically important for the progress of all the other SDGs; but institutions must be strong for everyone, not just the people who built them. Most of what I’m going to talk about is specifically regarding the UK, but many of the issues hold true throughout much of the Western World.
The UK (for the time being at least), has strong institutions. Great. The problem is that, by and large, they were put in place by privileged white men**. The design of our society favours the privileged; if your skin colour (or beliefs, or sexual orientation etc.) mean you diverge from this, it becomes harder and harder to thrive. This is systemic oppression. I’m not going to take up your time explaining this to you, but in case you need a refresher, or perhaps help explaining it to any children or young people in your lives, this is a useful video.
Did I work for the things I've achieved in my life? Absolutely. Does that make me special? Not at all.
On the contrary, there are many thousands of people born without these privileges who have had to work a damn sight harder than me to get to where they are.
All very righteous, but can we see systemic racism born out in hard data? Short answer is yes.
Fans of Freakonomics (if you’re not you should be) will be familiar with the disparity between the life expectancy of African Americans vs European Americans, even after controlling for socioeconomic factors. There are countless studies detailing exactly how our criminal justice, policing, healthcare, social support and education systems are littered with structural biases that discriminate against BIPOC.
It became clear from very early on in the UK's COVID crisis that BIPOC were suffering severe symptoms and dying at a higher rate than white British people. At the time of writing, around 90% of the doctors who died after contracting COVID were from ethnic minorities. The US has seen similar trends.
There are likely to be many interlinked causes behind these headlines but the country must first recognise the economic disadvantages that put BIPOC communities at greater risk. Deep-rooted discrimination in UK society creates systemic barriers to the conditions needed to live a healthy life. We already know that the risk of being killed by COVID is strongly associated with existing poor health.
It is also important to note that, across the general population, BIPOC workers are more likely to live in densely populated urban areas and are disproportionally represented in high-risk key worker jobs. This is particularly true in London, which has seen the largest number of COVID-19-related deaths of any region. Data from the ONS Labour Force Survey analysed by the Health Foundation illustrates this.
Black and minority ethnic (BME) workers make up a disproportionately large share of key worker sectors in London
The government rightly asked Public Health England (PHE) to investigate. I’m not going to delve any deeper into the resulting fiasco as you’re probably already familiar with it. You can read the initial report here but if you don’t have time to read all 89 pages, the Guardian provided a helpful summary. The headline? Racism and inequality were identified as key factors contributing to the elevated mortality rates amongst BIPOC.
The report states that:
“…after accounting for the effect of sex, age, deprivation and region, people of Bangladeshi ethnicity had around twice the risk of death than people of White British ethnicity. People of Chinese, Indian, Pakistani, Other Asian, Caribbean and Other Black ethnicity had between 10% and 50% higher risk of death when compared to White British”
The second report entitled “Beyond the data: Understanding the impact of COVID-19 on BAME groups” (you know; the one which wasn’t going to be published but ended up being leaked so was eventually published), is here.
This is not a COVID problem. The pandemic, and the wider governmental and societal responses, may have brought UK health inequalities into sharp focus, but we have known for more than a decade that people facing the greatest deprivation also experience the worst health outcomes. The debate around the unequal impact of the virus has at last exposed this to the mainstream - the structural disadvantage and discrimination faced by parts of minority communities. The measures implemented to control the spread of the virus and save lives now are exacting a heavier social and economic price on those already experiencing inequality.
Boris has launched an enquiry into racism and inequality. Let's hope the 7th such review in 4 years actually yields some meaningful change this time.
*There are 169 targets that underpin the UN SDGs, and 231 indicators. Target 16.7 is to “Ensure responsive, inclusive, participatory and representative decision-making at all levels”. Indicator 16.b.1 calls for “[a reduction in the] proportion of population reporting having personally felt discriminated against or harassed in the previous 12 months…”.
**One pertinent example I've recently come across, showing how UK institutions are discriminatory, is the government's own Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme. This pays up to 80% of furloughed workers' salaries. The catch? It's based on a one-off snapshot of what a worker earned in March 2020, and *not* their reference salary. This means that anyone whose earnings weren’t ‘normal’ in that month –.e.g. those on long-term sick or maternity leave – will only receive 80% of their sick or maternity pay. So when the worker ‘returns’ from leave to furlough alongside their colleagues (who did the same job for the same pay before), they'll be getting an awful lot less support. This clearly discriminates against new parents – often just the mother – and people with long term health problems. Private organisations have in the past received a great deal of public criticism for remuneration policies far less discriminatory than this.