The Stark Evidence of Everyday Racial Bias in Britain

Poll commissioned to launch series on unconscious bias shows gulf in negative experiences by ethnicity

Robert Booth and Aamna Mohdin in The Guardian 

 

Half of black, Asian and minority ethnic respondents in the poll said they believed people sometimes did not realise they were treating them differently because of their ethnicity. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod for the Guardian


The extent of racial bias faced by black, Asian and minority ethnic citizens in 21st-century Britain has been laid bare in an unprecedented study showing a gulf in how people of different ethnicities are treated in their daily lives.

A survey for the Guardian of 1,000 people from minority ethnic backgrounds found they were consistently more likely to have faced negative everyday experiences – all frequently associated with racism – than white people in a comparison poll.

The survey found that 43% of those from a minority ethnic background had been overlooked for a work promotion in a way that felt unfair in the last five years – more than twice the proportion of white people (18%) who reported the same experience.

The results show that ethnic minorities are three times as likely to have been thrown out of or denied entrance to a restaurant, bar or club in the last five years, and that more than two-thirds believe Britain has a problem with racism.

The ICM poll, commissioned to launch a week-long investigation into bias in Britain, focuses on everyday experiences of prejudice that could be a result of unconscious bias – quick decisions conditioned by our backgrounds, cultural environment and personal experiences.
It is believed to be the first major piece of UK public polling to focus on ethnic minorities’ experiences of unconscious bias, and comes amid wider concerns about a shortage of research capturing the views of minority groups.

The poll found comprehensive evidence to support concerns that unconscious bias has a negative effect on the lives of Britain’s 8.5 million people from minority backgrounds that is not revealed by typical data on racism. For example:

• 38% of people from ethnic minorities said they had been wrongly suspected of shoplifting in the last five years, compared with 14% of white people, with black people and women in particular more likely to be wrongly suspected.

• Minorities were more than twice as likely to have encountered abuse or rudeness from a stranger in the last week.

• 53% of people from a minority background believed they had been treated differently because of their hair, clothes or appearance, compared with 29% of white people.

The Runnymede Trust, a racial equality thinktank, described the findings as “stark” and said they illustrated “everyday micro-aggressions” that had profound effects on Britain’s social structure.

“Racism and discrimination for BAME people and minority faith groups isn’t restricted to one area of life,” said Zubaida Haque, the trust’s deputy director. “If you’re not welcome in a restaurant as a guest because of the colour of your skin, you’re unlikely to get a job in the restaurant for the same reason. Structural and institutional racism is difficult to identify or prove, but it has much more far-reaching effects on people’s life chances.”

David Lammy, the Labour MP for Tottenham, said the findings were upsetting. “Racial prejudice continues to weigh on the lives of black and ethnic minority people in the UK. While we all share the same hard-won rights, our lived experience and opportunity can vary,” he said.

Recalling being stopped and searched when he was 12, Lammy said: “Stereotyping is not just something that happens, stereotyping is something that is felt, and it feels like sheer terror, confusion and shame.”

Half of the respondents from a minority background said they believed people sometimes did not realise they were treating them differently because of their ethnicity, suggesting unconscious bias, as well as more explicit and deliberate racism, has a major influence on the way millions of people who were born in the UK or moved here are treated.

As well as demonstrating how much more likely ethnic minorities are to report negative experiences that did not feature an explicitly racist element, the poll found that one in eight had heard racist language directed at them in the month before they were surveyed.

It also found troubling levels of concern about bias in the workplace, with 57% of minorities saying they felt they had to work harder to succeed in Britain because of their ethnicity, and 40% saying they earned less or had worse employment prospects for the same reason.

The poll persistently found evidence that the gap in negative experiences was not confined to the past. For example, one in seven people from ethnic minorities said they had been treated as a potential shoplifter in the last month, against one in 25 white people.

The findings come a year after Theresa May published a race disparity audit that identified differences in living standards, housing, work, policing and health. The prime minister pledged to “confront these issues we have identified” but admitted: “We still have a way to go if we’re truly going to have a country that does work for everyone.”

In October the government said employers could be forced to reveal salary figures broken down by ethnicity, as they already do for gender, in a move that lawyers predicted could lead to a flood of employment tribunal cases. Black, Asian and minority ethnic unemployment stands at 6.3%, compared with 3.6% for white people.

Bangladeshi and Pakistani households had an average income of nearly £9,000 a year less than white British households between 2014 and 2016, and the gap between white and black Caribbean and black British families was £5,500.

One of the few positive findings was that just over half of those surveyed said they had either never experienced someone directing racist language at them, or had not done so for at least five years.

However, the results raise concerns over efforts to forge a multicultural British identity, with 41% saying someone had assumed they were not British at some point in the last year because of their ethnicity.

People from minorities are twice as likely as white people to have been mistaken for staff in a restaurant, bar or shop. One in five said they had felt the need to alter their voice and appearance in the last year because of their ethnicity.

The effects of bias are not the same for all ethnicities. Half of black and mixed-race people felt they had been unfairly overlooked for a promotion or job application, compared with 41% of people from Asian backgrounds. Black people were more likely to feel they had to work harder to succeed because of their ethnicity.

Muslims living in Britain – a large minority at around 2.8 million people – are more likely to have negative experiences than other religious groups. They are more likely than Christians, people with no religion and other smaller religions to be stopped by the police, left out of social functions at work or college and find that people seem not to want to sit next to them on public transport.

A government spokesperson said the prime minister was determined that people of different ethnicities were treated equally. The spokesperson said: “One year on from [the race disparity audit’s] launch, we are delivering on our commitment to explain or change ethnic disparities in all areas of society including a £90m programme to help tackle youth unemployment and a Race at Work charter to help create greater opportunities for ethnic minority employees at work. We have also launched a consultation on mandatory ethnicity pay reporting.”

Big data prove it is possible for a society to be riddled with racism in the complete absence of racists.

The government audit shows racism can be endemic even in the absence of racists


Trevor Phillips in The Financial Times


If Theresa May’s challenge to her own government on race equality does nothing else, it should take some of the terror out of talking about racial difference. Her government’s compendium of data about ethnic minorities’ experience across 130 public service areas, published this week, confronts us with a baffling puzzle: in a society demonstrably more open-minded than a generation ago, why do race and ethnicity remain such powerful pointers to an individual’s place in society?

You do not have to be a specialist in race relations to know that your doctor is more likely to be a Sikh than a Somali. Most of us can see that people from certain backgrounds — South Asians, Chinese — are more likely than others — African Caribbeans, Pakistani Muslims — to wind up as chief financial officers of big companies.

Sir John Parker, in a review that concluded this week, called out the paucity of non-white leaders in Britain’s top companies, confirming what most business leaders know: there are many available candidates but black and brown faces still do not turn up in the boardroom — except perhaps when they come to clean.

White Britons remain cautious about making such observations, for fear of being held personal responsible for racial inequalities. People of colour stay silent because nobody wants to sound like a grievance-monger. The race audit could be the best chance in years to break the silence.

Ministers have anticipated the charge of stirring up minority resentment by releasing a flood of data, some of which show that whites too can be at a disadvantage. White boys, for example, are far less likely to get in to a good university than the proverbial hijab-wearing Bangladeshi-heritage girl. By acknowledging that some differences might turn out to be intractable, Mrs May’s injunction that disparities should either be explained or eliminated could encourage a more open debate.

Some critics suggest that the audit will undermine minorities’ faith in public services. This underestimates the common sense of most people of colour. We do not live to complain about racism. On the contrary, we factor it into our daily lives, shrugging off discourtesies. But forbearance should not be confused with compliance. The data show that people of colour are right to have low expectations of their treatment by the healthcare system, the police or the courts. Their resentment should not be a surprise.

The audit is far from complete. Crucially, it tells us nothing about the UK’s most important economic issue — low productivity. Yet race relations can have a profound impact on the workplace.

A US survey shows that more than a third of white-collar employees think discussing race is off limits in the office, even though staff of all races think it affects their prospects. Blacks and Latinos believe their ethnicity holds them back; whites fear a word out of place will torpedo their careers. Annual appraisals have become stilted affairs: white bosses worry that too critical an assessment will land them in the dock for bigotry. Poor performance goes unchallenged and mediocrity protected.

The data released this week have all been available before. But together they could revolutionise our understanding of racism. Since the 1999 Macpherson Report into the death of Stephen Lawrence, the official doctrine has been that pretty much everyone everywhere was wrapped up in a racist conspiracy, even if they did not know it.

If that is true, how can we explain the fact that every measure of racial hostility has declined steadily over the past 40 years but there has been no corresponding fall in racial disadvantage? The answer is that most racial disadvantage is not the product of individual attitudes. Even if we were to adopt the widest definition of a racial incident, including online insults, and attribute every one of those acts to a prejudiced white person, it remains statistically demonstrable that the average person of colour will encounter such hostility once in their lifetime — not enough to produce the persistent patterns revealed by the audit.

So if Britons are individually better people what is preventing us becoming a better nation? Part of the answer is inertia: racial patterns we inherited and have not dealt with effectively. An example would be ethnic segregation in cities, baked into the geography because of settlement patterns generations ago.

A new source of racial disparities stems from what may be called techno-racism. Online decision systems use apparently neutral data: names, addresses, place of education. But these data carry racial markers that machines can read as reasons to reject minority applications for jobs, loans or insurance. In the US, companies are rewriting mortgage-lending programmes, having seen fines in excess of $100m for discriminating against African-American borrowers. Big data prove it is possible for a society to be riddled with racism in the complete absence of racists.

Mrs May says that government departments will have “nowhere to hide” in future. Unfortunately, her own privacy legislation will protect ministers from scrutiny. Data protection means that neither public bodies nor private corporations are allowed to keep ethnic data about individuals. A prime ministerial decision to allow companies, particularly recruitment firms, to hold ethnic data could be transformative.

Mrs May’s audit has opened a Pandora’s box. But when the first woman in the legend unleashed evils on humanity, Hope sat gleaming at the bottom. Our modern Pandora, lifting the lid on racism, is betting the facts may be the best way to solve our most toxic social problem. In this, at least, she has to be right.

A tale of two ethnic cleansings in Kashmir

by S A Aiyar in the Times of India

January 19 marks the 25th anniversary of the Azaadi (independence) uprising in the Kashmir Valley, leading to the ethnic cleansing of around 400,000 Kashmir Pandits. For some, this day heralded the rejection of Indian rule by protesting Kashmiris, followed by the bloody suppression of Kashmiri human rights by Indian forces (portrayed in the film ‘Haider’). For the Pandits, it heralded a reign of Muslim terror.

Rahul Pandita has written a heartbreaking first- person account of the Pandit tragedy in ‘Our Moon has Blood Clots’. He shows that ethnic cleansing was not the work of a few Islamic militants, as claimed by optimists. On January 19, Pandita’s Muslim neighbours chanted the Islamic battle cry “Naara-e-taqbeer, Allah-o-Akbar”, made famous as heralding Muslim attacks by the TV film ‘Tamas’. Pandita’s mother swore to kill her daughter and then herself if the house was invaded. The long night passed without an invasion, but many fearful Pandits quickly left.

Soon after, local Muslim boys gathered outside Pandita’s home, and discussed how they would share the houses of departing Pandits and rape their girls. One Muslim boy laughingly said to another, “Go inside and piss: like a dog you need to mark your territory.” Pandita’s terrified father decided to flee.

Official figures say only 219 Pandits were killed in the valley. But the threat of violence was so great, and the chances of curbing it so remote, that lakhs of Pandits fled. Most are now rotting in refugee camps in Jammu.

Recently, an ex-general — also a Pandit — told me the Indian media had underplayed the tragedy of his tribe. I agreed, but added that the media has also ignored the earlier mass expulsion of Muslims from Jammu. This surprised the ex-general: I’ve never heard of that, he declared.

He is not alone. Although our media pride themselves on free and bold speech, they maintain a conspiracy of silence on some issues relating to the supposed “national interest.” This includes the mass killing and expulsion of lakhs of Muslims from Jammu in 1947. That story should be recalled on this sombre anniversary.

Today, Jammu is a Hindu-majority area. But in 1947, it had a Muslim majority. The communal riots of 1947 fell most heavily on Jammu’s Muslims; lakhs fled into what became Pakistan-occupied Kashmir. That turned Jammu’s Muslim majority into a Hindu majority. In sheer scale, this far exceeded the ethnic cleansing of Pandits five decades later.

The jagir of Poonch was a semi-autonomous part of J&K till World War II. Subsequently, the maharaja took direct control and imposed high taxes, with special levies on Muslims. This sparked an anti-tax protest in early 1947, which the maharaja put down with armed force.

Poonch had 50,000 ex-soldiers of the British Indian Army, many of whom still had guns. The maharaja felt threatened by this, and in July ordered all holders of arms to deposit these in police stations. But many arms deposited by Muslim ex-soldiers were then handed out by the maharaja’s police to Hindu and Sikh families, raising communal fears. Muslims responded by purchasing fresh weapons from arms bazaars in neighbouring NWFP province. Sardar Ibrahim Khan, a prominent Poonch politician, organized an armed Muslim force that soon staged a revolt.

The official Indian version holds that the Indo-Pak imbroglio over Kashmir began with the invasion of the valley by Muslim tribesmen in October 1947, obliging the maharaja to accede to India. But many academics, including Christopher Snedden in his book ‘Kashmir: The Unwritten History’, argue that the Poonch revolt was the first step in upending the maharaja’s rule, for purely local reasons unrelated to Indo-Pak claims.

Meanwhile, the bloody partition riots in neighbouring Punjab spilled over into Jammu. Snedden cites estimates of between 70,000 and 237,000 Muslims killed. Historians Arjun Appaduri and Arien Mack in their book ‘India’s World’ give a hair-raising estimate of 200,000 killed and 500,000 displaced in Jammu. Tens of thousands of Hindus were killed and expelled from what became Pakistan-occupied Kashmir, but Muslims were by far the biggest victims.

The ethnic cleansing of Pandits from the valley was more one-sided than that of Jammu Muslims in 1947. Yet in sheer numbers and horrors, the Jammu episode was much worse. We have forgotten what happened then because it is politically and morally inconvenient.

The tragedies of J&K constitute a long, horrific tale of death and inhumanity. It has many villains and no heroes. Both sides have been guilty of ethnic cleansing. Both claim to be victims, forgetting they have also been perpetrators. On the 25th anniversary of the Azaadi uprising, the Hindu-Muslim divide is deeper, and ethnic amnesia more selective, than ever before. Some stories do not have happy endings.

Cambridge University medicine admissions show race gap

Applicants with three A*s at A-level are 20% more likely to get offer if they are white than if they are from ethnic minority

• James Ball and Kurien Parel
• guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 13 March 2013 12.56 GMT

Cambridge University released the detailed admissions data, covering 2010 to 2012, for medicine only in response to a freedom of information request. Photograph: Brian Harris/Alamy

People applying to study medicine at Cambridge University with three A*s at A-level are more than 20% more likely to be given an offer if they are white than if they are from an ethnic minority, according to new data released by the institution.

Cambridge University released the detailed admissions data, covering 2010 to 2012, for medicine only in response to a freedom of information request. The university refused a similar request a few weeks before, which covered more subject areas, on the grounds of cost.

The data, which covers applications from within the UK by people who declare their ethnicity, shows that 329 out of 586 white applicants for medicine who went on to achieve three A*s were given an offer of a place, versus 190 of 412 applicants from ethnic minorities – representing success rates of 56% and 46% respectively. The difference between the two groups is statistically significant.

Both Oxford and Cambridge have been challenged by MPs and campaigners to do more to get students from ethnic minorities into their institutions, particularly as the headline admissions figures for the two institutions show a substantial gap in success rates between students of different ethnicities.

The universities have said this gap is explained in large part by students from ethnic minorities disproportionately applying for the most competitive subjects, such as medicine – but these new figures show that even within the competitive subjects, white students are more likely to receive offers.

Cambridge's race gap for medical applicants is substantially smaller than that of its rival, Oxford University. Figures released to the Guardian under the Freedom of Information Act, published last month, show white students applying for medicine who went on to achieve three A*s were 94% more likely to be offered a place than those from ethnic minorities.

A-levels are only one of several factors taken into account by admissions tutors for medicine at both universities. Applicants are also required to take a specific entrance exam, the bioMedical admissions test, while work experience and performance at interview are also factored in to whether to make an offer. Those handling applications may also be unaware of the ethnicity of prospective applicants rejected prior to interview.

A spokeswoman for Cambridge University said analysis of applications based on A-level grades "ignores a significant number of relevant variables" and is therefore "superficial".

"Admissions decisions are based on students' ability, commitment and their potential to achieve," she said. "Our commitment to improving access to the university is longstanding and unwavering … [and] we aim to ensure that anyone with the ability, passion and commitment to apply to Cambridge receives all the support necessary for them to best demonstrate their potential."

She added that Cambridge had run initiatives to encourage gifted students from minority backgrounds to apply to Cambridge since 1989.

Oxford University declined to comment on the difference in size of the medical race gap of applicants between itself and Cambridge University, but said in an earlier statement it constantly reviewed the race gap of its applicants.

"Oxford University is committed to selecting the very best students, regardless of race, ethnicity, or any other factor," a spokeswoman said.

"This is not only the right thing to do but it is in our own interests. Differences in success rates between ethnic groups are therefore something we are continuing to examine carefully for possible explanations."

The Oxford spokeswoman also noted Cambridge made more use of students' grades at AS-level than does Oxford, and said ethnic minorities were well represented at the university, making up 22% of all students and 13% of UK undergraduates.