Boris Johnson’s Racial Disparities Commission Could Scrap The Term ‘BAME’
Written by SOURCE on March 30, 2021
The term ‘BAME’ (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic) is currently under the spotlight after it was claimed that the use of this term would be one of the central parts of an upcoming report from the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities.
Athough it’s proven to be a highly controversial term that many are glad to see the back of, some campaigners have questioned the commission’s decision to put so much focus on this one issue. Many feel that the subject is of relatively little importance and that it distracts from much larger problems on a systemic level.
Downing Street has yet to comment, however a spokesperson for Boris Johnson did suggest the government would be backing away from the term. “The government doesn’t routinely use the terms ‘BAME’, or ‘BME’, because they are not well understood in user research, and because they include some groups and not others,” he said.
Halima Begum, the chief executive of the Runnymede Trust charity, expressed concern that it would do little to address structural issues. “If advice on the use of the term BAME is the extent of the commission’s findings, or the most pressing of its recommendations, then Britain’s ethnic minority communities are being insulted by this report and its authors,” she said.
“Regardless of the fact that many UK government departments including Defra [the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs] and the Foreign Office have been advising for years against use of the term BAME, we live in a country where Black women are four times more likely to die in childbirth than their white friends, and young Black men are 19 times more likely to be stopped and searched by the Metropolitan police than their young white neighbours. These are the sorts of issues the commission should be examining at an institutional and structural level if it is to have any credibility at all.”
Maurice Mcleod, the chief executive of Race on the Agenda (Rota), said: “Many activists working to end racism in Britain have long argued that use of BAME is problematic and so Rota is pleased to hear that the term will not be used by public bodies in future. The term came about as a way of describing everyone who is not white but this kind of generalisation leads to a lack of specificity. By zooming out and looking at all minority ethnic communities together, the experiences of particular groups, such as African-Caribbeans or the Gypsy, Roma, Traveller communities, get lost.”
Another element campaigners are concerned about is that the commission was overseen and set up by the head of Johnson’s policy unit, Munira Mirza, who has a track record of questioning whether structural racism even exists. Not only that, but she chose Tony Sewell to chair the commission and he also questioned institutional racism as a concept.
After delays pushed back its original December publishing date, the report is said to be due this week.
