Don Flynn on racial bias
Structural Racism: The Dynamics of Opportunity and Race in America by Stephen Menendian published by Routledge
It is now over a quarter of a century since the Macpherson Report on the findings of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry offered a definition of “institutional racism” as “the collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture, or ethnic origin. It is detected in processes, attitudes, and behaviour that disadvantage minority ethnic people through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness, and stereotyping.”
Compelling at the time and seeming to promise new avenues for active policy that would push harder for the elimination of racism, the idea made waves for a few months but then seemed to drift to a halt. A pushback was gradually underway, which insisted that Britain was changing and no longer generated disadvantage for its ethnic minorities as a comprehensive response to their presence. When the report of the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities, chaired by the sociologist Professor Tony Sewell, came out in 2021, the chairperson’s introduction could declare, “Put simply, we no longer see a Britain where the system is deliberately rigged against ethnic minorities. The impediments and disparities do exist, they are varied, and ironically, very few of them are directly to do with racism.”
Sewell argued that racism existed as a residual consequence of the failure of some minority communities to grasp the opportunities that now existed across society. Voices from across the spectrum of politics, academia and policy expertise howled in opposition to this conclusion, but it can nevertheless be said to have shunted inquiry into the best way to deal with the evidence of ethnic penalty into sidetracks about family cultures, attitudes to education, and failure to adapt to the demands of a rapidly changing labour market.
This new book by a noted US scholar of social group inequality might help reinvigorate the arguments made for entrenched racial bias existing deep within the social system, but it will mean going beyond the conceptual limits implied by the term “institutional” racism and thinking instead of its “structural” character. The former term implies that racism arises from the practices of a unique institution, with borders between itself and the rest of society which make it impervious to wider efforts to move beyond entrenched prejudice. For Menendian, the very idea of “prejudice” – unwittingly or otherwise – as the driver of racism needs to be dethroned as the key issue to be considered. The production of racist outcomes takes place independently of the will of the people who work within it. Its logic needs to be resituated in the way society generates what he calls opportunity structures, which configure the range of possibilities for life that are produced differentially across population groups.
Drawing on the evidence of structural racism in the US, the book considers the way opportunity structures emerge across three social spaces – regions, municipalities, and neighbourhoods. At the regional level, we are broadly talking about the economy and what this offers in terms of career or business opportunities, with consequences for the tax base that will support decent quality infrastructure and public amenities.
The municipal space in the US defines the character of housing, and whether an area is zoned for middle-class family homes or multi-family apartments. The neighbourhood is responsible for effects which define a locality as being on either an upward curve (gentrifying), declining (flight of affluent and replacement with hard-pressed strugglers) or merely held somewhere between the two.
The interaction between these three spatial dimensions provides just a framework in which a wide range of factors interact. These are characterised as “a network of nodes and links, formed by institutions, infrastructure, social networks, markets, and both public and private resources.” Acting within this matrix does not forgo the possibility of social mobility for groups within this structure, since each might bring some resources, or have the simple good fortune to access an asset which is not generally available. But the overall picture, as it is established for the mass of people who have been constituted or racialised as minorities, is one of entrapment within a chronically limiting system which places a ceiling on how far they can rise in the world.
This is a book written primarily for the US policy community, and it sets out perspectives which are not directly applicable to the situation in the UK. But its insistence on the structural, as opposed to institutional character of racism, is relevant. If it is absorbed into the British policy discourse, it will help move things beyond specialised jousting with policing, education, housing, employment, etc, policies and help us reach a better understanding of how these institutions work together within a structure that generalises racial disadvantage.