Fifty years on from the first race relations legislation passed in Britain, the popular press, our political leaders, and public debate all affirm that we have overcome racism. Rather than diagnosing how we got to this position, it is more productive to outline three challenges we need to overcome to get beyond it, and some tentative ideas for doing so.

The challenge of analysis

Evidence continues to show significant ethnic inequalities in the UK. Over 100 Black people have been murdered since the death of Stephen Lawrence, there are just 17 Black female professors, Black and Asian students need better marks to get into university, half of Bangladeshi men earn less than £7/hour, violence against Jews and Muslims is rising, and the entire Muslim population is being framed as a fifth column.

However, the nature of ethnic inequalities does now vary, with some groups doing well in some areas – for example Chinese and Indian pupils in our schools. We can rebut dishonest uses of this evidence that seeks to deny racism still exists by pointing out that even Indian and Chinese pupils are less likely to get into British universities with equivalent A level results, and that despite these higher A levels they are less likely to get a first, earn less in their graduate jobs, and are also still subject to racist abuse, harassment and even violence on the street.

But we must recognise that the changing evidence on race has led to some confusion regarding our analysis of the cause of racial justice. This can be seen in our shifting terminology in describing the issue since the 1990s. On the one hand terminology is becoming more expansive: from Black and minority ethnic (BME) to Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME). On other occasions, the issue is described in terms of ‘ethnic minorities’. These twin shifts are symptomatic of our difficulty in confronting directly the fact that our collective experience of race in Britain has indeed changed, even as some things sadly remain the same.

Neither of these shifts has explicitly fostered a new conceptualisation of race or anti-racism. While the BAME category indicates the increasingly various experience of non-white people, the term ‘ethnic minorities’ allows for analysis of white ethnic minorities – Jewish, Irish and now Eastern European people, all of whom experience prejudice.

However, this strength is also a weakness. Namely, it doesn’t allow us to highlight the particularly difficulties that non-white groups experience, still less to deploy more critical terms such as ‘institutional racism’ and ‘white privilege’.

Confusion regarding how to adapt our analysis to respond both to the changing nature of ethnicity in Britain, as well as the continued salience of colour-based racism partly explains why race has moved off the agenda, which is an issue not just of categories and analysis, but of mobilisation and policy.

The challenge of mobilisation

There are now 8 million BME people living in the UK, or the same as the combined population of Wales and Scotland. However, BME voters are unlikely to extract the promises that nationalist parties in Scotland, Wales, or even the DUP in Northern Ireland may get in the coalition haggling following the General Election this May.

The shifting analysis described above is partly a response to different mobilisation among various ethnic groups, and so the relatively weaker political power of BME people collectively. Not only do some Asian groups not identify as politically ‘Black’, but many have come to reject the term ‘Asian’ too, preferring Indian, Bangladeshi, Muslim, Chinese or Thai identities, and mobilising collectively on those grounds. And of course it’s not only Asian groups that identify based on their national origins: the same is true for many Nigerians, Brazilians, Jamaicans, various white minority ethnic groups, while some more recent arrivals may instead identify as migrants.

Rather than bemoan this diverse mobilisation, we should recognise the ways people currently mobilise, and that some groups may prioritise different issues. But given the relatively small population of each community, there is an opportunity and need to bring these groups together on a wider platform.

However as Runnymede learned in its ‘End Racism this Generation’ campaign, it is not easy to build and sustain a common position or mobilisation around race. For many young Black and minority ethnic people, or for already committed activists, an analysis that focuses on white privilege and institutional racism isn’t simply an academic argument, but a descriptive reality for them, both emotionally and economically.

However, such terms often make less experienced but sympathetic participants uncomfortable – and not only white British people. One of the many unfortunate consequences of the mainstream view that we live in a post racial society is that perfectly reasonable assessments of the nature of race in Britain go unheard or are deemed too radical. Putting it in slightly exaggerated terms, there is now a very wide gap between how white and non-white people speak about race. Many Black and minority ethnic people speak and think one way about race in their homes and with their families, and speak differently in public or in the workplace, having learned that certain language is viewed as too controversial or radical, with serious consequences for their ability to enjoy friendships or progress at work, as well as for the honesty of our public discourse.

In responding to this dilemma, perhaps we can be inspired by and learn lessons from Martin Luther King Jr. in this 50th anniversary year of the marches in Selma, Alabama. Dr King fully realised the need for white liberal allies, even as he also focused on black self-organisation. So while we should not avoid calling out racism or highlighting that concepts such as white privilege and institutional racism have real explanatory power, we must also recognise that a decade and more of seeing the problem as solved means that many potential allies will be bewildered and upset by this analysis, and will at least initially require a different form of messaging to bring them on board.

Policy

Policy is the third and final challenge for achieving race equality. One key issue is data, not least as there appears to be less commitment to collecting it. Without good data collection we cannot measure and so evaluate the efficiency and equity of government policy and service delivery.

However, data needs to be used effectively to hold government to account. From the comprehensive spending review to welfare reform to voting rights to apprenticeships to immigration, government indicated the disproportionate effects of these measures on Black and minority ethnic people, but failed to explain or justify these effects, much less to mitigate this predicted increase in racial inequalities. This also reflects the lack of serious political leadership on race.

A third general policy push should be on targets or even affirmative action. There is some possibility that FTSE 100 companies may adopt a race target for their boards in much the same way they have done for women. Similarly the judiciary may be willing or required to improve BME representation, and it is hard to see how the 17 black female professors can be improved upon even in the medium term with much more drastic action. The under-representation is so severe, and the people on the next rung of the ladder too few, that it will take 50 or even 100 years for many of our institutions to reflect our society.

All major British social institutions should therefore adopt a 10-year strategy to ensure that they better reflect the ethnic makeup of our society. For those opposed to affirmative action the question is: what else do you propose to do, or are you satisfied to wait for 50 years or more to remove racial inequalities?

Targeted policies will not be easy to implement in Britain today, and not just because they are currently unpopular. Last year over 100 BME people were appointed to the Civil Service Fast Stream, a significant improvement compared to 10 years ago. But only 1 Black Caribbean, and a handful of Black African, Bangladeshi and Pakistani people managed to secure a place. This suggests that outreach or even affirmative actions programmes that only focus on BME people generally may not benefit those groups most under-represented presently.

Conclusion

We must continue to highlight and emphasise the role that race plays in determining the life chances of young and old BME people living in Britain. However, when we analyse the issue, we cannot ignore colour-based racism, not just in the memories of 80 year old people born in Barbados, but for 18 year olds born in Birmingham, Bradford and Belfast.

There is an opportunity now – both with new forms of mobilisation and with the withering of traditional forms of influence in political parties and in Westminster – to come together on a common platform to reduce inequality and poverty generally in Britain. However, we should not underestimate this challenge, and not only because some powerful groups are hostile to it. We must be alive to the changes in how groups identify and experience life in Britain not simply at a conceptual or mobilisation level, but also in terms of how we design policies.

Racism hasn’t gone away, and our challenge for the next decade or more is to ensure that our message reaches the wider audience that Martin Luther King Jr .reached 50 years ago in Selma when faced with much steeper challenges. If enough people mobilise and if we focus clearly and collectively on a few key issues, we will make it more likely that the third and fourth generations of British-born BME people finally achieve equal opportunities with their white British peers.

This blog first appeared on Just West Yorkshire's website