Slipping through the ‘racial equality’ cracks

The uncompromising recommendations of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry with regard to institutional racism generated widespread political and public response and commitment to racial equality. However, in their efforts to avoid being labelled as institutionally racist, few organisations reflected on the gendered nature of their racial equality policies and practices. Few have stopped to consider that the Lawrence Inquiry was an all-male committee and may therefore have had a male-centred view of racism. In terms of racial equality, it is still a man's world. Thirty years on, the African-American women's saying of the 1970s – “all the women are white and all the blacks are men, but some of us are brave” – still holds true (Hull et al, 1982). Gender is still seen as a white woman's issue, while it is taken for granted that ‘race’ is a black male issue. Black and minority ethnic women appear to fall into the cracks between the two. They are often invisible, occupying a ‘blind spot’ in mainstream policy and research studies that talk about women on the one hand or ethnic minorities on the other.

Black and minority ethnic women still do not seem to be part of the race equality picture of the new millennium. The ‘new language’ of racial equality and inclusion, in the context of the liberal democratic discourse on equality and anti-discrimination, has been constructed around the dominant masculine agenda of objectives and targets, enforcement and evaluation, recruitment and audit (CRE, 2001). The pervasive discourse on social inclusion through ‘respecting diversity and achieving equality’ has at its core the concept of the ‘recognition of difference’. However, the social construction of ‘difference’ does not include the invisible or messy contradictions black women pose by their presence. Diversity is now about good public relations and inclusivity as good business sense (Fredman, 2002): it is more about ‘getting the right people for the job on merit’ and the ‘business benefits of a more diverse workforce’ (Cabinet Office, 2001). It is not, then, about removing exclusionary barriers to participation and equal access. However, when we read of the commitment of public sector organisations to ‘meeting needs’, ‘facilitating access’, ‘flexibility’, ‘embracing difference’, and ‘working in partnership’ with black and minority ethnic people (Cabinet Office 2002), it is assumed that racial equality and social exclusion are gender-neutral experiences.