Key points
This report on the Home Truths 2 survey is the first major output of the Home Truths 2 programme. The insights and experiences of Black and Minoritised Ethnic people in the survey will guide the programme’s work to build a sector that takes meaningful action on anti-racism and race equity.
Overall, the survey offers glimpses of what an anti-racist future for mainstream civil society might look like. There are some signs that organisations are recentring themselves against the idea of racism but that this positioning is not reflected in practical steps. This means that the lived reality for most survey respondents is of mainstream civil society as a site of racism, not anti-racism.
Some key findings from the survey of Black and Minoritised Ethnic people in mainstream civil society are as follows:
- 77% of respondents have experienced or witnessed racism in the last five years;
- 73% of respondents feel that mainstream civil society has a racism problem;
- 68% of respondents have felt the need to ‘tone down’ their behaviour or to be on their ‘best behaviour’ in order to fit into mainstream civil society.
The picture appeared brighter in other regards. For example:
- 46% of contributors feel that anti-racism/race equity is taken seriously in their organisation;
- 47% agreed that they have already seen real progress on anti-racism/race equity in their organisation.
However, on a range of practical measures, from ongoing learning and development on anti-racism and race equity to publicly reporting on ethnicity pay gap and action plans, the proportion of organisations not acting is (sometimes much) greater than the proportion that are.
The situation on reporting racism is similarly bleak. Only 16% of those who have raised concerns said that they were satisfied with the institutional response, compared with 64% who were dissatisfied. In some cases organisations appear affronted by reports of racism and choose ‘fight, flight or freeze’ responses instead of facing claims in an open way.
Although the overall survey responses highlight UK civil society’s ongoing racism problems, there is hope. Sixty-five per cent of survey contributors are hopeful that progress will be made on anti-racism/race equity in the organisation in which they work.
Whether this hope is well founded will depend, in part, on the courage and commitment of mainstream civil society leaders and organisations and whether they are willing to undertake the hard emotional labour that moving towards anti-racism and race equity entails.
If there is enough willingness, transformation is possible. If not, then mainstream civil society will be deemed to have offered warm words on racism, but these words will offer cold comfort and count for little.
Introduction
On its release in June 2020, our report Home truths: Undoing racism and delivering real diversity in the charity sector had a stark message: that civil society did not simply have a diversity problem; it had a racism problem.
An important source of evidence for this finding was a survey carried out in the latter half of 2019. This showed significant proportions of respondents experiencing racist harms, including being over-scrutinised in the workplace and feeling that progressing in civil society meant that they would have to be on their ‘best behaviour.’
More than three years on from the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, and an upsurge in the Black Lives Matter movement, there has been greater focus on racism in civil society than there had been in the run-up to the first Home Truths report.
However, attention is not the same as action.
Our new survey helps to build a more up-to-date picture and textured account of how civil society organisations engage with Black and Minoritised Ethnic people who work for and with them. It provides an opportunity to understand whether the warm words of civil society organisations after George Floyd’s murder have been translated into meaningful institutionalised anti-racist action.
In Home Truths 2, our starting point is that it is only with the transformation of leadership, institutions and foundational ideas that civil society can move decisively to end racism in the sector and meaningfully contribute to positive outcomes for Black and Minoritised Ethnic populations.
Before moving further, it is worth outlining a working definition of racism. We define racism as the condition where the ideology of race hierarchy[1] informs, requires and justifies actions – e.g. in institutions, in the street and in wider society – that tend to harm Black and Minoritised Ethnic people and help white people.
Accordingly, anti-racism is the practice of actively identifying and ending racism by changing the values, structures and behaviours that enable it.
A related term used in the survey and in this report is ‘race equity’. Race equity is the process of ending racial disparities and breaking the link between life outcomes and ‘race’ or ethnicity. Race equity builds on anti-racism because it focuses on treating people in an appropriate way – not necessarily treating them all in the same way – to overcome inequities and to secure good outcomes for all people.
The Home Truths 2 programme is centred on building a mainstream civil society that takes serious practical action on anti-racism and race equity in relation to its workforce and the work it does in the outside world. The programme will develop practical resources and guidance for mainstream civil society and provide opportunities for leadership development.
The survey is part of the process of guiding efforts at transformation by drawing on the experiences and embedded the understanding of Black and Minoritised Ethnic people within mainstream civil society.
[1] Although ‘race’ is a scientifically meaningless concept, a significant minority of the population believe that the capacity for hard work, character traits and intelligence are all influenced by ‘race’. See Reframing Race’s research report Testing Times: https://reframingrace.org/data/testing-times.
