Suchergebnisse

The murder of George Floyd by police officers in the US in 2020 reignited the Black Lives Matter movement and reverberated across the world. In the UK, many young people demonstrated their determination to resist structural racism and some organisations subsequently acknowledged the need to take action to promote race equality and reflect upon their historical role in colonialism and slavery. At the same time, resistance to these challenges mounted, with right-wing news media and the UK government initiating culture wars to disparage attempts to combat structural racism and decolonise the curriculum. This article argues that the campaign to discredit anti-racism culminated in 2021 in the production of the first major report on race for over 20 years, a report chaired by Tony Sewell and commissioned by the government. Drawing on critical discourse analysis, the author deconstructs this report. Far from making a balanced evidence-based contribution to a national conversation about race, as its proponents claim, it is argued that the report draws upon many right-wing tropes and in the process comprises a further weapon in the culture wars.

The concept of political correctness, or more accurately, anti-political correctness has re-emerged in the last decade as a major interpretive framework in the media. Populist politicians such as Trump in the US and Farage (a key advocate of Brexit) and Johnson in the UK for example routinely draw upon a discourse featuring political correctness as a bete noire. While the attack on PC is typically made by conservatives, I focus in this paper on a left wing critic, Trevor Phillips who argues that the pervasiveness of PC has fueled a populist backlash. It is argued, contrary to Phillips, that it is not PC but an anti-PC discourse that lies behind the success of populist politicians in the UK and US and that the campaign against political correctness plays well with their supporters.

With the advent in the UK of a new Labour government in 1997 and the publication of the Macpherson report in 1999, public debate over race and racism was reactivated after a long period when such concerns had remained dormant. In this article, I shall draw upon an ethnographic study of one university in the UK over a ten year period (Pilkington, 2011a). Here I shall focus on the early part of that period, predominantly 1999-2003 when arguably issues relating to race and racism were at their height. I examine how Midshire University responded in turn to the Commission for Racial Equality's (CRE's) leadership challenge; the government's strategies for higher education relating to widening participation and equal opportunities; and the race relations legislation. The story is not a happy one, with the institution constantly subsuming race under a more general agenda and in the process failing to address the specificities of race. Midshire University is unlikely to be the only university to do this. For universities in the UK are typically characterised by the 'sheer weight of whiteness' which blinds senior managers and academics to racial inequalities in their midst.

It is imperative that an appropriate balance is reached between three key principles: equality, diversity and social cohesion. In many countries across the world, however, there is a discernible move away from a concern for equality and diversity as the problem of order looms larger. I shall focus here on Britain in presenting my central thesis that there is a very real danger that a new nationalist discourse centred on community cohesion and integration is trouncing any duties on us to promote racial equality and respect cultural diversity. The paper comprises three sections. I shall firstly identify a radical hour when there was for the first time official recognition that institutional racism existed in British society and some urgency that this needed to be combated. I shall secondly highlight the fragility of such progressiveness and identify threats from the changing nature of racial discourse since 2001. Here, I shall highlight in particular how the prominence given to institutional racism, with the publication of the Macpherson report, was remarkably short lived and how multiculturalism has come under increasing attack, not least because of its purported threat to social cohesion. I shall finally offer some tentative proposals for a more positive way forward.

This paper focuses on the recent history and current operation of a well‐established multi‐agency diversion and crime prevention unit in Northamptonshire in Britain. Four themes are addressed specifically. First, we examine the place of diversionary initiatives in the context of a central government‐driven 'get tough on crime' agenda. Second, the local conditions and struggles over the fate of multi‐agency diversion in Northamptonshire are outlined. Third, we present an empirical overview of the current rationale and routine work of the Diversion Unit. Fourth, we examine the nature of multi‐agency practices on the ground and, in passing, test the claims of the influential academic 'net‐widening' and 'denial of justice'theses on multi‐agency diversion. In conclusion, we argue that a multi‐agency case‐driven approach to diversion has emerged in response to the renewed 'culture of severity'around crime control issues.