Wanted: a new image

In 2003 the Arts Council England (ACE) launched Decibel, a multimillion pound scheme to celebrate cultural diversity in the arts and promote ethnic minority artists. Two years later it announced another positive-action scheme, Inspire—which gave aspiring ethnic minority curators a placement in a major arts institution at a total cost of around £400,000 a year.

I believe that the arts should be open to people of all backgrounds. But these schemes have not addressed the real issues of class, race, social disadvantage and educational attainment—they were merely ill thought-out, box-ticking exercises.

Ethnic minorities make up approximately 7.9 per cent of the population and only 4 per cent of the arts workforce. But this is mainly a matter of class, not race. Overwhelmingly, the visual arts workforce consists of middle-class people, because they can afford to provide free labour (in the form of unpaid internships) and have a particular educational background (knowledge of the classics, art history and so on). I know many black people in the visual arts who share that background, but hardly any people—white or black—from the Hackney council estate I grew up on.

The debate about diversity in the arts has become focused on brown-skinned people as perpetual victims, ignoring the ways in which inequality affects all people from disadvantaged backgrounds. Moreover, my black peers and I are always being asked to “demonstrate our ethnicity” in a way that white artists are not. I have colleagues who also feel troubled by this but many of them are unwilling to voice their concern publicly.

Young people from minority backgrounds of the third and fourth generation have a different understanding of belonging and identity to our parents or grandparents. There is also a degree of scepticism about the race industry and its impact on the arts. While we are grateful for the struggle of previous generations against injustice, we have different stories to those who grew up in the 1960s or 1970s.

One of my concerns about schemes like Decibel and Inspire has been their impact on black arts professionals. Having been told that the sector is “institutionally racist,” some feel the only way in is through diversity placements. They can end up in effect confined to a ghetto—moving from diversity job to diversity job, part of a narrow network divorced from real decision-making and power. Others feel the need to actively distance themselves from conversations around diversity, so as to be treated as a “normal professional.”

In 2007, I wrote a paper entitled “Boxed In: How Cultural Diversity Policies Constrict Black Artists.” The aim was to challenge the diversity industry’s approach to the visual arts. It called for an end to schemes like Decibel—instead the funds could be used to support the arts education of people from socially disadvantaged backgrounds. It argued for the end to exercises which might ghettoise black practitioners. How was the report received? With a bewildering mix of vitriol, demonisation, encouragement, scorn and support—often from the same people. (The difference between the public and private faces of many arts professionals was astounding.)

ACE’s reaction was mixed. It was my primary target because it holds the purse strings for nearly all public funding on the arts. It is easy to bash organisations like ACE, but my intention was to encourage it to reconsider its approach and to consult with a wider range of arts practitioners.

Some of the most supportive people in private were ACE staff working in non-diversity roles. Perhaps because they have a more secure position within the organisation, they were confident enough to engage with dissent. Senior diversity officials and policymakers in the arts often come from local government. They apply the language of 1980s anti-racism to institutions, often without much experience or understanding of working in the arts.

ACE recently changed its definition of diversity to encompass class and social deprivation, but so far this has had no impact on its policies and programmes, which continue to target minorities.

In 2009, ACE extended the Inspire programme by introducing an educational qualification for participants, despite widespread misgivings in the sector. The result is the ACE-funded Inspire MA at the Royal College of Art—a vocational masters degree at one of the best schools for curatorial education in the world, just for brown people. How on earth did we get to the stage where ethnically exclusive tertiary education is seen as a good thing?

The announcement of this scheme was met with horror by many of my peers. Not only is it racist (can you imagine a degree just for white people?), it is also a diminished version of the RCA’s standard curatorial MA. Inspire MA students are expected to focus only on art shown in publicly funded British galleries, there are no international placements, and students are based in national museums and galleries, returning to London intermittently for the “educational” element. They do less academic work, and more vocational training. Why are ethnic minorities expected to be less ambitious, less intellectual and less outward-looking than others? If there is room for a vocational, funded curatorial MA, why is it not open to everyone?

Other articles in Prospect's special feature on the failings of multiculturalism today:

Tony Sewell on education

Lindsay Johns on dead white men

Swaran Singh on psychiatry

Munira Mirza on her hometown of Oldham