With race top of the agenda, how much disadvantage do minorities in Britain actually face? For some ethnicities, the data is encouraging: British Indians now achieve on average better exam results and hourly pay than white Britons. But the picture is very different for others, especially Bangladeshis and—pertinently just now—black people.
The first chart illustrates some of the raised risks they face: school exclusion, unemployment and—to a staggering degree—being stopped and searched. None of this looks good, but is it only racism at play, or could there be other factors, such as concealed class disadvantage? In the US, the sociologist Robert Putnam has argued: “class, not race, is the dominant—and becoming more dominant—dimension of difficulty.”
Ask Britons directly about their own prejudice, and you find a sharp reduction in unease about a relative marrying someone from another race. But even in a society where racism is less acceptable, chart two shows a hard core still admits to thinking that some races are less intelligent and a large minority still presume some ethnicities are lazier.
It sounds like a recipe for disadvantage, and that is borne out in experiments. Otherwise identical CVs with “black” names yield fewer responses than those with “white” names, and evidence of ethnic prejudice has also been found to be haunting the housing market.
