Sway by Pragya Agarwal

Author:Pragya Agarwal [Agarwal, Pragya]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781472971371
Google: Tt3LDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2020-04-01T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

It’s Not Black and White

In early 2019, the well-known rapper Stormzy pulled out of his headline slot at Snowbombing festival in Austria just hours before he was due to perform, accusing its staff of racially profiling1 his friends by looking for someone carrying a weapon, ‘despite no one [in their party] fitting the description.’

A recent investigation by the Bristol Cable and Bureau of Investigative Journalism shows that, in the UK, nearly a fifth of all people stopped and asked to prove their immigration status are British, and this figure has remained unchanged for almost seven years. Immigration officials are supposed to conduct their checks based on intelligence or behaviour that gives them ‘reasonable suspicion’ someone has committed an immigration offence. Yet people are being targeted as per their race and ethnicity, and since the start of 2012 British citizens have been subject to immigration spot checks more than 25,000 times. Labour MP David Lammy and other politicians have spoken about their own experiences and have insisted that racial bias is increasingly playing a role in this. The Equalities Act 2010 makes it illegal to stop someone on the basis of their race or ethnicity, but the Home Office does not routinely record the ethnicity of those encountered and so it is difficult to say with 100 per cent certainty how many of these stops were of people who were non-white. People’s experiences, however, seem to echo my own and are evidence of the way race and ethnicity play a huge role in who is stopped and searched.

In December 2018, a survey for the Guardian of 1,000 people from minority ethnic2 backgrounds found they were consistently more likely to have faced negative everyday experiences – all frequently associated with racism – than white people. This survey laid bare what minority ethnic communities had been feeling and expressing for a while. The survey found that 43 per cent of those from a minority ethnic background had been overlooked for a work promotion in a way that felt unfair in the last five years – more than twice the proportion of white people (18 per cent) who reported the same experience. The results also showed that minority ethnic individuals are three times as likely to have been thrown out of or denied entrance to a restaurant, bar or club, and 38 per cent of respondents from minority ethnic backgrounds said they had been wrongly suspected of shoplifting, compared with 14 per cent of white people. I can vouch for how this kind of racial profiling and prejudice can cause feelings of confusion, shame and terror.

Racial discrimination emerges from stereotypes. This leads to prejudice, discrimination and structural racism that is fostered in society through criminal justice, employment, media, education, healthcare and other systems. Such discrimination can also lead to interpersonal racism, where negative feelings and interactions result between individuals. This is a manifestation of structural racism, and while this is more obvious and explicit, interpersonal racism can be often unacknowledged.

Research has shown that

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