Race and Ethnicity in United Kingdom Public Policy: Education and Health

Abstract

The idea that there are groups of people so distinct that they form separate races has long been discredited by biologists (Bodmer and Cavalli-Sforza, 1976; Gribbin, 1985 and others). Genetic variation within a supposed racial group will be greater than that commonly found between groups (Hirst and Woolley, 1982; Washburn, 1980). Mindful of this, sociologists have turned to concepts of ethnicity which refer to socially constructed differences grounded in cultural processes, ancestry and language (Fenton, 1999).¹ However, this manoeuvre does not obviate all the difficulties associated with biological race; over forty years ago Franz Fanon (1962) saw ethnicity as the ‘new racism’ (see Gillborn, 1999 for a more recent account).

No sooner do we mention ‘race’ than we are caught in a treacherous bind. To say ‘race’ seems to imply that ‘race’ is real; but it also means that differentiation by race is racist and unjustifiable on scientific, theoretical, moral, and political grounds. We find ourselves in a classic Nietzschean double bind: ‘race’ has been the history of an untruth, of an untruth that unfortunately is our history … The challenge here is to generate, from such a past and a present, a future where race will have been put to rest forever. (Radhakrishnan, 1996, cited in Gunaratnam, 2003)