Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race(20)

When it comes to women, lack of representation prompts calls for all-out quotas. A 2015 London School of Economics report called for gender quotas in all senior public and private positions. When a survey in the same year showed that less than 20 per cent of senior managers in the City of London were female, women in the financial sector began calling for quotas to tackle the over-representation of men.29 And when surveyed in 2013 over half the women working in construction – many of whom were working in companies where women were just 10 per cent of the workforce – supported the idea of quotas.30

But when it comes to race, the language used to raise awareness of similar issues is much less definitive. Instead of talk of quotas – where progress can be measured with numbers – the solutions posed are vague. The head of the Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills suggested positive discrimination in teaching recruitment in 2015, stressing that the ethnic mix of teachers should reflect the pupils they teach.31 When he was head of the Greater Manchester Police, Sir Peter Fahy called for a change in equality legislation so that police constabularies could use positive discrimination when hiring black police officers, but he was sure to let it be known that it wasn’t about ‘targets’.32 It seems that the root of the problem of both the under-representation of race and gender is essentially the same, but the solutions proposed for each are radically different. When there are no hard targets behind programmes of positive discrimination, initiatives are in danger of looking like they’re doing something without actually achieving much.

Positive discrimination initiatives are often vehemently opposed. Descriptions of the work addressing the over-representation of whiteness inevitably reduce it to tokenism, nothing more than an insult to the good hard-working people who get their high-ranking jobs on merit alone. Whenever I do the panel-event circuit, meritocracy and quotas tend to be an issue that rests heavily on audiences’ minds. The main questions asked are: is it fair? Do quotas mean that women and people of colour are receiving special treatment, getting leg-ups others can’t access? Surely we should be judging candidates on merit alone? The underlying assumption to all opposition to positive discrimination is that it just isn’t fair play.

The insistence is on merit, insinuating that any current majority white leadership in any industry has got there through hard work and no outside help, as if whiteness isn’t its own leg-up, as if it doesn’t imply a familiarity that warms an interviewer to a candidate. When each of the sectors I mentioned earlier have such dire racial representation, you’d have to be fooling yourself if you really think that the homogeneous glut of middle-aged white men currently clogging the upper echelons of most professions got there purely through talent alone. We don’t live in a meritocracy, and to pretend that simple hard work will elevate all to success is an exercise in wilful ignorance.

Opposing positive discrimination based on apprehensions about getting the best person for the job means inadvertently revealing what you think talent looks like, and the kind of person in which you think talent resides. Because, if the current system worked correctly, and if hiring practices were successfully recruiting and promoting the right people for the right jobs in all circumstances, I seriously doubt that so many leadership positions would be occupied by white middle-aged men. Those who insist on fairness fail to recognise that the current state of play is far from fair. When pressed on lack of representation, some like to cite the racial demographics in Britain, saying that because the minority of the population isn’t white, that percentage and that percentage only should be represented in organisations. This mathematical approach is the true tokenism. It is an obsession with bodies in the room rather than recruiting the right people who will work in the interests of the marginalised. Representation doesn’t always mean that the representer will work in the favour of those who need representation.

In the interests of honesty, I must disclose that there was a time when I thought efforts to increase black representation were suspicious. I didn’t understand why there was a need for it. I could never understand why, growing up, my mum had also instructed me to work twice as hard as my white counterparts. As far as I was concerned, we were all the same. So when she forwarded me an application form for a diversity scheme at a national newspaper when I was at university, I felt angry, indignant, and ashamed. At first I resisted applying for it at all, telling her, ‘If I’m going to compete against my white peers, I’m doing it on a level playing ground.’ After some cajoling on her part, I applied, got through to the interview stage, and eventually landed the internship.

A few things were apparent to me from the outset when working there. At the interview stage, I was one of the few applicants who weren’t currently studying at, or a graduate of, Oxbridge. Then, during the internship itself, I quickly understood why it was needed in the first place. To me at the time, internship schemes looking for specifically black and minority ethnic participants seemed fundamentally unfair, but once I got through the door, the black faces working there were more likely to be doing the catering or cleaning than setting the news agenda. Moreover, back then, it was rare for internships to be formalised at all. Until fairly recently, media internships had been running on word of mouth and nepotism, relying on someone who knew someone who knew someone. If you didn’t have someone in your family, friendship group or extended network who was in the profession, or you weren’t prepared to work for free, you were cut out. I worked on a shop floor for months so I could afford to work unpaid for three weeks, and my family lived in London, so my living expenses were minimal.