As chief executive Simon Stevens ends his stint at the helm of England’s National Health Service (NHS), a Black health activist takes a critical look at the direction of travel on racial equality under his leadership. He argues that ‘racial democracy’, i.e., ethnic representation or diversity, has displaced the rooting out of racialised injustice and inequality. Using the example of the health service, he reveals just how the struggle against racism in institutions has been reduced under neoliberalism to a mechanical mathematics of inequality. While, simultaneously, long-discarded eugenicist and biological arguments are making an unwelcome comeback, and the ‘hostile environment’, ushered in by New Labour when Stevens was a health adviser, takes its toll on migrants and refugees.
See Wayne Farah, ‘Institutional racism in the NHS intensifies in times of crisis,’IRR News, 23 April 2020.
4.
See Adolph Reed Jr., ‘Skin Deep’, in Class Notes: posing as politics and other thoughts on the American scene (New York: The New Press, 2001).
5.
See Reed Jr., ‘Skin Deep’ and Adolph Reed Jr. and Merlin Chowkwanyun, ‘Race, class, crisis: the discourse of racial disparity and its analytical discontents’, in Socialist Register 48 (2012), https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~merlinc/ReedChowkwanyunSR.pdf.
6.
The Windrush scandal refers to revelations in 2018 that people who arrived as children from the West Indies (‘The Windrush’ being one of the earliest ships) were being wrongly detained, deported and deprived of rights if they could not produce the necessary paperwork to prove that they and their families arrived quite legally between 1948 to 1973, when Britain was desperate for labour, particularly in the National Health Service. They were affected by the ‘Hostile Environment’ created in 2012, whereby many institutions were dragooned into immigration control and demanded paper evidence from users. See Frances Webber, ‘The embedding of state hostility: a background paper on the Windrush scandal’, Institute of Race Relations, 2018, https://irr.org.uk/app/uploads/2018/11/Embedding-State-hostility-v4.pdf.
7.
WilkinsonRichardPickettKate, The Inner Level: how more equal societies reduce stress, restore sanity and improve everyone’s well-being (London: Penguin, 2019).
8.
For a critique, see Jenny Bourne, ‘Unravelling the concept of unconscious bias’, Race & Class 60, no. 4 (2019).
9.
KalevAlexandraDobbinFrankKellyErin, ‘Best practices or best guesses? Assessing the efficacy of corporate affirmative action and diversity policies’, American Sociological Review 71, no. 4 (2006), pp. 589–617; Frank Dobbin, Inventing Equal Opportunity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).
Roger Kline, ‘The “snowy white peaks” of the NHS: a survey of discrimination in governance and leadership and the potential impact on patient care in London and England’, University of Middlesex, 2014, https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/edc7-0514.pdf.
