Unbearable whiteness of Bey-ing

November 6, 2020 10:06 AM

First published in 2017, the Colour of Power was developed to graphically illustrate the lack of female and BAME representation in the upper echelons of the UK’s most powerful institutions. With thumbnails! Of course, these 1,000ish positions are top heavy with patriarchs; but some cohorts are whiter and blokier than others. CEOs NHS Trusts? Leaders of political parties? Managing Partners of law firms? Chief Constables? Disclaimer: GreenPark are head-hunters and management consultants.
posted by BobTheScientist (9 comments total)

What a depressing list, not that I think Canada would fare any better. As this is UK-specific it would be interesting to see what schools they went to as well. Like for the relatively few BAME people on the list were they more or less likely to come from Oxbridge or public schools?
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 11:41 AM on November 6, 2020

I'm having some trouble with this BAME thing, the acronym is new to me. It seems to confound the notion of race and the fact of ethnicity.
posted by not_that_epiphanius at 3:25 PM on November 6, 2020

Isn't it just used as a more polite way of saying non-white?
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 4:17 PM on November 6, 2020

This report has some cherry picking by grouping all non whites as BAME. 0 BAME head of political parties? Of the 12 listed, 5 are in Scotland and Ireland. Scotland and Northern Ireland are 96% and 98% white respectively. The London figures are shocking though given the capitals diversity.
posted by Damienmce at 4:47 PM on November 6, 2020

Mostly depressing. The Welsh Assembly and Scottish Parliament ministers seem pretty gender balanced though.

BAME (Black and Minority Ethnic) is a pretty established term in the UK. In the UK the term "black" was sometimes used within progressive movements to include Asian and other non-white peoples, but black is also sometimes used to mean just African and Afro-Caribbean people. BAME seems to have become established as a less ambiguous term.
posted by TheophileEscargot at 9:20 PM on November 6, 2020

>I'm having some trouble with this BAME thing, the acronym is new to me. It seems to confound the notion of race and the fact of ethnicity.
It's complicated -- so let's note it has footings in whatever gains European empirical colonialism brought to the rest of the world, they were massively in the shadow of the gains taken by the European empires such that the exploitation (bodies, culture, riches, more) is a fact. We (I'm some mongrel European celtic whitey) don't really have a post-colonnial term for the people whose equity the global colonnial empires stole and whose opportunity is still not on an equitable footing, but there's a whole power dynamic in whose labels and history books get used.

BAME refers to Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic -- Britain has Commonwealth, or ex-colony nations across south, south-east and east Asia and that's a lot of people to disenfranchise.

"Victims of Colonnial Exploitation" or "Heritage from the Global South" or "Non-North-Atlantic" are divisions we could use. This document, though it's about using diverse thought to get the best people in the best place for our society. (Some people believe that there are people with not-their ethnic heritage who can't be the best people in our society because of racist criteria -- we have to oppose that as strongly as possible.)
posted by k3ninho at 1:38 AM on November 7, 2020 [2 favorites]

BAME (Black and Minority Ethnic)

Black, Asian, Minority Ethnic
posted by EndsOfInvention at 2:13 AM on November 7, 2020 [1 favorite]

And for what it's worth, while it's widely used it's not necessarily widely accepted by those it's used to describe.
posted by EndsOfInvention at 2:17 AM on November 7, 2020

Yes, it’s a useful shorthand for “people likely to be on the receiving end of racism/structural discrimination”, without centering white people by saying “non-white”, but I wouldn’t use it to refer to a specific person. Nobody is “a BAME”.
posted by tinkletown at 12:15 PM on November 8, 2020