faraz yousufzai: City bears code name shame

City bears code name shame

Blog: Blog
Verfasser: faraz yousufzai - Datum: 05 Jun 2007, 12:18

I sit in meetings and people keep talking about me. I’m not paranoid, it’s true. They don’t use my name though; that would be far too obvious. Instead, they use a special code whilst nervously glancing at me with twitching expressions.

And I’m not alone. Actually, almost half of Birmingham shares this same code name.

How odd? I’ve been led to believe that Birmingham gloriously celebrates its ‘diversity’ and ‘vibrancy’? So why have half of all Brummies been reduced down to one name. Let me re-introduce myself: ‘I’m BME’ - Black and Minority Ethnic.

Imagine if every time I wanted to talk about the ‘other’ half of Birmingham’s population I referred to them as ‘PWP’ – Poor White People. It is most degrading. But that is just what BME means: Poor brown and black people.

I just grit my teeth and smile. I know that they are not really talking about me because I’m alright.

The problem is, I cant help but flash back to that bus stop in Mere Green, when the local racist thug sat next to me and said something about ‘Pakis’ but that I was ‘alright’.

Nevertheless, labels can have their place.

Take for example the Birmingham region ‘City Strategy’. This is a plan to be approved this month by Government, setting out how the region will create more local jobs and train more local people to do them.

The problem is that nowhere in their 100+ page ‘strategy’ does it mention ‘BME’s’. There are all sorts of targets for improvement but not a single target to improve the employment rate of ‘BME’s’.

So what?

Well, did you know that for the last 20 years there has been a shameful 15% difference between the employment rates of PWP’s and BME’s? And, that based on current progress, it would take over 100 years to change this?

This of course begs the question: Whoever heads this up, how could they completely miss them out of any ‘strategy to improve the economic well being of the City’ and still keep their job?

Perhaps he/she is trying to say that different parts of the city have different challenges and we don’t give them a colour or a label because they contain all colours and all labels.

Convincing? To a young idealist like me - yes. But to older realists who have been in the ‘industry’ for 20+ years, this is just more smokescreen.

As always though, I am quietly confident that things are changing.

At Working Links for exmaple, this inequality simply doesn’t exist. We place equal proportions of white, brown, black and every shade in between and we never, ever have to use the code word.

Published Birmingham MAIL TMG, May 2007