Banning BAME from the BBC is really only a partial victory
The BBC, alongside ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5, has decided to drop the acronym “BAME”, which stands for “Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic”. The decision – prompted by a recent industry report which rightly said that the acronym “homogenises culturally distinct social groups” – is a victory for all of us who worry that the current tendency to view everything through the prism of race is a mistake.
However, it is only a partial one. Yes, BAME, by lumping together people from vastly different backgrounds into one group, is a damaging idea and one best extinguished. But it will take far more than one linguistic change to end the new thinking which has been repackaged as “anti-racist” and which has all-too-often been adopted uncritically by the BBC and other media.
Take the notion of “white privilege”, which is often heard on the airwaves.
This concept is just as homogenising as BAME, ignoring the importance of class, family background and education and obscuring the prejudice that Jewish, Roma and other “white” groups can face.
It plays, too, into the damaging idea that our skin colour is what ultimately defines us.
Yet BBC Bitesize, an educational resource for children, was comfortable promoting the concept in a video with John Amaechi. The Corporation’s banishing of BAME will be for nothing while it continues uncritically to promote this divisive way of viewing the world across its programming and its online presence.
Even the term “black” cloaks the nuances and complexities of the experiences and lives of British people of Afrocaribbean origin, which should serve to remind us that ultimately we should be moving to a world where skin colour is increasingly unimportant.
Instead, it is often treated as if it were more central than ever, with Channel 4 offering The Black Full Monty and The Black Lesbians Handbook, while the BBC has a documentary called Spending Black on black-owned businesses, and a comedy show called Bamous.
This sort of well-meaning commissioning purports to improve representation, yet a 2020 report by the Creative Diversity Network (CDN) found that “[ethnic minority] on-screen representation is 23 per cent compared to the UK national figure of 14 per cent.”
The industry report that prompted the move against the term BAME stated that its use could be “used to hide failings in the representation of specific ethnic groups”.
Fine, but the suggestion that we should be obsessively pursuing exact racial representation proportionate to the make-up of the national population is absurd. It perpetuates the notion that there is competition between different races and the false idea that all racial disparities are caused by racism or discrimination.
Abolishing BAME is a small but important step in illuminating a more accurate picture of the different experiences, backgrounds and ethnic origins that make up modern Britain. But we must continue to challenge the growing fixation with racial difference within institutions, wider society and on TV.