Warm words, cold comfort
UK civil society’s ongoing racism problem
Written by Sanjiv Lingayah. Photo by Phoebe Davies.
On its release in June 2020, our report Home truths: Undoing racism and delivering real diversity in the charity sector had a stark message: that civil society did not simply have a diversity problem; it had a racism problem.
An important source of evidence for this finding was a survey carried out in the latter half of 2019. This showed significant proportions of respondents experiencing racist harms, including being over-scrutinised in the workplace and feeling that progressing in civil society meant that they would have to be on their ‘best behaviour.’
More than three years on from the murder of George Floyd in May 2020, and an upsurge in the Black Lives Matter movement, there has been greater focus on racism in civil society than there had been in the run-up to the first Home Truths report…