3.5 Ethnic categories

As we noted in Section 1, the names and labels used to denote specific differences – including those relating to ethnicity – are always changing. For example, the term ‘mixed background’ was first introduced in the 2001 census; also, different categories were used in the Northern Ireland census. So ethnic identities say something about how society categorises people, not about unchanging facts ‘out there’. You may also have noticed that the categories in the list refer to different things: some are about skin colour, while others refer to national or geographical origins. Then again, the list does not include some categories that people might regard as ethnicities, or might have been regarded as ethnicities in the past. One example is Jewishness, which might have been included when anti-Semitism was perceived to be the main ‘racial’ issue in the UK.

How useful is ‘ethnicity’ in understanding people’s experience of care services, and specifically their interactions and relationships within them? Several writers on ‘race’ and social policy have criticised the ways in which ethnicity has been used to account for people's needs, a process that the writer Avtar Brah terms ‘ethnicism’:

Brah makes two important points here. One is that defining people in terms of their ethnicity reduces them to one aspect of their identity, and overlooks needs that may derive from other aspects. Secondly, the process tends to assume that all members of a particular ‘ethnic’ group have similar needs. Brah also suggests that explaining people’s experience in this way overlooks the experience of racism, a point that is also made by health researcher and writer Waqar Ahmad:

Elsewhere, Ahmad echoes Brah’s concern when he argues that too rigid a conception of ethnicity or culture ‘provides a description of people which emphasises their “cultural” difference and helps to obscure the similarities between broadly defined cultural groups and the diversity within a cultural group’ (Ahmad, 1996, p. 190).

Does this mean that terms such as ‘ethnicity’ and ‘culture’ have no value in helping to account for people’s experience of using or working in care services? While acknowledging the reservations expressed by Brah and Ahmad, David Kelleher, a health researcher and medical sociologist, defends the use of these terms in some contexts, specifically referring to the experience of people of Bangladeshi origin in the UK:

So ethnic identity may assume greater or less importance in people’s lives depending on their experience of racism or other factors. Kelleher’s argument reinforces Hall’s suggestion, noted in Section 3, that identity, whether on the basis of ethnicity, gender or other factors, should be seen as a dynamic and active process of identification, rather than a reflection of some fixed or innate ‘character’. By seeing ethnic identity as, in some instances, a response to the experience of racism, Kelleher suggests that ethnic difference can be a product of ‘racialisation’, rather than its cause. Next we move on to discuss the ways in which fixed ideas of ethnic difference can be used to disadvantage and discriminate against some groups in the population.