Tuesday 1 April

Beyond Compliance: the Race Challenge
 
This conference gave us another chance to examine progress in promoting equality and celebrating diversity.  Alongside champions of racial equality like Lord Herman Ouseley, guest speakers and Leeds Met experts, we considered the implications of the legal duty placed on public bodies to respond positively to the 'race' agenda.  Our particular contribution was to use both our academic research and our practical professional experience to consider the use of charters and standards as mechanisms for promoting racial equality and tackling racism.

A political belief that there are generic issues of equality to be addressed irrespective of the cause of unequal treatment (age, disability, ethnicity, gender, religion or sexual preference) has coincided with an academic interest in issues of inter-sectionality.  The individual equality commissions have been superseded by the Equality and Human Rights Commission, and of the two Standards we have been most closely involved with, one has already become a generic standard and the other is currently making that transition.  Many researchers share the concerns of campaigners worried that their issues of concern will be lost in the blandness of general principles.  At the same time they/we are asking whether existing methodologies are up to the challenges now being posed.
 
Jonathan Long and Karl Spracklen
Carnegie Research Institute

This is the latest in a series of reflections collated by guest editor Professor Sue Clegg