Half of black Britons experience workplace racism, finds survey

Half of black Britons say they are as likely to have encountered racism in the workplace as they are to have experienced it on the street, according to a survey by YouGov. 

The poll, which questioned 1,270 adults from a variety of ethnic minority backgrounds found significant divergences in the way racism is experienced by different groups. Black people were more likely than others to say their career development — in terms of hiring, training opportunities and promotion — had been hampered as a result of racism at some point.

More than 50 per cent of black Britons said this had happened at least once and almost a quarter said it had happened multiple times over their careers. 

Across all groups sampled — including people of Indian, Bangladeshi, Chinese and other Asian descent — more than half (59 per cent) said they had been on the receiving end of assumptions based on race and 44 per cent had experienced an impact on their career.

The poll, provided exclusively to the Financial Times, is one of the first that YouGov has carried out with a focus on different ethnic groups, rather than on perceptions of racism across many.

Overall, 84 per cent of those sampled said they felt that racism was present in UK society today, compared with 86 per cent who believed it was present 30 years ago. However, 47 per cent of those sampled said there was “a great deal” of it now, compared with 68 per cent who thought there was “a “great deal” 30 years ago.

This suggested that the type of racism people experienced or witnessed had changed over time, according to Tanya Abraham, an associate director at YouGov who carried out the research.

She said the poll was unusual in providing detailed insights into the kind of racism experienced by different ethnic groups, who in the UK are often lumped together under the same acronym — Bame (Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic).

“It does seem apparent that people of black ethnicity experience more racism,” she said.

But while black people’s experience of institutional and workplace racism came out more strongly in the survey — with far more saying they had been stopped in the street by authorities than people of Chinese descent for example — it was not the case in all areas.  

People from a Chinese background were more likely than black people to say they had been described using a racial slur, with 71 per cent of those surveyed saying this was the case, compared with 50 per cent of black people sampled, and 48 per cent of British-Bangladeshis.

Almost a quarter of a century since the Metropolitan Police was publicly excoriated for its handling of the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence, 69 per cent of black people sampled still thought the force was institutionally racist. This compared with 42 per cent of people from an Indian background.  

There was majority support across all ethnic categories for the recent antiracism demonstrations in the UK, which were sparked by the killing of George Floyd by police in Minnesota last month, and led by the Black Lives Matter movement. However, 82 per cent of black people said they supported the protests compared with 61 per cent of those from an Indian background and 57 per cent of people from a Chinese background.

Some of the figures in this article have been updated following a correction to the weighting by age group of the study since it was first published.