Bethan Harries

We Need to Talk about Race

It is not easy to name racism in a context in which race is almost entirely denied. Despite a recent focus on the ‘silencing’ of race at a macro level, little has been done to explore the effects of living with these processes, including how they might be resisted. Drawing from a study with 20–30 year olds in Manchester, this article addresses this gap. It examines how respondents disavow racism they experience when to do so is counter-intuitively understood to be associated with being racist or intolerant. These narratives demand that we ask the question, why is racism denied? Or, why is it difficult to articulate? To do this, the article argues we must access narratives in ways that reveal the embeddedness of race and contradictory levels of experience and bring attention back to the meanings and effects of race in everyday life in order to challenge racism and white privilege.

Diversity in place: narrations of diversity in an ethnically mixed, urban area

ABSTRACT This paper explores the implications of representations of places as ‘diverse’, particularly for those who live in them. Arising from an interdisciplinary research project, the paper takes one neighbourhood in Manchester (Cheetham Hill) and explores some of the narratives about it produced by residents and those who have a ‘professional’ stake in the area. These are put in the context of public narratives of the area, as well as Census data. The paper examines how different types of data generate different stories and how different methodological approaches can produce varied understandings of place, which have implications for how a place comes to be known and for the potential impact on the distribution of resources. Cheetham Hill is known as ‘diverse’, or even ‘super-diverse’, but the paper examines how this label serves to obscure lived experience and inequalities and can reveal ambivalences over the ethnic difference and urban living.

The roles of social housing providers in creating ‘integrated’ communities

ABSTRACT Cohesion and integration agendas in Britain can be characterised by localisation of ‘race relations’ responsibilities and the importance of local institutions in shaping neighbourhoods has been acknowledged. However, little is understood about the roles of housing providers in integration initiatives. Indeed, research on housing and race has experienced a lull in the 2000s. Thus, this paper aims to examine how social housing providers negotiate their positions and are complicit in constructing a certain vision of community. It draws on interviews from the ESRC Centre on Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE)’s work in the ethnically diverse neighbourhoods of Cheetham Hill (Manchester), Newham (London), Butetown (Cardiff) and Pollokshields and Govanhill (Glasgow). The paper makes three arguments: first, that race and ethnicity as facets of ‘integration’ have been subsumed into broader agendas, yet remain implicit in community building; second, that housing organisation practices are often detached from local meanings of community and prioritise exclusionary activities focusing on behaviour change and, third, that the roles of housing organisations in constructing ‘integrated’ communities are highly variable and localised, influenced by the history and contemporary dynamics of place.

Reconstituting Race in Youth Studies

‘Hamid’, a young British-Somali living in Manchester, explains how he routinely negotiates his identity. At work, he passes as Caribbean rather than Somali because he is black and walks with the so-called ‘Moss Side limp’. This assumption is made based on where he lives and how he acts but, in spite of the fact that he has a Muslim name. Indeed, his passing is so successful that when fasting during Ramadan, people think he is joking. He recognises an advantage to being associated with a Caribbean identity these days because, ‘[Racism is] more of a religious thing [now]. So, the emphasis has been taken away from black people onto Asians—from one brown to a lighter brown. People are not so interested in the gangbangers, they’re looking for more religious terrorists, so that kind of helps you out.’ In contrast, Hamid describes himself as classless and raceless but conscious of various ‘codes’ that he has picked up from living in different parts of Manchester and mixing with people from different racial, class and religious backgrounds. He explains how he has to keep these ‘lives’ separate in order to maintain an effective blurring. In order to pass effectively in each space, he must change the way in which he interacts with it by meeting some in certain spaces but not others. ‘When in Rome, do as the Romans’, he jokes.1