‘In my Liverpool home’: an investigation into the institutionalised invisibility of Liverpool’s black citizens

Abstract

Reviewing the 22 years that have elapsed since Gifford’s 1989 report labelled Liverpool as racist, the authors focus on the fact that in a city which has had a British African Caribbean (BAC) community for over 400 years, there is minimum representation of that community in the city’s workforce. The authors investigate two major forms of employment in the city, i.e. the teaching workforce and the city’s Council workforce and one major route to employability, i.e. Higher Education Institutions in the city. They set out an evidenced argument which demonstrates the under-representation of the BAC community in two of the city’s major areas of employment. The authors hypothesise that this under-representation is grounded in institutional and structural racism.

Keywords:

• equity/social justice
• race
• employment
• teacher training

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Statement of Retraction

Notes

1. British African Caribbean: term devised by Gordon (2008) to define the repositioning of the identity of the African Caribbean population of the UK (see www.cbacs.org) The term subsumes the three existing nomenclatures of: African Caribbean, Black Caribbean and Black British.

2. The authors use the term ‘British African Caribbean (BAC) to represent the ‘black’ population. However quotations from reference sources use their original nomenclature ‘black’.

3. Pressure exerted by the Merseyside Community Relations Council (MCRC), the Liverpool 8 Law Centre, the Charles Wootton Centre.

4. The internal trawl is supposed to have been abolished, but we learned six months after it was supposed to have been abolished that one trade union was still having access to certain posts within the council. Black people are not on the inside to see what is happening, so we can only take their word’. Nelson 2000, 220.

5. in 2010 the Department for Education’s Statistical First Release stated that the Black or Black British group provided 1.8% of the national total. Even this low percentage has only been achieved through an 11% population in Inner London and 5% in Outer London, indicating how poor is the profile recorded by Liverpool at 0.5%.

6. ‘Race’ is a changeable term and we have to understand the ways in which ideologies and structures construct certain groups in ways that presume they are naturally distinct. In this sense ‘race’ is not real or a measurable quality, hence the use of quotation marks to denote its social construction. ‘Race’ is a social relationship in which structural positions and social actions are ordered, justified and explained by reference to systems and symbols of beliefs which empathise the social and cultural relevance of biologically rooted characteristics (Bhavnani, Mirza, and Meetoo, 2006, 217).

7. Data sourced from Liverpool’s Universities, i.e. Hope University, John Moores University and Edge Hill.