Karen Photo: Photo courtesy Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust.
Karen Chouhan: economic equality for black communities in Britain
Rosemary Hartill continues her series of profiles of the ‘Rowntree Visionaries’. She talks to Karen Chouhan, who has developed new approaches to race equality in Britain
It was a visionary vision. ‘And I really believed it was achievable,’ says Karen Chouhan. ‘I’d been working in race equality for twenty-five or more years, there was still a pretty good swing going on race equality, and I had a whole range of contacts over the UK. So I knew the atmosphere was right, that people would come behind a new approach to race equality that was based on tackling some of the stark facts of economic disadvantage.’
The work of all the other Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust (JRCT) visionaries had a strong international dimension. ‘I found it a bit ironic,’ she says cheerfully, ’that the only black JRCT visionary and perhaps the only one not born in the UK was doing something very focused on the UK.’ The issues were also deeply personal to her.
She came over with her parents from Lahore in Pakistan, aged six months, and grew up in London experiencing and witnessing racism. In an attempt to understand the roots of inequality, she studied Philosophy at Leicester University and Race and Community Studies at Bradford. This led to her life’s aim to work for race equality. Her wide experience includes youth and trades union work, lecturing, researching, and leadership roles in a host of race equality organisations.
Today she lives with her university lecturer husband and family in a mostly middle-class Asian area of Leicester, a city where the mix includes Indian, Pakistani, Somali, Bengali, Polish and far beyond. Leicester, set to be the first city with black and minority ethnic groups becoming the majority of the population, ‘is generally very good and peaceful,’ she says.
However, inequalities exist, and nationally, she says, evidence indicates that:
• ‘black people are approximately fifteen per cent less likely to obtain jobs than the general population and this has remained the case for the last twenty years;
• on average some are paid up to twenty-one per cent less for the same job and qualifications;
• black women are likely to be paid up to a third less than a white British Christian man for the same job and qualifications;
• seventy-two per cent of Bangladeshi children in the UK live in poverty;
• around two-fifths from Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) communities live in low-income households, twice the rate for white people.’*
Her first and foremost thought after she got the visionary award was how quickly the tide had changed: ‘In that year, 2005, the 7/7 bombings occurred in London and it was as if the hurt and anger of those terrible events caused a further political regression on tackling race equality via institutional and structural discrimination.’
That same year, Trevor Phillips, the head of the Commission for Racial Equality, made a speech warning that the nation was sleepwalking into segregation. This was picked up as a way of deriding multiculturalism and set the platform for some to blame troublesome ethnic minorities who don’t integrate for being the seedbeds of terrorism. Many local authorities set up cohesion units: ‘Some of these have done very good work on building community relations,’ Karen says. ‘The point being missed was the need to challenge structural inequalities, which lead to disaffection’ (see the highlighted figures).
Karen’s vision was to develop a UK-wide Race Equality Solutions Consortium. This would be a local, regional and national grouping of key individuals and organisations, rooted in the experience of local communities, that would challenge the analysis, build awareness of the injustice, and focus the blame for terror on terrorists, not British citizens.
To begin with, the steering group called it PUSH UK to reflect an alliance with the Rainbow PUSH Coalition led by Jesse Jackson in the US. This itself was following in the footsteps of Martin Luther King and Gandhi.
Though Karen found lots of support and was building good contacts and a database, there was no infrastructure, or money for a director, website, mail-outs and so on. The solution she favoured was to locate the work in the 1990 Trust, a human rights and race equality campaign group that she had previously directed, and link PUSH UK with it. A Home Office grant was raised. A key focus was to develop an economic analysis of race equality in the UK, in both private and public sectors.
But Karen found herself caught in practical management issues within the Trust, which she had hoped to avoid. At the same time, she was still involved in the Peepul Centre – a newly developed £14 million Asian Women’s Centre in Leicester whose board she had previously chaired.
In 2007, she relaunched PUSH as Equanomics UK. This was during the successful tour she had initiated with Jesse Jackson. Timed to coincide with the bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, it encompassed thirty-five events in nine English cities over six days.
A shorter second UK Jackson tour at the end of 2008 was linked with Barack Obama’s election as president. Three follow-up events were also arranged. ‘We knew then’, she says, ‘that we had a movement with a vision with people who would come behind us.’
The idea was to work through volunteer hubs in cities, and to encourage them to get the facts about their areas, and to keep on the agenda questions like ‘Why are black people here poorer and more likely to be out of a job than others?’ There was a little group in Leicester, but being volunteers, time was an issue.
Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Bradford, Bristol and London picked it up in a bigger way.
Karen knew that politicians liked it if she and colleagues worked with them as partners, in a non-adversarial way – and had something the government really wanted. ‘And some MPs did help with it. The concept of economic justice hit the mark and did start to make waves. I was doing up to fifty presentations and debates a year’
‘What perhaps was a bit naïve’, she says, ‘was to think we could have such an influence on government that they would come to us. You only get that if you become a really strong movement that they feel frightened of, that there is some fear – or some votes – in it.’
There were glimpses of how this could work. During the run-up to the general election for example, Equanomics played a leading role in editing, authorising and distributing the 2010 Black Manifesto. Many MPs attended meetings of the BME communities held in six English (not UK) cities.
Another of Karen’s achievements is founding the Roots Research Centre. It helps make archive material accessible and provides occasional research support for various campaigns.
Equanomics has also tried to influence government policy via specific campaigns and written submissions:
• On bank reform and for a one per cent tax on bank profits and ten per cent of the dormant account funds for reinvestment in poor and black and ethnic minority communities.
• On disproportionate Stop and Search.
• On the Equality Bill
• On the need to address institutional racism
‘Overall I thought I could achieve my vision in five years or at least be a lot further along than I am now, but a series of difficulties, which could not be predicted, have taken their toll. These included the passing on of my father and sister-in-law within a year of each other; and, at the same time, a media campaign by the London Evening Standard against BME leaders and organisations to smear Ken Livingstone’s mayoral campaign, in which I was collateral.’ Also, the failing financial positions of both the 1990 Trust and the Peepul Centre in Leicester diverted Karen’s energy as she tried to keep them afloat.
Overall, one of the harder things about the visionary award, she says, was that it brought out some hostilities and jealousies.
A final thought? ‘What I’ve learned is that all this work takes far longer than you think. In my brain, I know how all the pieces fit together, but the challenge is to translate that to people in a way that takes them with you. It’s been life-changing.’
*See ‘The Price of Race Inequality: The Black Manifesto 2010’ at www.equanomicsuk.org For further information, email: info.equanomics@googlemail.com
