What’s in a name? A lot, it turns out.
Written by Mai-Anh Peterson
Examing the erasure of ESEA minorities in national statistics and a frustrating lack of consensus around the language we use to identify ourselves.
In 2011, British Asians made up 7% of the population. East and Southeast Asians made up 30% of that number, or 2.1% of the overall population. While this might seem like a very small figure, taking into account population density in large cities, along with predictions that the ethnic minority population of the UK is set to grow by 20% by 2051 (Guardian, 2010), this means that we’ll likely be looking at more ethnic diversity than we’ve ever seen before by the time the next census rolls around in 2021.
But that’s just it. The last census in the UK was done almost ten years ago. Officially, we’re working with data that’s a decade old and only refers to a small handful of specific ethnic groups.
The official ethnic minority classifications for the 2011 census were as follows:
Gypsy/Traveller/Irish Traveller
Mixed/Multiple Ethnic Groups
Asian/Asian British: Indian
Asian/Asian British: Pakistani
Asian/Asian British: Bangladeshi
Asian/Asian British: Chinese
Asian/Asian British: Other Asian
Black/African/Caribbean/Black British
Other ethnic groups
Only one specific East Asian classification (Chinese) and all the other countries of East and Southeast Asia (sixteen in total) lumped together: Other Asian. We’ll get to the ‘Othering’ part and how that works in media representation in a later piece, because it merits its own entire discussion.
‘So why does it matter,’ you ask, ‘since the other minorities only make up less than 2% of the population?’ It’s an important question.
Let’s look at the example of Black/African/Caribbean/Black British. We know that teachers tend to downgrade students from Caribbean backgrounds disproportionately to their abilities as shown in their blind assessments, compared to Black students from African backgrounds, and certainly compared to their white classmates (Burgess & Greaves, 2009). So how on earth can we possibly make data-driven policy changes to tackle socio-economic issues affecting specific Black ethnic groups if we don’t even distinguish between them statistically at national level?
Similarly, 2020 data from the Metropolitan Police has shown that hate crime towards Asian people spiked in the UK from January-March and renewed again after the easing of lockdown. But even that brand-new data itself is confusing, with references to South and East Asians (does this include Southeast Asian by default?) or the outdated and problematic classification ‘Oriental’. Yes, you read that right: Metropolitan police reporting still classifies ESEA people as oriental. So who are we talking about? Are all ‘orientals’ East Asian? What about Southeast Asians? Where even is Southeast Asia? What the heck is BAME? Is BAME something you are born as or something you become? Who even am I? Is butter a carb?
We understand from the 2017 Lammy Review that, despite the fact that the UK Criminal Justice System (CJS) is meeting its obligations under the Public Sector Equality Duty, publishing annual figures that reveal over representation and poorer outcomes experienced by BAME people, the analysis simply does not go far enough. According to Clinks (the national infrastructure organisation supporting voluntary sector groups working in the CJS), ‘there are gaps in the data in relation to faith and to specific groups within the BAME category which mean we do not have a full understanding of the extent of inequality in the system and how it manifests.’ This ethnicity data gap is an issue in other areas, too. The Office of National Statistics (ONS), in its 2018 publication on Ethnicity Pay Gaps, wrote: ‘The ethnic groups that make up the smallest proportions of those employed within Great Britain are the Bangladeshi and Chinese ethnic groups, at 0.7% and 0.5% respectively. The estimates of average hourly pay and subsequently the pay gaps are likely to be more volatile or inaccurate for the ethnic groups with smaller sample sizes such as these.’ Translation? They don’t have enough data on other ethnic minorities to carry out accurate analysis on pay inequality. Basically, public institutions are checking boxes, but they aren’t really paying attention to the specific 'BAME' people who occupy the spaces those boxes are meant to represent. Isn’t it time we laid this unhelpful, monolithic moniker to rest?
Yet another example of inequality among ethnic minorities and a frustrating lack of data to allow a detailed analysis came in the form of a 2020 report by Public Health England, which concluded that ethnic minorities were more likely to die from contracting Covid-19 than the white population. While the report did not examine detailed reasons behind why this is the case, all signs point to the fact that we simply don’t have enough data on different ethnic minority communities to understand the jobs they are doing, the medical care they are or aren’t receiving or their economic and family situations. We know that Filipinos are the second highest ethnic minority working in the NHS. However, due to a lack of official government data, we need to rely on the experiences of organisations like the Kanlungan Filipino Consortium to provide information. According to Susan Cueva of Kangunlan, ‘Most Filipinos living in the UK are in low-paid jobs. They often live in overcrowded accommodation [because] they have to send money back home. We know there's a mix in accommodation of undocumented and NHS workers who go in and out of the house, and that concerns us.’ The lack of language to denominate these communities and subsequent lack of data is not just frustrating in cases like these; it can be life-threatening.
Even the acronym ESEA (East and Southeast Asian) is problematic. Academics can’t agree on whether Vietnam is east or southeast, an embarrassing chunk of the population has no idea where the Philippines are and nobody is sure how we talk about Korea. Even people who are ESEA don’t know how to refer to themselves. The word ‘Asian’ in the UK is very commonly used to talk about South Asians, who occupy a larger percentage of the population. This is the opposite of how our transatlantic counterparts discuss identity: under the ‘Asian American’ umbrella, there is much more visibility of ESEA people (though of course, they have their own representation issues). What ESEA does not help us to understand, though, is how differently ethnic groups under that umbrella are treated. As it stands, ESEA is the most appropriate classifier that we have, though in using it, we must be aware that even among ESEA, different groups will face different types of exclusion and discrimination. We may not know what we are, but we certainly know what we are not: we are not a monolith.So, we’ve established that ESEA people in the UK already face the linguistic challenge of how to talk about themselves, and that there’s a lack of data at government level. Let’s make it more complicated, and throw nationality into the mix! How does a British-born person of ESEA heritage, who has never set foot in Asia, identify? Hello, identity crisis.
Part of the problem with the 2011 census is that ‘British’ was included in each ethnicity category. Why conflate nationality and ethnicity? Whose job even is it to come up with these check boxes? The more I asked myself these questions, the more I felt I was pulling at a loose thread and unravelling a giant jumper of erasure and inequality.All this confusion around who’s who and what’s where tends to lead to one thing: lack of visibility. The most common issues with representation of ESEA people in the British media stem from one uncomfortable truth, and that is that erasure of and racism towards ESEAs is normalised in today’s society. How can we promote visibility of ESEAs when people don’t even know who we’re talking about when we say the acronym ESEA? When people don’t really know the difference between East and Southeast Asia? How can we amplify the different voices of ESEA folk when they are clumsily lumped together by our public bodies?
This is where we are trying to make a change. At besea.n, we strive to amplify and promote ESEA voices and presences in the media and in public consciousness, advocating for open dialogues about identity and language. In order to do that, we need to understand why these voices aren’t being listened to in the first place. That’s why we are offering a multi-part series exploring common media tropes and pitfalls when representing ESEA people - including what your organisation or business can do to help.Watch this space! And in the meantime, check out our Resources for handy guides on what is East and South East Asia.Sources:
https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2010/jul/13/uk-population-growth-ethnic-minorities
Burgess, Simon, and Greaves, Ellen, ‘Test Scores, Subjective Assessment and Stereotyping of Ethnic Minorities’ (2009)
https://www.clinks.org/sites/default/files/2018-09/lammy_review_briefing_final.pdf
