How many is enough?

I was quite surprised to hear Lenny Henry complaining recently about a lack of ethnic diversity on television. He said:

“When I started, I was surrounded by a predominantly white workforce, and 32 years later, not a lot has changed,”

I am not sure what he really expects to see in his workplace, but with 90% of people in the UK being white, almost all workforces are likely to be predominately white. The laws of probability states that for every 100 people in the television industry, just 2 will be black and 90 will be white.

When I was a boy, the only time that I would see a black man on TV was when my father walked over to turn the set on and I caught sight of his reflection. These days television is positively brimming with black people, and other ethnic minorities for that matter. Certainly a marked change from a few decades ago. Indeed, Lenny Henry claims that nothing has changed since he started his career, but that isn’t true. Lenny Henry was unique, because he was the only black comic on TV at that time. I remember seeing him for the first time on New Faces.

However, he said advances had been made in children’s television and praised the BBC for its “fantastic” range of presenters.

Last year, BBC executives waived their annual bonuses for failing to meet their full diversity targets.

Diversity targets? Only liberal guilty white people could concoct such a phrase. Time was, a man gained employment due to being the best person for the job. Today, it is a hidden quota that must be met first, ability comes second. Perhaps it is just my generation, but I despise positive discrimination as much as negative.

When I was growing up, I knew that I had earned my place at every employer and I worked damn hard to achieve it. I would have been just as livid then, as now, if I knew I were awarded employment primarily because of my skin colour, rather than my ability. Apart from being no way to run a business, it is also unfair on all participants. It devalues non whites and demeans them, as if they need a helping hand to succeed.

Negative discrimination harms those of colour, positive discrimination harms white people. Who’s to say which is the fairer?

I rarely watch children’s television these days but I decided to take have a look at Henry’s claims. John Craven’s Newsround for instance apparently has seven presenters, two of them black, meaning almost 30% of the team is black, when it should be just 2%. This is another problem with ethnic diversity targets, they can never be met in full making them worthless. I also looked at the CBBC presenters in general. There was 34, just 29 actual humans. Of that though:

• 6 were black – 20%
• 3 were Asian – 10%
• 20 were white – 69%
• 18 men – 62%

Clearly the diversity targets are skewed here in favour of blacks, a point that Lenny Henry seems to be OK with. Therein lies the problem of these quotas, whilst blacks are doing well, those of Oriental origin do not figure at all. The inevitable merry go round then ensues, ‘we need more Chinese, women and gays…’

Surely if they just stuck to hiring people who are the best suited for the position it would all even out eventually?

He appears to be making a mountain out a molehill whilst also, at least in my view, fuelling the fires of the far right. Something which I have never forgotten but some people today seem to, this is a white country, there are more whites here than any other race by far.

By skewing things like ethnic representation in our favour we are only giving people like the BNP ammunition. London aside there are still plenty of areas in the UK where black people, or even non white people, are a rarity. Having white people see a black face as every third person on television is only going to affirm the dire warnings of people like Nick Griffin of a brown invasion leading to a brown Britain and make them feel threatened and concerned.

Britain is not an inherently racist nation, and things have changed almost beyond recognition since my youth, when ignorance rather than hate prevailed. It isn’t perfect, far from it, but race, like gender is no longer the barrier it was, or it seems, the barrier that some would make it out to be.