Research Topic: What happened to Migration, Ethnicity, Race and Diversity in a Post-Brexit and pandemic Britain?

Sin Yi Cheung ^1* Steve Garner ^2* April-Louise Pennant ¹ Sofia Vougioukalou ¹

• ¹ Cardiff University, Cardiff, United Kingdom
• ² Swansea University, Swansea, Wales, United Kingdom

Wisniowski and colleagues' review focuses the economic impact on ethnic minority communities in the city of Greater Manchester, highlighting differences pre, during and post-COVID 19. In a similar vein, Li and Ding examine the impact of different types of social capital, namely, networks of contact, support and trust, on the well-being of minoritised ethnic groups from different social classes across the UK.Interestingly, when isolated, Li and Ding find that all three domains of social capital they identified improved wellbeing scores. However, when all are included at once, the outcomes worsened. In other words -too much effort and sacrifice in Covid times lead to poorer outcomes. The article concludes that there were no specific ethnic impacts. Indeed, Li and Ding's summary is deceptively concise: "the root cause of disadvantage thus lies in socio-economic inequality rather than ethnicity, but ethnicity is a notable bearer of such inequality".What is the relationship between socioeconomic inequality and ethnic inequality in this period? The answer is that there is more than one relationship. Anyone who has worked on ethnic or racial disadvantage would find the articles here an enlightening read. Wisnowski and colleagues' fascinating data compilation covers inter alia, universal credit take-up, food, financial and housing security, encouraging us to reflect on that final conclusion about ethnicity 'bearing' socio-economic inequality. For a long time, the patterns of UK wealth, poverty and advantage/disadvantage have demonstrated an 'ethnic penalty' (Cheng and Heath, 1993) for ethnic minorities, and that this penalty has particular ethnicised consequences for the distribution of opportunities, wealth and poverty (Garner and Bhattacharyya, 2011;Picitto et al., 2024). Even within ethnic groups there are patterns of wealth and poverty, and this is the norm from decades of study. So, when the conclusion is phrased as 'socio-economic inequality rather than ethnicity' (Li and Ding) it suggests a binary or causal relationship, which is, we would argue, an over-simplification.As social scientists, binaries are not usually our friends. It is not a random pattern of socio-economic outcomes. How people got into the various deciles when we start data collection is not a given, so the statement that socioeconomic status is more important than ethnicity relies on starting the clock at the beginning of data collection rather than understanding that patterns of discrimination and relative advantage have produced these departure points, and shaped the evolution of outcomes analysed in this piece. Indeed, Wisnowski et al (p12) argue that: '… ethnic minorities have faced worse labour market outcomes due to the pandemic and restrictions than White people across the UK. The government's provisions have not included enough consideration for prior inequities in the labour market and the ways in which ethnic minority groups were uniquely impacted by the pandemic because of these'.These 'prior inequities' are the key to decoding pandemic experiences: the disproportionate numbers of ethnic minority workers in frontline, precarious and essential services, obliged to use public transport and with a higher risk of living in poorer housing exposed them to a higher likelihood of contracting Covid and also of worse labour market impacts at the end of the pandemic.This entanglement of the socioeconomic with race and ethnicity leads us to Ayodeji Ogunrotifa's opinion piece, in which he critiques a high-profile US theoretical intervention on race: Emirbayer and Desmond (2015). This book has received a lot of criticism from race scholars, particularly for its minimal engagement with the perspectives of scholars of colour, and the fact that they wrote a prescriptive tract about the putative paucity of theory in a field where neither had expertise. Ogunrotifa's critique identifies a lack of connection with the workings of capitalism, i.e. a failure to theorise in context. He points out that the process of racialization is not mentioned in the book, and notes that contemporary forms of racism are more varied in their foci than just the body (as it is assumed in Emirbayer and Desmond). This could also be a critique of basing definitions of racism on ideology alone. While no critical race scholar can work without acknowledging the material and economic dimensions of the actors and the relationships that they study, Ogunrotifa's final framing, like that of the network of scholars he cites, claims theoretical primacy for the material (economic) over the cultural (race). Nothing can be resolved by attention to racial democracy and multiculturalism he argues, because capitalism will still strain those social organising principles in times of crisis. This is obviously a challenging, although far from new proposition for those of us invested in less deterministic frameworks, with race at their centre. Indeed, this tension between class and race -both as conceptual tools and sources of experience -has existed pretty much since the early days of the sociology of racism, and has brought us landmark pieces of scholarship such as Cox's Caste, Class and Race (Cox, 1948), Robinson's Black Marxism (Robinson, 1983), Miles' Racism and Migrant Labour (Miles, 1982) and ultimately the 'racial capitalism' paradigm (Bhattacharyya, 2018). Ogunrotifa's input into this Research Topic is a part of that tradition.Communication and shared ideas link the other two papers in this collection. The first attempts to identify patterns of Welsh Twitter users' engagement with the EU Referendum. It's refreshing to see a Welsh focus on research on Brexit, and indeed the political engagement with immigration, so this is a step in a good direction. With all the caveats about representativeness, Larissa Peixoto Gomes seeks to discover whether Welsh and English Twitter demonstrate similar or distinct patterns of discourse on Brexit. Her study reveals a good deal of complexity. While both focus on politics and nation more than anything else, the Welsh emphasis is less on immigration and when it is, it is more positive than the English. However, the connections between race, immigration, the economy and support for the two voting options do not seem to be particularly strong for either, in this sample.Lastly, Garner's contribution goes beyond Britain and links two ongoing campaigns led by the state and supported by social movements, aiming to push back against anti-racist advances, as slim as they may be, in the USA and France. Opposition to anti-racist scholarship and all things associated with it have a long history in America, and opposition to Muslim immigration in Metropolitan France could similarly be dated back generations. However, the central state in France and the State governments in the USA have never before adopted such proactive and critical engagement with the concepts and scholars themselves as has been the case in the past few years. Patterns of discourse shape the French state's critique of the concept of Islamophobia and the American states' critique of what they shorthand as 'Critical Race Theory'. Such attacks are funded, organised and engaged in by non-state actors too, and this moment is worth identifying in the long arc of the struggle against racism, as an important watershed. Britain has witnessed similarly fraught engagement with officially defining Islamophobia, and institutional racism over recent years. The work in this Research Topic enables us to touch a number of issues running through the contemporary analysis of race and ethnicity: the material inequalities embedded in British society that the pandemic exacerbated; the fine distinctions within the UK over Brexit (which of course remain to be studied further); the longstanding argument over how to ultimately resolve social inequalities that sits behind all race scholarship; and the state's newfound populist urge and capacity to engage in ideological warfare with the proponents of antiracist paradigms, and portray them as battles over the nation's soul.