Why must voluntary and community organisations openly practise anti-racism today?
The simplest answer is that racism continues to damage people’s lives.
But there is a wider answer too. Racism damages the health of our organisations, communities and society. It distorts how we understand one another, whose knowledge we value, who receives opportunities and who is expected to remain silent.
Anti-racism is an antidote to that damage.
It is not simply a specialist concern for Black people or another policy to be added to an organisation’s equality statement. It is an active, continuing practice through which we identify and change the cultures, decisions and distributions of power that allow racial inequality to persist.
When practised honestly, anti-racism improves conditions for everyone.
The past is still present
Britain’s colonial empire may have largely disappeared from the map, but many of the ideas, institutions and economic relationships created through empire remain influential.
Alongside the global spread of English language, law, commerce and education sits another legacy: the construction of racial hierarchy and the pseudoscience used to justify the enslavement, dispossession and exploitation of African and other colonised peoples.
England’s involvement in the trafficking of enslaved Africans developed over centuries. In the 1560s, John Hawkins undertook slaving voyages with royal support. By the seventeenth century, English colonies in the Caribbean and North America were developing legal systems that treated African people and their descendants as property.
The scale and reach of this involvement have been brought into sharper focus by the publication of the Register of British Slave Traders (britishslavetraders.org) in September 2026. Researchers identified approximately 13,000 people who invested in Britain’s trafficking of more than three million enslaved African men, women and children over nearly 250 years. The records reveal the involvement of monarchs, parliamentarians, merchants, financiers, clergy and more than 1,000 women. They also help trace how wealth generated through the slave trade became embedded in banks, churches, schools, hospitals, charities and cultural institutions – many of which remain part of British life today. The Guardian’s reporting describes it as the most comprehensive single picture yet assembled of those who financed Britain’s slave trade.
The profits of slavery flowed through plantations, ports, merchants, insurers, banks, manufacturers, universities, churches and wealthy families. They helped shape institutions that remain part of British life today. When slavery was abolished across most of the British Empire in the 1830s, the formerly enslaved received no compensation. The British government instead provided £20 million to enslavers, around 40% of annual government expenditure at the time. More than 800,000 African people were emancipated, but many were compelled to provide years of further labour through the so-called apprenticeship system. The compensation debt was incorporated into the national debt, with its final associated repayment made in 2015.
Legal abolition did not abolish the belief systems that slavery had produced.
Racial hierarchy was adapted to justify colonial occupation, economic extraction, segregation, unequal citizenship and discrimination. It continued through popular entertainment, education, employment, housing, immigration policy, policing and the stories Britain told about itself.
Progress has usually followed pressure
Post-war Britain invited people from the Caribbean and other parts of the Commonwealth to help rebuild the country and staff its transport system, factories, hospitals and public services.
They arrived as British citizens. They were nevertheless confronted by the colour bar in housing and employment, racist violence and unequal treatment by public institutions.
The pattern that followed is familiar.
Communities experience discrimination. They organise, protest and demand change. Government commissions an inquiry, publishes a report or introduces legislation. Institutions adopt new language. Attention then moves elsewhere, often before the underlying distribution of power has substantially changed.
The Race Relations Acts, the Scarman Report following the 1981 uprisings, the Gifford Inquiry into policing in Broadwater Farm and the Macpherson Inquiry following the murder of Stephen Lawrence were all responses to conditions Black communities had already exposed.
Each intervention mattered. Yet racism did not disappear.
Today, many organisations speak confidently about equality, diversity and inclusion while remaining uncomfortable with the more difficult work of examining institutional power, leadership, money, recruitment, commissioning, organisational culture and accountability.
Diversity can change who is present.
Inclusion can invite people to participate.
Anti-racism asks who holds power, whose interests are being served and what must change.
Why the voluntary sector matters
Voluntary and community organisations often work with people experiencing poverty, exclusion, discrimination, ill health or insecure housing and employment.
This gives the sector both an opportunity and a responsibility.
Organisations cannot effectively challenge inequality outside themselves while reproducing it internally. A diverse photograph, a Black History Month event or a statement condemning racism cannot substitute for examining who makes decisions, who receives funding, whose work is properly paid and whose knowledge is recognised.
Proactive anti-racist practice might include:
- examining racial differences in recruitment, progression, pay and staff retention;
- paying community members for their expertise rather than repeatedly requesting unpaid consultation;
- making funding, commissioning and partnership decisions transparent;
- ensuring Black-led organisations have access to resources, infrastructure and long-term investment;
- recognising how apparently neutral procedures can produce unequal outcomes;
- creating safe and credible ways to challenge discrimination;
- sharing decision-making power with the communities most affected; and
- holding leaders and trustees accountable for measurable change.
This is not about assuming that every white person has an easy life or that racial injustice is the only form of inequality.
It is about understanding that racism shapes who is believed, protected, funded, promoted or punished—and that it often intersects with poverty, disability, gender, immigration status, sexuality and class.
How does everybody benefit?
An anti-racist organisation must become better at listening, learning and questioning its assumptions.
It must make decisions more transparently. It must notice whose voice is absent. It must distinguish between intention and impact. It must create ways for people to challenge authority without fear of retaliation.
These practices benefit everyone who has been ignored, underestimated or excluded.
Fairer recruitment benefits candidates who do not have access to influential networks. Transparent pay systems benefit workers who are uncomfortable negotiating privately. Accessible meetings benefit disabled people, carers and those with limited time. Sharing power with communities produces services grounded in lived reality rather than institutional assumptions.
Anti-racism does not solve every injustice. But it strengthens the habits and structures through which many forms of injustice can be confronted.
This does not mean that everybody is harmed by racism in the same way. Black and racialised communities experience its direct and disproportionate consequences. A universal benefit argument must never erase that reality.
It means that nobody ultimately thrives in a society organised around inherited ideas of superiority, inferiority, domination and exclusion.
The questions we must ask
Anti-racism is not a destination or a badge of moral approval. It is a practice.
For voluntary organisations, that practice might begin with some uncomfortable questions:
- Who holds power in our organisation?
- Who decides how money and opportunities are distributed?
- Whose knowledge is treated as professional expertise?
- Who undertakes unpaid or poorly paid work?
- Who feels safe enough to disagree with senior leaders?
- Are the communities we serve helping to make decisions, or are they merely being consulted?
- What happens when somebody reports racism?
- What measurable difference has our commitment made?
The antidote to racism is not silence, neutrality or another carefully written statement.
It is the sustained practice of recognising injustice, redistributing power and changing the conditions that allow inequality to reproduce itself.
Anti-racism makes the greatest difference to those most directly harmed by racism. But the society it seeks to create, fairer, more truthful, more democratic and more compassionate, is better for us all.
Afiwe editorial note
Afiwe provides space for community voices, interviews, commentary and lived experience. Views and opinions expressed by interviewees and contributors are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of Afiwe, its publishers, partners or funders. Afiwe aims to distinguish clearly between opinion and verified fact and to provide appropriate context where matters are contested, developing or subject to ongoing proceedings.
