This book aims to help fill a huge gap in the literature around community development policy, training and practice. It is remarkable that, despite the salience of ‘race’ and ethnicity in public policy debates, at least at the level of communities if not within government, and the growing threat of racism – in all its manifestations: nationalism, chauvinism, fascism, ethnic cleansing, genocide, modern slavery – across the world, there is only one major book about community development, and that 35 years old, which took as its main focus working with black and minority ethnic (BME) groups (Ohri et al, 1982). That book, reporting largely on the experience of racialised minorities within the United Kingdom (UK), observed that the dimension of ‘race’ was then hardly on the agenda of government and outlined, in a series of case studies, the struggle of minorities to achieve some leverage against the racism that was then endemic in British society. The editors exhorted community workers (then mainly white) to ensure that minorities were fully engaged in their work and warned of the dangers facing British society if the issue of ‘race’ continued to be ignored.

Beyond this book, the issue of ‘race’ and ethnicity from a community development perspective is poorly represented in the wider literature: the Community Development Journal 's Cumulative Index, for example, lists only 10 articles in the first 35 years of publication, with a few published more recently, including a special issue on working with refugees. Thirty-five years on from that single book, with race-related disturbances in many parts of the UK (provoked by a combination of the continuing immiseration of most minorities, racist policing practices, the racist-related murders of more than 100 black and Asian people since 1997 and the failure of public policy effectively to deal with the consequences of a wider racism – Craig, 2013), this cocktail of widespread hostility – or, in many cases, passive tolerance – towards minorities in the policies and practices of most private and public agencies, not to mention the attitudes of the public at large (as demonstrated in the spike of racist attacks following the UK's 2016 EU referendum – Burnett, 2016), suggests that this warning seems well justified.