Britain’s stance towards ethnic minorities has been janus-faced: developing an increasingly repressive and restrictive stance towards immigration, and – supported by a strident media - portraying minorities and migrants as undermining British culture and values, ‘sponging’ on the welfare state. Domestic policies of successive governments, including some ameliorative community-based programmes of community and race relations, and occasional claims that governments were determined to create a compassionate and caring multicultural society, have not fundamentally addressed the racism inherent in immigration policy and practice. The consequence has been that the welfare of Britain’s minorities – measured by outcomes in  branch of welfare provision – has largely been disregarded by the British state. Despite these few liberal initiatives supposedly aimed at improving the lot of Britain’s minorities, the racism inherent in policy and practice persists. Worryingly for the social sciences community, this racism extended beyond the political practice and policy to its academic disciplines.

Now, prompted in part by the growth of the Black Lives Matters movement, this racism is being challenged from within a number of academic disciplines. The UK Social Policy Association recently commissioned a report on the absence of a dimension of ‘race’ in social policy learning and teaching and parallel initiatives have been taken within the disciplines of sociology and history. The SPA report has now led to a special issue of the journal Social Policy and Society in which contributions of both a theoretical and practice-based nature have been drawn together from the UK, the US, Hungary and New Zealand/Aotearoa. This collection is an important contribution to the decolonisation of the curriculum in social policy and offers detailed examples of work going on in universities to challenge the racism still underpinning much university teaching. - Gary Craig, Guest Editor

Check out accompanying content from The Social Policy Blog and Cambridge Core Social Studies blog, view author and editor interviews on the Special Issue or get in touch on social media: