Micro level

It would be a nonsense to argue that individual prejudice and racialised discrimination are not still a part of the postcolonial condition. Even commentators such as Gilroy (Reference Gilroy2005: 438), who see multicultural conviviality as a defining feature of urban Britain, accept the continued presence of racism in Britain. Micro social theories which consider interpretative meaning in the social interactions of everyday life can illuminate micro-level racialisation. Face-to-face encounters and recognising the agential element of individual action has traditionally been considered within an interactionist framework, with phenomenological approaches attending to subjective views of reality, rather than objective factors (Roberts, Reference Roberts2006). As Lal (Reference Lal1995) has observed, processual understandings of race and ethnicity emphasise their historical and spatial context, and look to how culture is communicated between members through socialisation and interactive experience. Such ideas permeated the work of the Chicago School of Sociology's work on immigrants’ and Southern blacks’ adjustment to city life, which also examined the social distance and spatial distribution of ethnic groups (Park, Reference Park1967).

Social psychological research into prejudice and racism has pointed towards the significance of the social and cultural normative climate in which dominant ingroups (the white majority) express prejudiced attitudes, which in turn contribute to a positive self-identity (Terry et al., Reference Terry, Hogg, Blackwood, Augoustinos and Reynolds2001). Studies of racist violence indicate that individual perpetrators operate within families and communities that implicitly endorse racialised prejudice and ethnic hatred (see, for example, Sibbitt, Reference Sibbitt1997). Undoubtedly, some individuals working within welfare settings will have been exposed to, and have internalised views consistent with, what has been referred to as the ‘new racism’, where egalitarian ideals can co-exist with an anti-Black affect that causes anxiety, distrust, fear and hostility (Augoustinos and Reynolds, Reference Augoustinos, Reynolds, Augoustinos and Reynolds2001). Such approaches also recognise the inherent ambivalence of prejudice where individuals may hold both positive and negative attitudes towards minority ethnic groups, which may explain the complex nature of the link between racist attitudes and discriminatory behaviour (Terry et al., Reference Terry, Hogg, Blackwood, Augoustinos and Reynolds2001; Pettigrew and Meertens, Reference Pettigrew and Meertens1995).

Micro-level racialisation, then, is inextricably framed by the influence of familial socialisation and shared cultural values which are manifest in individuals positioned within various ethnic, classed and gendered groups. These are themselves shifting rather than static, shaping and shaped by interactions with other identity groups, and influenced significantly by local environmental conditions.

Meso level

Building on this further, the meso-analytical level is particularly concerned with situating and contextualising factors which are temporally and spatially specific. In this middle-range of theorising, the following can be considered, although this is by no means an exhaustive list: (i) socio-economic disadvantage; (ii) neighbourhood composition and effects; (iii) political, media and popular discourses; (iv) political incorporation and empowerment; and (v) institutional processes and practices.

A focus on socio-economic disadvantage and class has always been central to social policy's epicentre of work examining poverty, inequality and redistribution. Social policy analysts have also considered neighbourhood-level processes and the specific composition of communities, acknowledging the area-based experience of social, economic and political inequality (see for example Lupton, Reference Lupton2003a). The Chicago School of Sociology's more qualitative influence in analysing the dynamics of community interaction, social order and institutional arrangements, often at the neighbourhood level, also operates in this range of theorising. Political engagement has similarly been understood as a key dimension whose absence has been defined as a marker of social exclusion in a democratic society (Burchardt et al., Reference Burchardt, Le Grand, Piachaud, Hills, Grand and Piachaud2002).

Political, media and popular discourses addressing race/ethnicity, inequality and racism often contribute to ‘commonsense’ understandings of social life, which inform processes of micro-level racialisation. Migrationary flows into both urban and rural areas, for example, have been accompanied by sentiments carefully concealed in ministers’ speeches, political statements and policy documents which underline racial Otherness and project multiple negative traits on to unwelcome migrants and asylum-seekers who are viewed as welfare-dependent opportunists, rather than as potential economically profitable contributors (Schuster and Solomos, Reference Schuster and Solomos2004). Such discourses combine with the politics of resentment (Ware, Reference Ware2008) centred on the perceived unequal distribution of resources to favour minority ethnic groups and more recently concerns about Islamic terrorism. Psycho-social understandings recognise the affective and emotional component of racism, which is represented as threat, pollution and contamination by racial Others who are blamed for structural changes relating to deindustrialisation, economic inequality, housing shortage, immigration and fractured communities (Hoggett, Reference Hoggett1992). Together such views build on anxieties about both the cultural cohesion of the nation and the believed compromises required by multiculturalism (McGhee, Reference McGhee2005).

Finally, institutional racialisation recognises cumulative disadvantage experienced across interrelated welfare experiences (housing, education, employment and so on), produced through institutions’ routine operations, regardless of the intentionality of individual actors (J. Williams, Reference Williams1985).

Macro level

Structural determinants of material conditions provide the frame through which institutional processes and practices at the meso level are enacted. Globalising forces, which have produced fundamental changes in the mode of economic production, transnational politics and the unequal distribution of resources, structure social relations in Britain as elsewhere. Major demographic changes wrought by migration flows within and between North and South states have resulted in diverse social groups seeking welfare services.

The nature of welfare more broadly, and housing, education and employment specifically, have also been transformed in the post-industrialised late modern world. Deindustrialisation, technological change, casualisation and part-time working, educational credentialism, marketisation, increased owner-occupation, the residualisation of social housing, the rise of the consumer/client, and entrenched inequalities of wealth, income and power have all influenced the context in which social welfare is provided and services are delivered. Added to this, the neo-liberal stamp of decentralised governance and public managerialism have dramatically altered the way in which public sector organisations are managed, which is then translated in front-line operational practices.

Goldberg's (Reference Goldberg2001) insights on the formation of the modern racial state are also valuable for our interpretive understanding at the macro level. Through its apparatuses, modern states, it is argued, shaped articulations of race and racist exclusion, through definition, regulation, management, economic controls and the mediation of social relations. Ethnic monitoring, the surveillance and criminalisation of racially identified populations, their limited access to economic resources and the extent to which such groups interacted, all served the modern racial state. Imbibed within political and popular culture, such expressions of race (typically hierarchical) are deeply rooted in Enlightenment thinking (Eze, Reference Eze1997), and are acted upon, albeit reflexively, within institutions.

David Gillborn's (2008) coincidence or conspiracy?

Utilising the tenets of Critical Race Theory and Roithmayr's (Reference Roithmayr2003) concept of ‘locked-in inequality’, Gillborn (Reference Gillborn2008) argues that the achievement gap is a permanent feature of the English education system. Historical discrimination against minority ethnic groups has been institutionalised so that even when contemporary barriers to equality are removed, persistent inequality remains.

Gillborn's attention is specifically focused on educational practices, such as setting, coaching and examination tiering, which it is argued cumulatively disadvantage black pupils. Allocated to lower sets in maths, black pupils are then more likely to be entered into the Foundation tier for maths and English compared with their white counterparts. This amounts to a crucial lowering of academic possibilities, as pupils cannot be awarded higher grades which facilitate access to higher education and professional careers. This led Gillborn (Reference Gillborn2008: 97) to forcefully argue that ‘[i]t is difficult to think of a clearer example of institutional racism than a test, disproportionately taken by Black students, in which the highest possible grade is commonly judged to be a “failure”’.

Valuably, Gillborn (Reference Gillborn2008) also draws our attention to the way in which previous ‘knowledge’ about educational attainment in pre-school children, which showed black pupils to be performing well (using baseline assessments), has been ‘rewritten’. Instead, using the Foundation Stage Profile, which is based on teacher judgements, lower levels of early achievement among black pupils have been recorded. The enormity of this is self-evident: policy discourse now assumes a static level of black underachievement all through the education system, which deflects attention away from the role of the school in contributing to ethnic inequalities in education.

Gillborn's (Reference Gillborn2008) powerful insight into contemporary processes of schooling that reproduce and sustain inequality can be complemented by teasing out practices which additionally contribute to unequal outcomes, but which can be more precisely conceptualised as occurring at the micro meso and macro levels. It can accommodate the idea of multiple racialisations, something which Critical Race Theory, used by Gillborn, has been critiqued for not doing sufficiently, as well as incorporating intersectional explanations (Rizvi, Reference Rizvi2009). The application of the multilevel framework is presented below as an attempt to make explicit the cumulative layering of racialised disadvantage, whilst also avoiding the conflation of individual-level and institutionalised racialisation. In so doing, it specifies exactly how individual actions are framed by structural and material conditions, which are themselves built upon complex and shifting ideas about human groupings that are rooted in assumptions about racial hierarchies.

Applying the multilevel framework: educational attainment

At the level of the individual teacher (micro), racialised interactions that rely on essentialist notions of race, ethnicity and culture may taint the educational experience of some pupils who are discriminated against. In this account, the ‘unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racial stereotyping’ described in the Macpherson (Reference Macpherson1999: 6.34) element of institutional racism is redefined as micro-level racialisation, which can take account of multiple subject positions, including gender, class and religion.

FavourableFootnote ⁵ racialised stereotyping in the case of Chinese pupils and more negative racialisation where black Caribbean, black African and certain South Asian origin pupils are concerned have been documented in research studies. Such representations draw loosely on behavioural attributes, which appeared in Enlightenment classificatory systems that erroneously saw human phenotypical groupings scientifically categorised in an hierarchical Great Chain of Being to God. De Gobineau's (1853) classification, to name one example, referred to the Yellow race as tending towards apathy, lacking physical strength, having an obstinate will, but being theoretical and respecting the law. The black race, at the lowest end of the hierarchy was marked by animalism, limited intellect, great energy, wild desire and will, unable to distinguish between right and wrong. For de Gobineau, the White race had energetic and superior intelligence, perseverance, great physical power and an instinct for order. These bear a striking resemblance to contemporary racialised stereotypes, although at times these have been positively recast, as in the case of popular and commodified street culture associated with an essential blackness (Hill Collins, Reference Hill Collins2006).

According to Archer and Francis (Reference Archer and Francis2005a), representations of Chinese pupils’ academic abilities derive from teachers’ understandings of ‘Chinese culture’, which assumes high parental expectations, the valuing of education and stable family structures. These are seen as promoting obedience, respect and competition, as well as an appetite for educational success, which is supported through high teacher expectations, which have been linked to educational attainment (Mortimore et al., Reference Mortimore, Sammons, Stoll, Lewis and Ecob1988; OFSTED, 1999). Stereotypes of Chinese girls may include more negative elements, assuming passivity and patriarchal dominance.

In contrast, Youdell's (Reference Youdell2003) work reveals an inversion of the ‘coolness’ of black male identities within youth subcultures by some teachers who reproduce black boys as challenges to authority (see also Frosh et al., Reference Frosh, Phoenix and Pattman2002). Bodily and linguistic practices are often negatively interpreted as culturally deficient and then constituted by the school's organisational discourse as anti-school and incompatible with active learning, and this can extend to black girls too. Thus, micro-level actions are constituted by, and reinscribe, meso-level racialisation rooted in political and popular discourses, which typify young black men as hyper-sexual, aggressive and criminally violent (Alexander, Reference Alexander1996; Murji, Reference Murji, Ferrell and Websdale1999). It is also perhaps in this context that black anti-school masculinities are manifested, as any resistance to these micro-racialising practices by black pupils further entrenches negative labelling in a teleological manner (see Sewell, Reference Sewell1997, Reference Sewell2000; Howarth, Reference Howarth2004).

Howarth (Reference Howarth2004) too describes micro-teaching practices and behaviour management, which implicitly inscribe white British cultural dominance in dismissing the significance of Somali cultural practices, such as looking down when spoken to by adults as a sign of respect and deference – without meaningful cultural understanding, this is interpreted by British teachers as defiant and disrespectful.

For South Asian Muslim boys, teacher perceptions appear to be overly concerned with their presumed fundamentalist beliefs, patriarchal orientation, perceived self-segregation and violence (Archer, Reference Archer2003; Crozier and Davies, Reference Crozier and Davies2008). Constructions of the identities of South Asian girls position them as passive and oppressed in their home lives, despite more agential understandings of the various coping strategies which may be employed to overcome experiences of schooling which are shaped by racism in school and wider society (Shain, Reference Shain2000).

According to Reay (Reference Reay and Sveinsson2009), white working-class children have historically been depicted as culturally inferior and requiring control and surveillance in the state education system. Such ideas permeate educational practices in the contemporary period, contributing to a pathologisation of white and minority ethnic working-class children as unmotivated, unambitious and educational ‘losers’ set against middle-class ‘winners’ (see also Lupton, Reference Lupton2003b).

Decision-making by teachers – for example, choosing not to fully support and educationally challenge an individual pupil – may be influenced by these generalised and imprecise representations. This also undoubtedly contributes to the disproportionately high exclusion rates among black pupils (DCSF, 2007), which has a deleterious effect on pupils’ school careers and later employment opportunities, even though evidence suggests black excluded pupils are of above-average academic ability (OFSTED, 1999). Further empirical work exploring the subjective interpretations of teachers in these micro-interactions could valuably provide an insight into intervention possibilities.

At the meso level, class and socio-economic disadvantage have also been at the heart of sociological explanations of educational underachievement. Strand's (2008) analysis using the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England showed that low socio-economic status contributed most to White British lower levels of attainment for boys and girls, but was also an issue for black boys. Additionally, black pupils from middle and high socio-economic status homes underachieved in relation to White British pupils, despite high levels of commitment to education.

For white pupils from lower socio-economic status families, Strand (Reference Strand2008) found that low educational attainment was mediated through lower parental and pupil aspirations for educational success and a low academic self-concept (see also Lupton, Reference Lupton2003b). This is consistent with Reay's (2009) observation that many white working-class children have been made to feel educationally worthless. Evans’ (Reference Evans2007) bio-ethnography on an inner London housing estate has also suggested that white working-class educational underachievement can be partly attributed to formal learning rarely being practised in the home even though education is highly valued. As Reay has noted, working-class children are less likely to have access to private tuition and the culturally enriching activities that can be provided by middle-class parents. Additionally, for boys, according to Evans, masculine identification was associated with fighting and toughness rather than educational success, while Frosh et al.’s. (2002) earlier work indicates a clear polarisation between popularity and schoolwork. For Reay (Reference Reay and Sveinsson2009: 27), working-class pupils, ‘[f]acing an educational competition they cannot win [they] construct peer group macho and physically aggressive competitions where some of them can and do win’. Theorised by Garner (Reference Garner2007) as contingent hierarchies, white working-class identities have been pathologised in specific historical and spatial contexts, with labels from academia (‘underclass’) and popular consciousness (‘chav’) invested with the same lesser and blameworthy status (Haylett, Reference Haylett2001).

Relatedly, parental disengagement with schools, also seen to influence educational outcomes, can be related to socio-economic and class disadvantage, given the middle-class milieu of the school and increased pressure to make parents responsible for their children's learning (Ball, Reference Ball2003). This falls within the category of political incorporation and empowerment, which is itself subject to stratifying processes. The demands of contemporary employment for men and women may militate against active engagement by parents, which will impact most on minority ethnic and migrant groups because of their racialised disadvantage in the employment field (Heath and Cheung, Reference Heath and Cheung2006). Language and cultural barriers, particularly in multi-ethnic and multi-faith urban schools, may also inhibit active parent–school links (Lupton, Reference Lupton2003b). The latter two possibilities are structured by macro-level features of contemporary British society which lie beyond the institution. Finally, the legacy of more blatant forms of racism, experienced by today's parents (as children), as well as fears about the effects of negative stereotyping on their children may also be a contributory factor in poor home–school interactions involving black parents (Crozier, Reference Crozier2005).

For a whole variety of reasons – including economic constraints, access to housing, racist violence and racialised clustering choices – Britain's neighbourhoods have ethnically concentrated populations, particularly for South Asian communities (Lupton and Power, Reference Lupton and Power2004). Johnston et al. (Reference Johnston, Wilson and Burgess2004) have found that pupils of Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi and to a lesser extent black origin attend more ethnically segregated schools than would be expected by their representation in local neighbourhoods. Thus, concentrations of pupils whose attainment levels are average or below average are educated in schools where they form a significant proportion of pupils. Facilitated by school choice policies, this is indicative of ethnically informed choosing and class bias by parents (Tomlinson, Reference Tomlinson1998). Such practices defy a dichotomous analysis of racism per se, but correspond with a heavily racialised process that occurs at the interaction of class and state educational policies.

Similarly located at the meso level are the cultural practices of minority ethnic groups, which may militate against educational success. Abbas’ (Reference Abbas2002) examination of South Asian engagement with education suggested the greater time commitment required for Muslim religious observance compared with Hindu or Sikh religious observance might contribute to poorer educational outcomes (see also Lupton, Reference Lupton2003b, cf. Crozier and Davies, Reference Crozier and Davies2008).

The situational context of the school has also been shown to impact teaching quality, and such contextual effects are classed and racialised. Lupton's (Reference Lupton2003b) examination of four secondary schools in very deprived areas revealed numerous obstacles and disruptions to teachers’ academic activities. Specialised teaching materials for lower ability children often had to be constructed, vulnerable children required emotional support, and basic learning and extra-curricular activities were constrained by the material poverty of parents.

A more precise analysis of the role of institutional racialisation is proposed that seeks to avoid the conflation of previous definitions, instead analysing the routine bureaucratic processes and institutional practices that reinforce inequalities structured through ethnicity. It is here that Macpherson's (1999) notion of the ‘collective failure of an organisation to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their colour, culture or ethnic origin’ can be utilised.

An ethnocentric curriculum or extra-curricular activities which do not take at face value the government's assertion that ‘Britishness encompasses the collective contribution diverse communities make to the country’ (Home Office, 2005) is an example of institutionalised discrimination (Searle, Reference Searle2001). Failure to provide positive and meaningful representations of members of the white working-class in schooling (Reay, Reference Reay and Sveinsson2009) can be similarly defined. For Warren (Reference Warren2007), such practices rest on a culturalist logic which privileges certain kinds of white hegemonic knowledge based on racial, classed and gendered differentiation. School dress regulations, which prohibit certain kinds of cultural hairstyles or religious symbols favoured by particular ethnic groups, are another example of institutional racialisation and discrimination (see Sewell, Reference Sewell1997). The incompatibility of performance and attendance targets with an inclusive delivery of the curriculum to nomadic Gypsy/Traveller children is a further illustration (Cudworth, Reference Cudworth2008; cf. Jordan, Reference Jordan2001). Denying the racist motivation or failing to respond to the racist victimisation of pupils or staff represent an additional example of institutional racialisation (Crozier and Davies, Reference Crozier and Davies2008). All such practices encapsulate the key elements of Carmichael and Hamilton's (1968) definition which sees racial inequalities being produced through routine institutional practices, regardless of intentionality, rooted in the historical process of racialised (and classed) exclusion.

At the macro level, the neo-liberal orientation towards promoting choice for, and accountability towards, parents, established under the Conservative administration, has been further enshrined in New Labour's education policy. The language of marketisation, competition and choice is accompanied by the managerialist logic of testing and targets to raise educational standards. The corrupting effects of these policies are numerous and they stand oxymoronically alongside government discourse promoting community cohesion and social inclusion. Combined, these strands have produced corrosive effects which have entrenched racialised and classed inequalities and maintained a hegemonic position that favours the white middle class (Reay, Reference Reay2008), which could be seen largely as an unintended consequence or what Parsons (Reference Parsons2009) terms ‘passive racism’. Deindustrialisation and the increased importance of educational credentials have made such processes crucial in determining life chances and future opportunities in employment, housing, health and leisure.

Acknowledging the interaction of micro-, meso- and macro-level racialisation enables a clearer picture of their compounding effects. Micro-level actions by teachers in the routine nature of their work are framed by state policies in education, which have privileged a neo-liberalist standards agenda in which schools are pitted against each other to secure a dominant place in local education markets. Pressure from national government, local education authorities and headteachers is likely to impel teachers to direct their efforts to the goal of improving attainment overall. As funding is dependent on enrolments, which are dependent on parental popularity, there is mutual reinforcement of a strategy in which selective targeting of some pupils over others is a ‘rational’ response by teachers.

Implicitly, this promotes a targeting of teacher resources at pupils not deemed undesirable or problematic learners. However, this category may not be solely objectively determined, but instead be influenced by dominant discourses that attach inferior or superior behavioural attributes to certain ethnic and class groups. A Pakistani pupil who is automatically stereotyped as an undesirable learner and allocated by a teacher to a lower academic stream is disadvantaged by micro-level racialisation. When the pupil is not entered for a higher-tier GCSE examination or coached by their school to perform at the highest level, as Gillborn and Youdell's (Reference Gillborn and Youdell2000) research on rationing has indicated, it is the meso-level routine organisational practice of the school that further entrenches the disadvantage of the pupil. Further compounded by institutional racialisation, cultural practices and structural constraints, which affect school composition and parental engagement, ethnic and class-based inequalities persist in educational attainment.

Stop and search

The multilevel model can also be applied to understand ethnic disproportionality in the police use of stop-and-search powers in England and Wales. Figures for 2007/8 show that the rate of stop and search using powers under Section 1 Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984Footnote ⁶ was 7.6 (black) and 2.3 (Asian) times higher than for white people (Riley et al., Reference Riley, Cassidy and Becker2009). This long-observed ethnic disproportionality can be partially attributed to micro-level racialisation and discrimination by individual police officers on the street. Stereotypes posit black people as criminally disposed, drug-abusing and violent, which can be traced back to the classificatory systems of Enlightenment thinkers (de Gobineau, Reference de Gobineau1853). Asian men have increasingly come to be perceived as disorderly, militant, culturally separatist and inclined towards Islamic terrorism (Phillips and Bowling, Reference Phillips, Bowling, Maguire, Morgan and Reiner2007). Even the Macpherson Report (1999: para. 45.10) acknowledged that ‘the majority of police officers who testified before us accepted that an element of the disparity was the result of discrimination’. This is not, of course, to deny that black people's elevated rates of offending in relation to ‘street crime’ is a contributory factor (Phillips and Bowling, Reference Phillips, Bowling, Maguire, Morgan and Reiner2007).

At the meso level, racialisation structured through socio-economic disadvantage and social class comes into play. Black people's greater ‘availability’ on the streets – because of higher levels of school exclusions and unemployment combined with their residential concentration in higher crime areas – contributes to disproportionality in stop and search (Waddington et al., Reference Waddington, Stenson and Don2004). Political and media discourses on urban crime problems have cemented in the public mind a link between violence, gangs and minority ethnic, particularly black, individuals and communities (Sveinsson, Reference Sveinsson2008).

The study of police organisational cultures has also consistently shown racial prejudice as a defining and taken-for-granted feature of ‘cop culture’ (Reiner, Reference Reiner1992). Loftus’ (Reference Loftus2008) recent research indicates that the white, male, heterosexual interior culture of the police is resisting the new diversity and equalities policing agenda post-Macpherson. Interacting at the micro-meso levels, translated into operational practice, police officers may rely on unquestioned racialised stereotyping as they confront the ‘mean streets’ and battle crime, particularly where they perceive challenges to their authority and status (Foster, Reference Foster and Newburn2003; cf. Smith and Gray, Reference Smith and Gray1983). For Jefferson (Reference Jefferson and Gelsthorpe1993), age, sex, class, situation, demeanour and attitude determine who the police define as a trouble-making ‘toe-rag’, arguing this is a generic rather than racialised category. Such a reductionist explanation does, however, negate the relative autonomy of racism from economic and political relations (CCCS, 1982).

In relation to institutional practices, there is some evidence that stop-and-search rates are higher in certain residential areas where there is not the concomitant crime levels (MVA and Miller, Reference Miller2000). Moreover, whilst ‘racial profiling’ is not officially sanctioned, it appears to be unofficially practised as stop and search is a perceived indicator of performance by police officers. Minority ethnic police officers have reported advisory comments by colleagues, such as ‘if you see four black youths in a car, it's worth giving them a pull, as at least one of them is going to be guilty of something or other’ (Cashmore, Reference Cashmore2001: 652). Police legitimacy in minority ethnic communities is seemingly sacrificed even though stop and search has an extremely limited impact on crime disruption and detection (Miller et al., Reference Miller, Bland and Quinton2000), despite this being the official justification for its continuance.

Such practices coalesce with the dominant currents of macro-level racialisation in crime control which sees the increasing intolerance towards, othering and criminalisation of, socially, economically and politically marginalised groups. In a climate of material and ontological insecurity, resulting from a pluralism of values and identities, where informal social control has fractured, and populist punitiveness is buoyed by an insatiable media and politic, resentment is rife and the deviance of the relatively deprived is harshly punished by the criminal justice system (Young, Reference Young2007). This can be seen in the massive over-representation of minority ethnic people in prison. Periodic moral panics about black street crime and violence echo the long-heard claims of an essentialist ‘black criminality’ (Gilroy, Reference Gilroy1982). Similarly constructed are the political concerns over the criminality or extremism of immigrants. These features sustain institutional practices, propelled by a managerialist preoccupation with policing performance indicators and targets, framing micro-level racialisation by individual police officers encountering minority ethnic citizens on the street.